Page 146 of Faceless

Elizabeth stood very straight in the middle of the room and did not sit. The next ten minutes would determine the form in which she was to exist within a powerful stranger’s house. Widow, accessory, impostor, wife, complication, burden, ally — any of them were available. She had no particular intention of accepting the least favourable.

Richard moved to the hearth and waited with the composure she was learning to recognise as the Fitzwilliam family manner under strain.

The earl entered without haste.

He was larger than his son, with the carriage of decades spent having rooms alter around him rather than the reverse. The courtesy with which he stopped short on seeing her was less a genial habit than a discipline kept in excellent repair. Shock crossed his face once and was gone. The attention that replaced it told her at once what sort of man she had come to.

He looked at Richard, then at her, then at Richard again — this time as a statesman might look at a report that appears, at first glance, impossible and is therefore likely to be true.

Richard inclined his head, the smallest formal bow, and spoke as a colonel reporting in.

“Father. May I present to you the Baroness of Auchengray. Baroness, my father, the Earl of Matlock.”

The earl’s eyes did not leave Elizabeth’s face. He did not, for several seconds, do anything else. Then his attention returned, briefly, to his son.

“Leave us.”

“Father —”

“I would speak with the ‘baroness’ alone.”

Richard did not argue further. He glanced once at Elizabeth, not for permission and not in apology, only to make sure she understood that being left alone with the Earl of Matlock was not intended as abandonment. Then he went out and closed the door.

The earl moved to the window and looked down for a moment at the indifferent city below. “My son,” he said at last, “has been lying to me.”

The sentence was delivered without temper, which made it rather more formidable.

“I imagine he has,” Elizabeth said.

“For how long?”

“Since October, I believe. Before that, he did not know himself. Neither I, nor did anyone who matters, it seems, until the discovery could not be helped.”

He turned from the window. The scrutiny she met then was unsoftened by any pretence of domestic ease.

“And you have known since?”

“Late November. I suspected him earlier, but from the first moment I arrived at Auchengray until… until I knew… he came to me only in the dark and spoke in a whisper I could not recognise. It was a long while before I suspected I could have married a man who was supposed to be dead.”

“And you said nothing?”

“To whom?” she asked, because the truth of the thing admitted no more ornamental answer than that. “I was in Aberdeenshire. I knew no one of his family. I had only occasional letters from my own. I knew only that my husband was in danger and that the fewer people who knew he was alive, the longer he was likely to remain so.”

A faint movement touched his face. Not approval. Something more useful than approval. Recognition. “So, he is alive?”

“He was when I last saw him. He was arrested at a coaching inn outside Inverurie four days ago. The officers had followed us from Craighead. Colonel Fitzwilliam believes Auchengray had been watched for at least a week.”

He crossed at once to the desk and sat, not with the heaviness of receiving bad news but with the directness of beginning work. He pulled a sheet of paper towards him. The pen in his hand remained suspended above it.

“Nine months,” he said. The pen lowered. He set it down without writing. “He has been alive for nine months and chose not to inform me. Not to tell his own sister that —”

“He was given few options, my lord.”

The earl’s jaw tightened once. It was a gesture she had seen in Darcy a hundred times.

“Forgive me,” he said — not requesting pardon so much as buying himself one measured instant to put emotion away where it could not interfere with policy. “I have had a considerable quantity of information put into my hands in a very short span.”

“So have I, for some weeks now,” Elizabeth said before she could help herself.