Page 17 of Faceless

The factor’s records went somewhere. Somewhere connected to somewhere else. He had not come this far by trusting that the chain would break before it reached him, and he was not going to start now.

He would take the gossip. The factor’s polite dissatisfaction. The Reverend Innes’ unanswered calls. Whatever conclusions the village drew from the lights and the shutters and the servants who said very little. He would take all of it. It was the price of remaining hidden, and remaining hidden was the only thing keeping him alive.

He went back down the hidden stair and worked until the candle burned out. He thought in the dark after that, because the shape of the problem was the same in the dark as in the light.

The sea went on outside the walls, the way it had gone on outside these walls for four hundred years, indifferent to everything that happened inside them.

It would have to do, he told himself.

He was not certain he believed it.

VIII

The Last Good Day

She came back from her early walk to find the house already in full voice — Lydia in the hallway demanding to know whether anyone had seen her blue ribbon, Kitty on the stairs insisting she had not taken it, Mrs Bennet calling down for Hill to send up her tray. Mary was at the pianoforte. Jane was in the kitchen garden. Her father’s study door was closed.

Elizabeth hung up her bonnet, went to the kitchen to find some breakfast, and was, for the first time since returning from Kent, entirely at home.

By ten o’clock, the ribbon had been found — it had been Kitty’s all along, only she had forgotten — and Lydia had moved on to the more engrossing subject of Brighton. The regiment was to summer there. Harriet Forster had written; Mrs Bennet had read the letter aloud at breakfast; Lydia had vibrated with a species of excitement that made even the chairs seem exhausted.

“If we were only to go,” Lydia said, for perhaps the fourth time since breakfast, addressing the room at large from her favourite position draped across the settee. “Just think of it — the sea, and the officers, and the dances — I am sure I should come back quite transformed.”

“Into what remains unclear,” Elizabeth said, not looking up from her book.

“Into a married woman, perhaps,” Lydia said, entirely unabashed.

“On the strength of one summer in Brighton?”

“People have managed on less.”

“People have also returned from Brighton considerably worse off than they left it, which I suspect is the more likely outcome.”

Lydia threw a cushion at her. Elizabeth caught it without looking up.

Mrs Bennet, who had been following this exchange with the expression reserved for a shuttlecock match whose rules were not clear to her, declared Brighton sounded very well. Sea air was restorative. She saw no reason the girls could not go, if a suitable arrangement could be made — it was very hard that her daughters should be confined to Hertfordshire all summer when there was nothing in Hertfordshire to speak of.

“Someone else may take Netherfield,” Kitty offered.

“Netherfield,” Mrs Bennet said, “is empty. And has been empty. And will likely continue to be empty, for I have given up expecting anything from that quarter.”

“I understand there is some talk of a family from Northamptonshire taking it,” Mary said, from behind her book. “Mrs Long mentioned it to Hill.”

“Mrs Long,” said Mrs Bennet, “has two nieces and is hoping whoever takes it has sons. I would not depend on her intelligence.”

“I would not depend on Mrs Long’s intelligence in any event,” Elizabeth said, turning a page, “but that is a separate matter.”

Her father appeared in the doorway of the drawing room with the look he wore when the noise had reached a volume he was choosing to address rather than endure. He surveyed the scene — Lydia on the settee, Kitty in the window seat, Mrs Bennet on her favourite chair with her embroidery untouched beside her, Mary reading, Jane and Elizabeth sharing the sofa — with the expression long since reserved for peace with his domestic situation that he still found faintly bewildering.

“Lizzy,” he said. “Come and see this.”

It was a letter from a bookseller in London — a Morocco leather edition of Johnson’s Rasselas with gilt edging, which he had been trying to locate for the better part of a year, now finally available, on which he had wanted her opinion as to whether it was worth the price. She gave it, he argued for the pleasure of arguing, she revised her opinion to agree with his. He always knew when she was handling him.

“You always see through me,” she said.

“Only because you are transparent when you are being kind.” He set the letter down. “How are you, Lizzy? In earnest.”

He was watching her with the attention he deployed rarely — not the sideways amusement that was his usual manner, but something more direct.