Page 193 of Faceless

“Eat something anyway.” He looked at Jane. Jane nodded once. He took Elizabeth’s hand briefly and pressed it, and went out.

The door closed.

Georgiana made a small sound against the back of her hand and turned her face into the curtain at the window.

Elizabeth went to her. She put her arms around her sister-in-law, and Georgiana held on with the desperate grip of a sixteen-year-old who had been told, with no softening, that she might lose her brother in the next eight hours, and the brittle composure she had been holding since the morning gave way. She wept against Elizabeth’s shoulder. Elizabeth held her.

Then Elizabeth, against every intention she had brought into the room, found that she was weeping too. The two of them stood at the window holding to each other and crying with no attempt at composure for what was perhaps a quarter of an hour. Elizabeth did not know how long.

“Lizzy. Georgiana.”

Jane was at her elbow.

“Come away from the window. Both of you. Come here.”

“Jane —”

“Now, Lizzy. You will exhaust yourself, and Georgiana will exhaust herself, and there is nothing either of you can do at this hour that crying at the window will improve. Georgiana, my love, come and sit by the fire. Mrs Hatchett shall bring you something hot. Lizzy, you shall come upstairs with me.”

“Jane, I cannot —”

“You shall. I will not argue with you about it. I have been watching you all week, and you have not slept since the night before last, and you have eaten nothing since yesterday morning, and you can hardly sit up straight. You will come upstairs and lie down, and if word comes, I will wake you within the second. Come.”

Elizabeth let go of Georgiana, who was caught by Mrs Hatchett at the door before Elizabeth had realised that Mrs Hatchett had come in. Jane took Elizabeth’s arm.

“Jane.”

“Hush.”

“He may already —”

“Hush. We do not know. We shall not know for hours yet. Richard said so. Come.”

She fairly dragged Elizabeth up the stairs.

Elizabeth permitted herself to be undressed by Mrs Hatchett’s woman, who was efficient and silent and did not look at her face while she worked. She was put into a chemise and a shawl. Her hair was unpinned, brushed out, and braided loosely down her back. The bed had been turned down. The fire had been built up.

Jane stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed.

“In.”

“Jane, I cannot —”

“In, Lizzy.”

She got in.

The sheets were cold at first, and then the warmth of her own body began to come back to them. She lay on her side because she could no longer lie comfortably on her back, and her front was no longer available to her. The child was kicking. The child had been kicking all afternoon. The kicks were small and sharp and located, just at this hour, against the underside of her ribs on the left side, where they had been for the last three days because the child had taken some private decision about the geography of her abdomen that she could not dispute. Her back ached. Her hips ached. Her ribs ached on the side the child was not on, from holding the side the child was on at the angle that prevented the kicks from being worse.

She had not cried herself out at the window. She had only paused. The crying began again when she was alone in the bed with Jane gone out in the hall.

She did not try to stop it. She had nothing left with which to try. She turned her face into the pillow and wept for some considerable time, and Jane sat in the chair without speaking and put her hand briefly against Elizabeth’s shoulder when the worst of it came and did not otherwise intrude.

What she wanted — what she wanted and had been required to do without it for too long — was her husband.

She wanted him at her back. She wanted the long warmth of him curled against her in the bed and his arm coming over her waist and his hand spreading flat against the curve where the child was, the way it had done in November at Auchengray when he had comforted her in the pain of her courses, when he had put his hand there in gentle acknowledgment.

She wanted his breath against her hair. She wanted the low, contented sound he made when he settled into a bed she was already in. She wanted the smell of his skin against her neck. She wanted the warmth she had taken for granted at Auchengray and which she had not had for one hundred and twelve nights and was not, at this hour, certain she would ever have again.