Page 27 of Faceless

Colonel Fitzwilliam?

Here?

Her breath stopped in her chest.

He was in civilian dress, hat in hand, and grief was on him the way it was on people who had been carrying it long enough that they had stopped marking the fact — not acute, not performed, just present, worn into the set of his jaw and the lines around his eyes. He took in the window above them first — the window with the handbill — and then her face, which he plainly had not expected to see.

The carts went on past behind him. Somewhere a dog was barking.

“Miss Bennet.” He stopped as though her name had used all the air he had. “Forgive me — I had not thought to find you in London.”

“I had not expected to be here myself. Yet, I suppose I must be somewhere.”

He almost smiled. “May I?” He gestured at the step beside her.

She moved her skirt. He sat, hat still in his hand, and neither of them said anything. The street went on around them, carts and voices and the ordinary business of a London morning with no interest whatsoever in either of them.

“You have been crying,” he said.

“The sun is in my eyes.”

“Yes.” He glanced past her at the handbill in the window. His brow had drawn in slightly. “This is your uncle’s house?”

“It was.”

She let him take it in — the way his jaw set, the small ticking of his cheek muscles. He had not known. The sight of it registering on his face made it real in a way that sitting alone with it for two hours had not quite done, and she turned her eye to the street before her own face betrayed her.

“Why are you here, Colonel?”

He had not been ready for the question. She heard him weigh it, the slight intake of breath that was the beginning of one answer and then another. What he gave her at last had no arrangement to it. “The notice was in the paper at my club yesterday. A Gracechurch Street freehold, to be sold at auction, the particulars to be had of Messrs Haldon and Platt. A good neighbourhood, this. Drew a deal of interest, and no little speculation. The, ah… the price was wrong for a man moving up in the world.”

“Ah.”

“I could not put it out of my head. I came to see whether the address matched the name I was afraid of. I had not thought to find anyone I knew on the steps.”

She replied with a flat smile.

“What has happened? If you are willing to tell me.”

She was, it turned out. She had not expected to be, but the question arrived in a voice with no agenda attached to it, and she was very tired, and she told him.

“My father died in May. Five weeks ago tomorrow. He choked on his dinner. Not even a proper illness that would have permitted his wife and daughters some warning.” She looked away with a sniff. “He always did like to try Mama’s nerves.”

“Miss Bennet… egad, I had not heard. I am so sorry.”

“The entail activated the same week. Mr Collins took possession of Longbourn within a fortnight. We — the neighbourhood could not accommodate us. We came to London. We had no time to write. We only came.”

“And the house?”

“My uncle was ruined this spring — an investment that failed without warning. By the time we reached him, there was nothing left, and the house is to be sold on Thursday.” Her voice thinned. “They do not yet know where they will go. I think my uncle was viewing a flat in Pentonville today.”

He was quiet. He was working through it — the death, the entail, the Gardiners’ collapse, all of it arriving in the same two months, one blow after another with no space between them to recover.

“And you?”

She could not answer at once. Whatever he had seen on her face before, he was seeing more of it now.

“Miss Bennet, where will you go?” His voice was not what it had been. It was lower, unsteadier — asking a question he was not sure he was entitled to ask, and asking it anyway. “What will you do? Pray, say you are not to become a governess. That is a miserable life for a woman as clever and lively as yourself.”