Page 134 of Faceless

“About what? I am right about so many things that you must narrow the field.”

He smiled then, because there she was again, impossible and exact. “About our being suited.”

Her eyes found him, and the playfulness in her face gentled into something grave enough to hurt.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”

He kissed her once more, not out of hunger now, though hunger would have answered readily enough, but because agreement on such a point seemed to deserve a seal.

Outside, the ice covered the windows. Inside, he drew the blankets higher around them, and she came against him with the ease of having never belonged anywhere so much as here, in this bed, in this light, in this impossible life with him.

L

Counting The Days

Some days after Christmas, she came back to The Old English Baron.

She had not opened it since December — since the library, the ladder, the inscription on the flyleaf — and she brought it down from the shelf with the intention of reading it properly now that she knew what it was. He was already in the library when she came in, in the chair he had claimed since the second morning, and she settled onto the sofa with the book, and Falstaff arranged himself across both their feet with the impartiality that was his chief virtue.

She read for a while in silence. He read whatever he was reading. The fire popped occasionally.

Then she came to the armour scenes.

She had laughed at these alone in December — the portentous rattling, the clockwork of the haunting — and thought her father would have been insufferable about them. She laughed now, too, and this time he was six inches away.

“Listen to this,” she said, and read him a passage in which Edmund’s noble birth was signalled to the reader by a ghost, a portrait, and approximately forty pages of supernatural atmosphere, all of it deployed with absolute gravity.

He listened, and when she finished, he was quiet a moment before he said, “She means this.”

“She means every word of it,” Elizabeth said. “That is what makes it so magnificent. My father would have read this aloud at breakfast. He would have done all the voices. We would have had to leave the room.” She turned the page. “He never had this one, I think. I would have known. It has the feeling of a book he ought to have had. This was the one that was your mother’s.”

He sat forward with renewed interest. “This one? She must have left it when she visited Auchengray. She was forever forgetting where she had laid her books, and probably had no idea where she left this one. I think she would have liked your father,” he said, after a moment. “Or at least been able to laugh over the same books with him.”

“I think so too,” she said.

She went back to Edmund and read some minutes more. She looked up. He had not turned any of his own pages. She glanced sideways and found him still, his book lowered slightly, his gaze on her wrist.

On the handkerchief tucked into her sleeve — the white square with the small flower in the corner, visible above the edge of her cuff. The one he had pressed into her hand the night she wept over Lydia’s ruin.

“May I?” he asked.

She drew it out and put it in his hand.

He turned it over. He looked at the flower for a moment — the five petals, the stem, the small bloom in the corner — and something in his face went quiet in a way she had not seen before.

“Do you know,” he said, “that Mrs Reynolds has been putting that flower on the Pemberley linens since before I was born?”

“How should I know that?”

“She has. Every sheet. Every tablecloth. Every towel. It is the device of the house — has been for generations.” He turned the handkerchief in his hands. “It was said that my mother would put it beside her own name long before she had any business doing so.”

Elizabeth smiled and leaned closer into his shoulder. “What does that mean? Your mother set her cap for Pemberley?”

He gave a low laugh. “Not for the house but the man. She met my father when she was fifteen. He was twenty-two. She decided more or less on the spot that she intended to marry him. I imagine she was writing that flower beside her name from that day forward.” He glanced at the book in her lap. “I would not be surprised if it is in the inscription.”

She opened the book to the flyleaf and held it out to him without a word.

He read it. She watched his face as his fingers trailed the old ink with a fond smile.