Page 129 of Faceless

She found that she wanted him at hours she had not known one was permitted to want one’s husband. The daylight had altered nothing about the wanting and a great deal about her capacity to say so. She had told him, on the third afternoon, that he was to come upstairs with her, and he had given her the gaze of one being asked something he had not expected to be asked at that hour, and had set down his pen, and had come upstairs with her.

Neither of them had been the same about it since. The dark had imposed its own propriety on what could be asked for; the light imposed none, and she discovered she had fewer scruples about asking than she had supposed. He had not commented on the change. He had also not been slow to answer it.

What it did to her to have his eyes on her in the light was a thing she would have to take some time to come to terms with. He had a manner of looking at her, when she had told him to look, that made her aware of being seen entire.

By the week before Christmas, she had learned the sound of him moving through the house in a way that had nothing to do with the hidden passage or the dark. His step on the main stair was different from his step in the corridor — heavier, unhurried, the step of someone with no reason to be quiet. He always stood a second in the doorway of whatever room she was in before he came through it, not hesitating, taking stock, and she had stopped marking it consciously, as she had stopped marking the sea.

She had also learned to listen for horses on the road.

The first time she had stopped breathing, it had been the village boy with the post. The second time, it had been a tenant come to ask about a fence. The third time, it had been nothing at all — a sound carried up off the headland that she had mistaken for a hoof. He had been in the room with her on the third occasion, had seen her face, looked away, and she had been grateful to him for not asking, because she would have wept if he had, and she did not wish to weep about it where he could see.

She did not know how long she had him. The doubt had begun to do something to the texture of every ordinary hour. She had begun, without meaning to, the kind of private accounting one does when one knows the count is finite — taking him in at the desk, at the table, in the chair by the fire with the book closed against his thigh; storing it, in some part of herself that would still have it when the rest of her was somewhere else.

He came down one evening earlier than she had expected him and found her at the window of the long room, the dusk on the headland, and her hand against the glass and her face broken in something she had not had time to put right. He stood in the doorway and did not speak. After some moments, he came across the room and put his hand against the small of her back, and she leaned against him without turning, and they stood at the window together until the light was gone off the sea entirely.

He was at the table one evening when she came in, earlier than usual, and he was writing something and did not hear her enter. She stood in the doorway and took him in — the angle of his head, the pen moving, the line of his jaw in the candlelight — and behind it was July, the first night, standing in the dark with her hands loose at her sides while a stranger’s whisper came from two feet away, and the distance between that night and this one was four months and a lifetime. She put her fingers to her mouth and choked back a little sob — a sob for herself, walking into that moment so blind with terror, and for what he must have felt, aching to reassure her and not daring to give too much comfort.

His head came up at the sound of her gasp. “You are early.”

“You were not expecting me to be quiet about it.”

“I was not,” he agreed, and moved the papers to make room for her at the table.

XLIX

Christmas Morning

Christmas morning, he was asleep beside her in the grey December light, and she could see his face.

She had not marked the last time the drapes had been drawn back — sometime in the last fortnight, neither of them remarking on it, the way neither of them had remarked on the second chair in the library. But they were open now, and she could look at him as long as she liked.

He was, she was prepared to admit, exceptionally good-looking. This was irritating information, because it meant she had been wrong about that too, on top of everything else, and she had already been wrong about a considerable number of things this year, so she did not need to add to the list. But the evidence was directly in front of her — the dark hair curled against the pillow, the jaw she had traced in the dark more times than she could count, the lashes lying against his cheek in a way that she would not be describing to Jane under any circumstances — and the evidence was not ambiguous.

She propped herself on her elbow and studied him with the attention the situation deserved.

The jaw was extremely fine, she decided. The brow was exactly as her fingers had mapped it — broad, clean, the faint line between the brows that appeared when he was working through something. His hair was longer than it had been at Rosings, curling more richly now. She reached out and touched it, very lightly, and he did not stir.

She touched it again, less lightly.

He made a sound that was not quite a word.

“You are awake.”

He turned over. “I am not,” he said, into the pillow.

“You are clearly awake. Your breathing changed.”

He did not answer at once. “My breathing did not change.”

She drew her finger along his jaw, following the line she knew by memory; the slight roughness of it was there under her finger, the end of a long day even at the beginning of one. “You have been awake for at least five minutes, and you have been pretending otherwise.”

“I have been awake for thirty seconds,” he said, with considerable dignity, “and I intend to be asleep again in thirty more.”

“It is Christmas.”

“Christmas does not require consciousness at—” He opened one eye. The light was in the room, and she could see the moment of his taking it in — the grey December morning, the open drapes, her face above his. The eye closed again. “—whatever hour this is.”

“A perfectly reasonable hour. I have been awake for some time.”