Page 161 of Faceless

His eyes closed for a fraction of a second. When he opened them again, she saw what she had been waiting for — not the prison face that he had brought into the room, but the man who had spent four months at Auchengray learning to keep his face out of his voice and was now applying every part of that practice to keep his voice out of his face.

“Then you are… not immune. Your connection to me has endangered you,” he whispered. “Just as I feared.”

“No!” She reached impulsively for his hand across the table.

The gaoler nearly stood in the corner of her vision. “Madam,” he said in a warning tone.

Elizabeth sighed and jerked her open hand into the air. “I am not passing him any packages! You never said I may not touch my husband, so I will take his hand if I please. You sit there and do your duty and be sure I do not stay one second above my time.”

The gaoler subsided, and Elizabeth relieved him of the glare with which she had pinned him. Darcy, when she looked back, was trying and failing to disguise a smile. “You look well, my love,” he murmured

“I am well.”

“Are you? You have not been overtaxed?”

She wove her fingers through his. “I am tired. I have been seasick. I have wept a great deal in private and not very much in public. I have eaten what I can keep down. I am being attended by your aunt’s own woman and by Mrs Hatchett. I have not been alone in any room in which I might have been alone too long. I am as well as a woman in my present situation can reasonably be.”

His eyes flickered at seasick and situation, and the implication behind both, and the change that went across his face was one of full comprehension. He looked down at the table. He clenched his free hand on the wood. He did not lift it. He did not, for a long moment, lift his face, either.

When he did, what was in it was no longer mastered. It was, briefly, all of him. “Elizabeth. By heaven, Elizabeth! You should not have come here!”

“You said so already, Fitzwilliam. The choice was mine, and I made it while I still had liberty to do so.”

“I cannot — right now, in this place — I cannot —”

“I know. You do not have to. I know.”

She covered his fist with her other hand, and eventually, he turned his palm, slowly, until it lay open under hers on the table. He looked down a moment, then back at her. The feeling in his face was too guarded for the gaoler and too unguarded for anyone who knew him less.

“What do you make of my uncle?”

“Formidable. Offended. Entirely useful. He has summoned every favour in London — it seems everyone owes him one — and wishes me to tell him the truth whether he enjoys it or not.”

“That does sound like him.”

“There is something further you should know. Sterling has petitioned to nullify the marriage.”

He did not move. His hand on hers did not tighten or release. He stared at her, working through it with the speed of having thought of every weapon Sterling might use against him and not of this one.

“Has he?”

“It was filed yesterday. Pemberton had the papers within the hour, but he has been preparing the answer since my first interview with him last week.”

His jaw flexed, and he blinked at the wall. She followed each thought as it fell through his mind, for she had learned to read his face as well as his silences. Each time his eyes flared with the recognition of a new point, each crease of his brow as he dismissed it and thought of another.

“It will not succeed,” he said at last. “It cannot.” His voice had gone very quiet. “The marriage was contracted with proper consent on your part — within your understanding of what you were consenting to — and ratified by… by our subsequent actions, and by your continued residence in my house under the name, and by — ”

He stopped. His eye dropped, briefly, to the drape of her gown at the table’s edge. He did not let himself look there for longer than a fraction of a second. He brought his eye back to her face.

“And by the evidence that Pemberton shall, I expect, present in due course.”

“That is Pemberton’s view as well.”

His jaw ticked. “Then he… already…?”

“He has been thorough in researching the facts.”

Darcy’s eyes closed, and his jaw shifted. “You ought not to have been put to that interview. The indelicacy of it —”