Page 42 of Faceless

She set the cup down.

“Does the baron keep to the upper floor in the mornings?”

“Aye.”

“And in the afternoons?”

“He has his habits.”

Elizabeth wrapped both hands around the cup. She had questions enough to fill the morning — who he was, where he came from, why the dark, why the whisper, why her, why any of it — and Mrs MacLeod was a very pleasant wall. “He has been here long?”

“Some months.”

“And before that, the house was empty?”

“For some years. The old laird — his mother’s people — they kept it a generation back. It has been quiet since.”

His mother’s people. She turned her cup in her hands. That figure in the dark had once had a mother. Someone had stood in this kitchen before either of them was born, had called this place home. She wanted to ask who — she could see a dozen questions lining up behind the answer — but Mrs MacLeod had already closed the door behind her answer, and Elizabeth was too tired to push at a wall that would not move.

She ate her bread and looked out at the grey sea going about its business, and tried to remember the last time she had sat in a kitchen and not known what day she would leave it.

The house by daylight was extraordinary and strange and nothing like she had imagined it, which was partly because she had not let herself imagine it — had stopped her imagination at the signing of her name and refused to look beyond it.

Now here it was. The walls were eight feet thick in places. She pressed her palm against one, and the cold living inside went straight through her hand — not draughty cold but the chill of stone that had been standing when the sea was the only road. The ceilings were low and corbelled. The windows were narrow. It was not a house built for comfort. It was built to hold, and it held. Walking through it, she had the disorienting sensation of being inside something entirely indifferent to her circumstances — indifferent to the circumstances of everyone who had ever lived here, and would go on being indifferent long after she was gone.

The library was on the second floor. He had said three walls, floor to ceiling. She had formed some picture in her mind from those words, and the picture was wrong. The shelves ran from the floorboards to the low, corbelled ceiling without interruption. The light from the narrow windows fell grey and clean across the spines. She went in slowly.

The order on the shelves was not alphabetical but argumentative — a logic she could feel without yet mapping. History alongside travel alongside natural philosophy. Poetry in two languages. She ran her finger along the spines and stopped at the novels.

They were so like some of her father’s books.

Not his volumes, not his hand, not the worn, yellowed copies from Longbourn. But many of them were the same titles. The same shelf of companions he had kept within reach, the same authors he had pressed into her hands over twenty years with his running commentary — this one. This one. This one again, when you are older. Some of the books on this shelf were less yellowed than those above and below them, their bindings cleaner, their grouping too deliberate to be accidental. They stood together at eye level as if someone had drawn them from the larger library and set them here for easy taking.

Her throat closed.

She was in a tower in Scotland, married to a man she could not see, and her father had been dead two months and would never know how any of this had ended, and here was a shelf arranged closely enough to his habits that she could feel his absence in it like pain.

She sat down on the floor with her back against the shelves and wept, properly, for the first time since Longbourn. Not the controlled weeping she had done in a rooming house bedroom with Mary asleep six inches away and Jane listening from the other pallet, but the kind that had no audience and made no effort to be civilised, the kind her father’s death had deserved from the beginning and had not received because she had not had the room for it.

She cried until she was empty and then found she was not empty at all.

The worst of it was not grief by itself. Grief had plain edges. Her father was dead. Jane was far away. Longbourn was gone. She was in Scotland. Those were facts. Facts, however cruel, at least held still long enough to be looked at.

What she had not prepared for was kindness.

She had come north braced for hardness. For obligation. For something cold and contractual and perhaps humiliating, but intelligible. A brute could be hated. A monster could be feared. Fear built its own armour. Fear simplified. It turned life into the endurance of one thing.

There was no armour to be made against this.

He had put her in a room of books her father would have loved. He had arranged the supper table so she might move through the dark without fear or embarrassment. He had spoken to her with restraint instead of triumph. He had asked nothing. He had left her undefended against every softer thing she had spent the last months teaching herself not to want.

She bent over with her face in her hands and wept again, more quietly now, because the first storm of it had gone, and what remained was worse — not violence but exposure. She was still a daughter who wanted her father. Still a sister who wanted Jane. Still herself enough to hunger after wit and company and to feel the shape of the lack when the room closed round her.

How long was she going to be here? She did not know. She did not know most things about this situation, which was the situation in its entirety — a tower house, a fire, a shelf of books arranged with a knowledge that came too near understanding, and a husband who was more like a wraith, and none of the rest of it yet legible.

By the time it passed, she could not bear to stay there any longer. She opened one of the novels and read three pages without understanding a word of them, then went downstairs in search of bread and something warm.

She was in the kitchen when Angus came in. He opened the door and stood in the frame, and she looked past him, and whatever she had expected from the morning’s practical arrangements, it was not this.