Page 31 of Faceless

XIV

Reduced Circumstances

The night came through the walls from both sides. Through one she knew, without having been told, that the woman next door had an infant and a cough and a husband who came home late; through the other came her mother’s voice, going at intervals throughout the night.

Not crying — Mrs Bennet had moved past crying and into a feverish wakefulness that required Kitty and Lydia to bear it in turns in the room next door. Elizabeth had heard Lydia snap at something around two in the morning, her mother’s voice dropping, then nothing.

The room the three of them had been given was meant for one person, and held three pallets now — hers against the left wall, Jane’s against the right, Mary’s wedged between them and the door in a space so narrow that dressing in the morning required all three to take turns, the ceiling low enough that she could press her palm flat against it if she raised her arm. There was nowhere in it to be alone, and nowhere to escape one another. She had lain in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to Jane.

Mary had been asleep since half-past ten. She slept without interruption, which seemed, in the circumstances, almost offensive.

Jane had not slept at all.

Jane did not move, did not make a sound, lay with her back to the room in a stillness that was nothing like rest. Around midnight, there was one catch of breath. Elizabeth closed her eyes and did not answer it, because there was nothing to say, and because if she spoke, she would give herself away.

The light came in grey and early, and Elizabeth got up before the others stirred, dressed in the cramped space between the pallets, and went to stand at the narrow window. The street below was already moving — a cart, a woman with a basket, a boy running. London conducting its indifferent business.

She heard Jane roll over behind her. “You did not sleep,” Jane said.

“I slept a little.” She did not turn around. “How are you?”

Jane did not answer immediately. Elizabeth waited, still watching the street, and did not fill it.

“I am well enough,” Jane said.

She turned then. Jane was sitting up on the pallet with her hair loose around her shoulders, her hands in her lap, her back very straight. She had been holding herself like that for two and a half weeks — arms close, shoulders drawn in, as though making herself smaller was something she could do deliberately and maintain. She had come back from the outing with Blackwood sitting exactly like that in the carriage and had not said a word the whole way home.

Her eyes were dry. She had been crying long enough to run out, which was worse than tears.

“Jane.” Elizabeth sat down beside her. “Whatever happened, you may tell me.”

“There is nothing to tell.”

“There is something. I can see it.”

Jane kept her eyes on her hands. Her voice when she spoke was careful and flat. “He showed me the room that will be mine. Upstairs. The one at the end of the passage, away from the rest of the house. He took me there himself — not his housekeeper. He unlocked the door with a key he kept on his person, and when we had gone in, he closed the door behind us and stood with his back to it.”

“Jane, he did not…”

“He pointed out to me that there was no bolt on the inside. He said a wife had no use for one, and he had ordered any such fitting removed in each of the rooms she would have the use of. He said it in the way a man might point out the brasswork on a fireplace.”

She was still looking at her hands.

“Then he came to stand behind me. There is a looking-glass above the dressing table. He turned me towards it, put his hand on the back of my neck — not squeezing, only resting, the whole weight of his palm — and held it there while he told me, very quietly, what he expected of a wife, and that he was a patient man but required obedience and would not be crossed. While he spoke, his other hand began at my waist.”

Elizabeth’s face heated. “No…”

“Then he pulled my fichu out of the way. He did not tear it. He drew it loose from where it was pinned, the way a man undoes a parcel he means to look into, and let it fall about my shoulders, and then he put his hand under the muslin of my bodice and onto my skin.”

Her voice still did not rise, but it had taken on a kind of dreadful evenness.

“I said his name. I said, Mr Blackwood, please. I said, please, sir, not before the wedding, I beg you, do not disgrace me. I do not think I had ever in my life used the word beg before. I used it three times. He did not stop. He did not even slow. He went on speaking about a wife’s duties, with his hand where it was, and his hand on my neck did not move, and he was staring at me in the glass where he…”

“Oh, Jane… Oh, God…” Elizabeth clamped a hand over her mouth to keep the bile from surging forward.

“He told me to stand straighter, so I stood straighter. He told me to put my shoulders back. I did, and the front of my bodice fell open further where he had loosened it, and the air in the room was cold, and I felt it on me — on my breasts, on the skin he had been touching — and I knew he could see me, plainly, in the glass. He looked his fill. He did not hurry. He told me that was better, that he was pleased with what he had bought. He stood looking at me for what seemed a long time, and the cold did to me what cold does, and he saw that too, and he smiled once, very slightly, as though I had answered a question he had put to me.”

The oddest part was that Jane shed no tear. She was entirely blank, as if she had drawn a curtain over the feeling. That terrified Elizabeth more than anything. How would her sister survive such a man?