Page 174 of Faceless

“Yes, ma’am.”

She pinched her cheeks, sucked in a gulp of fresh air, and put the shawl back where Mrs Hatchett had laid it. She put her book on the table beside the chaise, then straightened it. Then she went back and tipped it crooked again, and opened it to a random page in the middle, to make it look as if she had been pleasantly engaged when her aunt came up. She passed a mirror and stopped. The redness about her eyes would not go away. She gave up trying to make it go away and sat down in the chair by the fire, because the chair by the fire had a better light than the chaise, and her aunt would see what was there in any case.

Mrs Gardiner was, in her ordinary way, the most welcome face Elizabeth had seen since Tuesday. She was wearing the dark green pelisse Elizabeth remembered from a Coleman Street afternoon in February, and she had a small parcel under her arm, and her face was warm and grave and entirely unsurprised by what she found in the chair by the fire.

She crossed the room and took Elizabeth’s hands and looked at her once and did not, mercifully, say anything about her face.

“Your uncle sends his love and a small jar of the lemon preserve, which he tells me is good for the constitution and which I personally consider better than any wine. I have brought it up myself in case Mrs Hatchett should imagine it required for the household tea.”

She tried to laugh. “Tell him I have not had lemon preserve since last May, and shall consider it sovereign against everything.”

The light through the window fell across her aunt’s face, and Elizabeth registered, properly for the first time in weeks, that her aunt had been worried about her. Mrs Gardiner did not let it show in her voice, but Elizabeth knew the small alteration about her aunt’s mouth that meant she had been losing sleep, and she felt, sharply, the additional weight she had become.

“You have been crying.”

Elizabeth nodded miserably.

“For long?”

“An hour. Less. More. I have not been counting.”

“Are you in any pain?”

“No. Nothing of the body.”

“Then you may have it out with me, and we shall be the better for it.”

Her aunt crossed the rug, sat down on the arm of Elizabeth’s chair, and drew Elizabeth’s head against her shoulder. She did not say anything — she just put one hand against the back of Elizabeth’s head and the other over Elizabeth’s hand where it lay in her lap, and she held her.

Elizabeth wept against the wool of her aunt’s pelisse. Her aunt smelt faintly of lemon and of the woodsmoke from the Coleman Street fire, and the smell undid Elizabeth more thoroughly than any of the words had. She had not been held by anyone like this, not being permitted to simply crumble and let her tears have mastery of her, since Fitzwilliam had comforted her in their darkened room.

Mrs Gardiner was not him. She could not reach into Elizabeth’s soul with a whisper or give her courage with a mere touch. But Mrs Gardiner was doing what Elizabeth could not have asked anyone in this house to do, which was to hold firm while she could not.

When Elizabeth drew back, her aunt produced a second handkerchief from somewhere about her person, pressed it into Elizabeth’s hand, and stayed where she was.

“Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. You are five months from holding your first child and four weeks from your last visit with your husband, and you have been confined to a house that treats you like a prisoner. It would be remarkable if you were not weeping. I should be concerned if you were not.”

Elizabeth dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. She did not, at once, trust her voice to work. She kept her hand against her face for a moment longer than was useful and then lowered it because pretending was not going to help her with her aunt.

“I had been managing perfectly well this morning,” Elizabeth said. It came out unsteady. She drew breath and tried again. “I had been at the desk. I had been reading. I had been — useful, I thought. And then the clock struck three, and it all came up at once, as it does, every afternoon, and I cannot — I cannot govern it any more than I can govern the weather. I sit here, and I think of him.”

“Of course you do, my dear. You must think of little else.”

She pressed the handkerchief against her cheek. “And of his child. I cannot keep them separate anymore. They were separate things to think of in February. They are not separate now. I think of them both at the same time and I cannot —”

She stopped. She had not meant to speak it. The words had been in her without her permission for weeks, and they came out now because her aunt had asked her a question and she had not the strength to refuse the answer.

“I think of the child not knowing him.”

Mrs Gardiner tightened her hand over Elizabeth’s.

Elizabeth fisted the handkerchief at her mouth, and what followed was more sob than words. “I think of a boy of three or four standing at a window I do not know, in a house I have not yet seen, asking me who the man in the small portrait is. And I do not know what I shall say to him. Or I know what I shall say, and I know it will not be enough, because nothing I say will be sufficient to the man I am trying to describe, and the child will grow up knowing only what I was able to put into words, and I shall fail him in that for the rest of my life.”

She had begun to weep again before she had finished. She had not realised until she heard it spoken aloud how completely it had taken her over. She pressed the handkerchief against her mouth.

“Forgive me. I had not meant to —”