Page 43 of Faceless

The creature on the end of his rope was enormous — or would be, presumably, when it finished arriving. At present, its paws had come in considerably ahead of the rest of it, its legs were several inches too long, and the whole design had the look of something still in negotiation with itself. It had clearly been running and was now applying that energy to the project of inserting its face into her ear.

“Is that—” she started. “Did he actually—” She stopped and looked at Angus. “He sent a dog!”

“Aye,” said Angus, who had carried the dog some distance and had feelings about it.

“He found it so soon! Last night I asked for a dog, and this morning there is a dog?”

She had asked — in the dark, in the first hour of her marriage, half out of bravado and half to see what he would do when the thing she asked for was not one of the arrangements he had prepared — and he had sent it. The next morning! A deerhound puppy, five months old, with paws like dinner plates and no sense of propriety whatever.

“Aye,” Angus said again. “Paid twice ’is price because the farmer that raised ’im already had ’im sold.”

“Twice his… No, get down,” she told the dog when he plunged against her skirt with muddy paws.

She was not obeyed, either.

She got hold of it around the middle — this required genuine effort — and held it off her and examined it. It looked back with the total, unguarded devotion of a creature that had decided, somewhere on the road from wherever it had come from, that she was the person it had been waiting for. Its tail was going at a speed that suggested structural risk. It was the least complicated thing she had encountered in two months.

Her eyes filled. She put her arms around the ridiculous creature and held on.

She had not laughed in — she counted backward and stopped counting because the number was too large. Her shoulders dropped for the first time since Longbourn.

“Well,” she said to it, when she could speak. “What shall we call you?”

The dog slapped its tail on the flagstones.

“Something dignified,” she said. “Hector. No. You are not remotely Hector.” The tail redoubled.

“Apollo, perhaps. No — too much to live up to. Cuchulainn? Do not make me spell that one twice a day.” She held its enormous paw up, examined the splay of it, and put it gently down. “You require a name for a creature with no sense of his own size.”

Her father had always said that Falstaff was funnier than Hamlet because Hamlet had the luxury of indecision, while Falstaff was too hungry to waste time on it. He had read her the scenes in the Longbourn library on winter evenings when she was nine, doing all the voices. She had laughed until her sides ached, and he had said — this one, Lizzy. The one who knows the value of a good meal and a warm fire and refuses on principle to be tragic.

The dog sneezed magnificently on her shoulder.

“Falstaff,” she said.

Angus looked at the dog. The dog’s tail, if anything, went faster.

XVIII

Something Better

She was at the supper table in the bedchamber before the hour, and the wine had gone a little warm in the glass when the knock came.

She had not thought he would knock. He had the means of opening the door and had not used them. She pinched out her candle and let her eyes find the dark again, and crossed to the door by the map she had made of the room that day, and opened it herself.

She heard the small involuntary catch of his breath. She must have surprised him.

She was standing in the open doorway two feet from a man she could not see, and his warmth reached her in a room that had been cold since Mrs MacLeod had left it that morning.

Relief ran through her so swiftly that it vexed her. Another person. Another mind — one hopefully more inclined to conversation than Mrs MacLeod. The room ceased to feel deserted the instant he entered it.

Underneath the warmth was the clean resinous scent of him — books and something else. He had been shaved recently. He had prepared for this evening. She was not entirely sure why that moved her, except that almost none of the day had contained anything that answered back.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Good evening.”

She turned back towards the table and found nothing. Everything she had mapped by touch had rearranged itself the moment she moved. “I… I seem to have lost my bearings. Would you—”