Page 2 of Faceless

The phrases she had said over to herself in the carriage — I take you, I take you, I take you — had gone. The words from the book of Common Prayer, the vows she had thought she might use instead — she reached after them, and they were not there. Nothing was there. She had already forgotten what he had said to her a minute ago except that it had been kind, and the solicitor was waiting, and the man in front of her was waiting, and she had nothing to say.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came.

She closed it. She tried to think. She thought of Jane. She thought of the carriage. She thought of the words the man in front of her had spoken and she reached for them because they were the only words that had been in the room.

“I, Elizabeth Bennet —” Her voice came out thinner than she had meant it to. She cleared her throat. “I, Elizabeth Bennet, take you… George Carlisle… Baron of Auchengray, as my… my husband. From this hour. Be- before these witnesses. Before God.”

She stopped. There was more to say, and she did not know what. The man in front of her had said more. She fumbled to remember what he had said.

“Whatever honour belongs to me is yours. Whatever —” Her voice caught. She did not let it break. “Whatever I have, I give. From this hour. Until death.”

She was not going to weep. She had decided that in the carriage, and she held to it now — not for dignity, she was long past dignity, but because if she wept she could not see, and she could not see anyway, and tears on top of darkness seemed like more than she could carry.

“So it is declared,” the solicitor said. Behind her, Mrs MacLeod said something low in Gaelic, and Angus answered it, a single syllable, and that was all.

She was married.

She stood in the dark in Scotland with the sea against the cliffs and the cold in the stone and the whole of her previous life on the other side of a door she had walked through of her own will, and her hands would not stop shaking. The man two feet in front of her drew a breath, and she did not know what came next. She had traded one cage for another with full knowledge and clear eyes — or as clear as eyes could be in absolute darkness. Jane was safe, and her mother and sisters would have a home, and it had to be enough. She made herself believe it would be enough, and she stood like a stone, and she waited.

His hands found hers in the dark.

She had not let herself think this far. She had stopped her imagination at the vows, at the solicitor’s pen, at the door closing behind the witnesses, and now there were hands — warm, both of them, and very careful, enclosing hers completely, not moving, not demanding, only there — and something gave way in her chest that she had been holding shut since London, and she could not get it back.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Not it is done. Not the formal language the moment might have warranted, not a single word of legal closure. Thank you, as though she had given him something freely, as though any part of what she had just spoken had been a gift or choice she could reasonably have withheld.

She had no answer for that. She did not look for one.

“Mrs MacLeod. Angus. Leave us.”

He did not let go of her hands. The door opened. The door closed.

She stood in the dark holding the hands of a stranger who had thanked her, and she waited to find out what she had done.

I

Good Company

The figure did not resolve itself into anything innocent.

Darcy had returned to his shipping account three times over the course of the afternoon — pushing back from the desk, walking to the window, coming back — each time expecting to find what the last hour had missed. Pemberley’s accounts were complex enough to produce exactly this — a number that did not belong, that would resolve itself the moment the right set of books was laid beside the wrong one.

He had told himself this the first time. And the second.

The fire had burned down while he worked. Outside, the light had gone from the flat grey of a March afternoon to the grey-blue that preceded dark — that brief interval when the streets went quiet before they went loud again. The hours had passed him unobserved.

He leaned back, his eye on the fire.

Most errors in a ledger had a ragged character — uneven, a gap that wanted filling. This had a different look. Smoother. More coherent. He could not have put it before another man as evidence of anything. He had learned to trust what he thought before he could explain why, and what he thought now was that someone had been careful.

He pulled a fresh sheet towards him, turned up the lamp, and wrote plainly, the way his father had taught him to write about money — without emotion, without accusation. He set out the account for his business partner, the discrepancy as he understood it, a request that a quiet inquiry be made. At the bottom, he noted that he would be departing for Rosings Park in Kent before the end of the week and intended to remain for a month at least, and directed that any findings be sent there.

He sat back. A month was longer than his usual stay. Most years, a fortnight covered everything Lady Catherine required of him. He had written in February to say a month, perhaps longer. Her reply had carried the satisfaction of confirmed expectations; Darcy had folded the letter and ignored the inference.

He folded this one now, reached for the seal, pressed it into the wax with the flat, deliberate pressure his father had shown him when he was nine years old, and the desk had belonged to someone taller. He set the letter on the corner of the desk for Hodges to dispatch in the morning.

He was looking at the fire — the fire that had gone to embers while he was not watching it — when he heard his cousin’s voice in the hall. Mrs Elliott’s voice replied, then Hodges, then there was laughter — his cousin’s laugh, unchanged since Cambridge. Darcy was already standing, already moving towards the door, before he had decided to.