Page 194 of Faceless

She wept for that as much as for any of it. She wept because the pain in her back and the pain in her hips and the pain in her ribs and the kicking under them were the pains a husband would have eased, in his presence, by no act greater than lying down beside her, and her husband was sitting at this hour in a cell beneath a court she could not reach, waiting for a verdict that might prevent him from ever lying beside her again.

She wept until she had no further capacity to weep.

She did not, then, sleep.

She lay on her side with her pillow soaked and her hand against the curve at the front of her, and she let her eyes close, and her body did what it could once her will had been spent. It surrendered. It went into the dull, motionless stupor that was not sleep and was not waking and was the only mercy available to her at this hour. The child ceased kicking. Her back, by some small slackening of the muscles, eased a fraction. The candle burned low on the table beside her.

Something touched her in the dark.

She came up out of the stupor with the small animal jerk of a body that had been holding itself in suspension for hours and had been brought out of it without warning. The candle had gone. The room was black.

But there was someone standing beside the bed.

“Lizzy?”

For half a breath, she did not move. She knew that whisper.

She would have known it through any door of any house in England, in any condition of waking, and it tore through her with a force that took her whole body before her mind had caught up to what its presence in her bedroom in the small hours of the morning had to mean. The hand that took hers in the dark closed around her fingers with the familiar pressure she had not felt in one hundred and twelve nights.

Then her mind caught up.

“Fitzwilliam!”

“It is me, my love. I am here. Hush, hush — Lizzy —”

She made a sound she could not afterward have described, half breath and half sob, and she was off the pillow before she had thought to move. Her arms went round his neck. She kissed his mouth and his cheek and the side of his throat and his mouth again, and his jaw and his temple and his mouth once more, with the wild and disorderly passion of a woman who had been kept from his face for one hundred and twelve nights and was not going to be careful with the first five minutes of having it back.

He laughed against her mouth — an unsteady sound that came out half a sob of his own — and put his arms around her and held her.

“My love — let me — let me breathe a moment —”

“Not yet! Not until I have felt that you are whole and well and here.”

She kissed him again and did not let him answer for some considerable interval. Her hands were on either side of his face, and his mouth was against hers, and she was crying, she discovered, into the kissing — not the wretched, soaked weeping of the earlier hours but the overflowing of a body that had been kept too long from what it had been wanting and was discovering that it had not, after all, lost the capacity for joy.

When at last she released him for long enough to permit speech, he was laughing properly. She had not heard him laugh in four months. The sound of it undid her more than the kissing had.

“I am free, my Lizzy. It is over. I have been acquitted. The verdict came in at three. You are safe. I am safe. It is done.”

Free. Acquitted. Safe.

The last word landed last and shuddered through her whole body, and her forehead came down against his, and she stayed there a long moment with her hands still on his face and his breath unsteady against her mouth.

“Say it again.”

“It is done. I am here. You are safe. The child is safe. There is no further proceeding against you. The misprision was dismissed within the half hour. The earl is at the courthouse signing the papers. Richard is on the road behind me. I came ahead. I could not wait. I should have let you rest. I am sorry I woke you —”

“Do not apologise. Not for that! If you apologise to me at this hour for coming to me in this room, I shall never forgive you.”

He laughed again, low and tired, and kissed her forehead.

Her hand found his jaw, and she felt the rasp of two days without shaving, and the long hollow of his cheek that had not been there in December, and the small hot tear that had got past him at some point in the last quarter-hour and had not been wiped away. She stroked his face, the angles of his jaw, the nose she knew so well, the brow she had kissed a hundred times in reality and a thousand in dreams.

“You are so thin. And you sound tired.”

“I am.”

“Lie down.”