Page 118 of Faceless

She had not meant to begin with his real name. That name had never meant him to her in any history she could call upon, and she was not sure how it came to her lips now. She had not planned anything about this conversation.

He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he just sighed wearily.

“Why George?”

He had to swallow before he answered. “My father’s name. I could answer to it without thinking.” He paused. He was arranging the words behind a wall of pain, and she could see him do it. “The first time you called me that — the night I got up and closed the door on you — I had not expected it to do what it did. My father has been dead five years. I had not heard his name from someone who—” He stopped. “I had not expected to hear it that way.”

She kept watching him, but he would not meet her eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“You had no reason to know.”

“No. But I am sorry, nonetheless.”

Neither of them spoke. The dark outside the slit was beginning to grey. Her head gave a slow, heavy throb behind her eyes, and she closed them briefly and waited for it to pass.

“You should have told me. I know why you did not. I know the reasons were real. But you should have told me.”

“I wanted to. Every time I came to you. You have no idea how many times I almost struck that cursed flint myself.”

She crossed her arms. “You let me fall in love with a man who does not exist.”

His face came up. “You…? No. Do not tease me. Last night was a… an act. You played me, and I deserved—”

“Last night, I told my husband that I loved him. I still do.”

His eyes widened. “Still? You… you meant it?”

“With all my heart, I love the man I called my husband. But this morning, I do not know if he was ever real.”

Air filled his lungs, and he stood a fraction taller. “George Carlisle is just a name. I exist. I am real. You fell in love with me. I was there every night, Elizabeth. That was not a fiction.”

“It was not entirely the truth, either.”

“No.” His eyes did not leave hers. “It was not entirely the truth.”

She turned to the window. Outside, the late November light was coming up very slowly over the grey sea. The snow had stopped in the night, and the headland was white and entirely still, and the brightness of it through the slit made her press the heel of her hand briefly against her eye.

“When you said — last night — the warrant, the man who constructed it — I want the whole of it now. Not last night’s summary. All of it.”

His eyes went to the window. Then he pulled out the chair and held it for her without speaking. She sat — slowly, because moving had become something she did in stages now — and he leaned back against the table, hands braced on the edge behind him, in a way that told her this would take some time.

“There is a man named Sterling,” he said. “A business associate — or so I believed, for the better part of three years. I was the silent investor; he ran operations, with access to my shipping interests that I had extended in good faith. He used it to funnel money through France, profiteering at the expense of his own countrymen and supplying the enemy.

“And because such activity is not overlooked forever, he spent those same years building a case that would leave him the innocent partner. Forged manifests, correspondence in my name, three years of paper placing me at the centre of a scheme to move gold to France through my own vessels.” He kept his eyes on the floor. “When the Home Office moved, I had perhaps four days’ warning — a man I retain privately had a contact inside the department.

“You were in Kent when it happened. I had the express in the middle of the night and left before dawn. There was no other course — Sterling’s evidence was thorough and he was already cooperating; a trial would have closed before any defence could be drawn. So I rode for London in secret, and Webb had five days to make an alternative.”

“So, you faked your death?”

“While I sailed for Aberdeen, Webb sent my carriage south on the Dover road — the coachman paid to vanish afterward, my signet ring inside it, and a body obtained by means I did not ask him to specify. The carriage was overturned, a fire staged, the body identified as mine by the ring.” He drew a slow breath. “Colonel Fitzwilliam identified it at the inquest. He was the one they sent for.”

She had risen from the chair and pressed herself back against the wall of the mural chamber without knowing when she had done it. Outside the ventilation slit, the grey was coming up over the sea.

“This Sterling. He is still… he is not in custody?”

“He is entirely at liberty, and cooperative — he built the evidence, so he knows exactly what they will find and what they will not. A grieved associate whose business was exploited by a disgraced traitor; that is his account, and his own forgeries support it. One man could contradict it. He has been moved three times and is beyond reach.”