Page 41 of Faceless

“You had expected something unspeakable,” he said. “Another kind of fear. Possibly worse than the one you were running from.”

“How do you know I was running from something?”

“It is the only arrangement of the facts that makes sense. A woman does not travel alone to Scotland to marry a stranger in the dark unless what she is leaving behind is worse than what she is travelling towards.”

She did not answer. Her hand had not withdrawn.

“As for what I want from you.” Her hand was warm now, warmer than it had been through the vows, and he was holding it across a table in the dark in her bedchamber on their wedding night and talking himself very carefully towards a cliff edge. “I am not eager to father an heir. I am not eager to take your body. I do not even ask for your affections, for you could not honestly bestow them where you are so thoroughly blinded.”

The warmth of her hand went up his arm, and he kept his whisper low and his grip loose and his mind on the words and not on the three feet of dark between them or the fact that she was there, present, real, safe, his.

“That is not… What I require of this marriage does not include… That is to say, not at present, and perhaps not…”

He could hear her breathing. He could hear his own blood. “In due course, if things were to progress differently, I would hope—”

He lurched from the chair.

He was still holding her hand. He held it a moment longer, standing in the dark beside the table, his heart making itself known against the inside of his ribs in a way that was not controllable and was getting less so.

Then he let her hand go, took up the shallow dish with the candle and the flint from the corner of the table, and set them down at her right hand.

“There will always be a candle at your place,” he said. “A candle, a flint, within reach of your hand. Whatever else you may have to endure in this arrangement, you will never be left in the dark. That is my word to you, and it will hold. I ask one thing in return. Do not light it until I have gone. Once I have drawn the door behind me, you may light it whenever you please. Open the other door then, and Mrs MacLeod will come directly. She will see to the fire. You will be warm.”

He found her hand with both of his and pressed his mouth briefly to her knuckles. “I wish you a pleasant night, Mrs Carlisle.”

He let go. He crossed the room by memory — four steps from her corner of the table to the door — and went through it.

The servant’s corridor was dark and cold and smelled of stone. He stood against the closed door with his back against the wood and his hands at his sides and his heart doing what it was doing, and he did not move.

Elizabeth Bennet was his wife.

She was here, and she was as safe as he could make her. She was four steps away on the other side of a door she would rise and bolt from the inside, and she was going to have the fire lit, and she was going to sleep in the bed Mrs MacLeod had made up — the one he had slept in when he first came here — and he was standing in a servant’s corridor in the dark, and none of this was anything like the wedding night he had ever dreamed of. Not one moment of it.

He stood there until his heart had made its point. Then he turned and walked back towards his own room in the dark.

XVII

The First Day

She had slept.

Her body had made a decision her mind had not finished making. She had not expected to sleep. She was married, in Scotland, in the dark, in a bed made for the laird. She had expected to spend the night counting the price of what she had done, the cost of saving Jane by interposing herself.

Instead, she had slept. Alone, and behind a bolted door.

The fire was already lit when she woke. Mrs MacLeod had come through without waking her. Elizabeth lay a moment in the warmth — the first warmth she had had in days that was not a cup of tea or her own coat — and looked at the ceiling she had not seen, grey light just beginning to show at the edges of the shutters, the stone above her utterly indifferent to the fact that she was now, apparently, its mistress.

She got up and washed her face and dressed, and when she looked at herself in the small glass above the washstand, she could not quite recognise the face looking back at her — too pale, too hollow about the eyes, carrying something in its expression that she suspected had been there since Longbourn and had not had the occasion to show until now.

She turned away from it and went to the windows. They were shrouded in heavy drapes that blocked out all light, but when she pulled them back, the sea and the rocks rushed to meet her.

She had known what she was coming to in the abstract — coast, cliffs, stone — but knowing it and standing at a window with the whole of it running from one edge of the glass to the other were entirely different things. It was not picturesque. It was grey and vast and indifferent in a way that had nothing to do with her or her marriage or the man on the other side of the bolted door. For a moment, that was the most restful thing she had encountered since her father died.

The headland below dropped to cliffs. Beyond the road to the village, the moor stretched out, grey-brown and enormous, running to the sky without apology. Somewhere past it was the whole of Scotland. Then England. Then — at a distance she had felt in her body on that crossing deck — the rooming house in London, Jane at the window, her mother’s voice going through the walls.

She stood at the window for a long time — long enough that the light shifted slightly and the sea went on without her — and then she turned away and went to find Mrs MacLeod.

The housekeeper was in the kitchen. The woman was, Elizabeth decided, somewhat older than her father had been. Not unfriendly, not exactly friendly either, something more durable than both. Tea appeared in front of Elizabeth without being asked. Bread appeared. Elizabeth drank the first of the tea and let the warmth find her fingers, and took the measure of the woman across the room while she did, and arrived at the conclusion that this was not a housekeeper who would volunteer anything.