Page 138 of Faceless

“I beg to differ.”

“You may beg all you like. I do not find the case persuasive.”

“You are the impatient one, Elizabeth. You have made that perfectly clear within the last few months. I have a witness, in fact — the dog is prepared to testify.”

She laughed properly then — the laugh that he had been working towards for the better part of the afternoon — and bent the rest of the way and kissed him hard once on the corner of his mouth before she straightened.

“Ten minutes. Possibly fifteen, if he is in a mood about the slate.”

“Fifteen and not a moment more.”

“You may begin counting.”

She stood. The book she had not been reading slid the rest of the way to the floor; this time, he did pick it up, because he had to put his hands to something or follow her into the corridor, and he was not going to follow her into the corridor with the factor at the door. He sat, the book on his knee, and watched her go — her step quick, her colour high, the smile she had thrown over her shoulder at him still on her face when she reached the door — and the latch closed behind her, and he was alone in the library with the fire and the dog and a piece of the afternoon left over which he had not been intending to spend by himself.

He laughed at himself, quietly, and let his head fall back against the sofa, and resigned himself to fifteen minutes of waiting.

LI

The House Broken Open

She went to the door still laughing.

Falstaff, who considered any knock upon the house a personal invitation to heroism, sprang past her into the hall and skidded sideways on the flags in his haste to reach it first. Elizabeth caught the edge of the table to steady herself, still smiling, and crossed the remaining distance with Darcy’s thick growl warm in her ears.

She pulled open the door.

Colonel Fitzwilliam stood on the step.

For one suspended second, nothing in her body understood what her eyes had given it. Then the laughter went out of her as a flame went out under a snuffed glass.

He was travel-stained to the throat, his greatcoat whitened at the hem where the road had dried and frozen and dried again upon it. His horse stood below the step with its flanks dark from labour and its breath going hard into the cold. He looked older than he had in Cheapside in July, older than he had looked even in Kent in April, not by years but by attrition — by the visible wear of carrying something too long and never thinking to put it down because there was no one to whom it could be safely given.

Falstaff thrust his head into Fitzwilliam’s hand with shameless conviction. The colonel touched the dog without looking at him.

His eyes were on Elizabeth.

They moved over her once, swiftly and completely. Not in impertinence — in assessment. The intelligence of it was on her at once — the unbound hair, the colour still high, the domestic disarray of the hall behind her, the ease with which she had come to the door, all of it placed with military speed. He had not come expecting to find such cheer, laughter fading into dismay at the sight of him. No doubt, he expected a haunted look on her face, broken by relief at the sight of someone familiar — if he expected anything at all.

What crossed his face was not surprise, but the look of his worst suspicion confirmed.

“Where is he?”

She heard Darcy behind her before she felt him — his step in the hall, then his hand, brief and steady, between her shoulders as he moved past.

“Richard,” he said.

The colonel’s jaw tightened. He took one breath. The next thing that came over his face was so quickly mastered that another woman might have missed it, but Elizabeth had spent months learning how much feeling could live inside a movement a man made only once. Nine months of grief broke open and shut again in that one breath.

“You look… somewhat more alive than advertised, cousin,” Fitzwilliam said.

Darcy’s eyes went briefly to her, and she could see the effort it cost him to receive that voice without answer enough for it.

“Come in,” he said. “Come inside.”

Fitzwilliam stepped over the threshold. Darcy shut the door against the cold, and the three of them stood for an instant in the narrow hall — herself between the room she had just left and the world that had now found them.

“How long do we have?” Darcy asked.