Page 46 of Faceless

Somewhere in the telling, she shifted her foot without thinking. Nothing was there. She did not mark it at the moment. Only afterward did she work out that the obstacle had been drawn back while she was not paying attention, that he had drawn it back when she did, that it had been his boot and not the table leg, and that he had given her the floor under the table as quietly as he had given her everything else.

“You named him?”

“Falstaff.”

“After the Shakespeare?”

“My father was very fond of the Falstaff scenes.” It came out before she could prevent it. She pressed her lips together and moved on before she lost any more ground.

He did not let her move on.

“What else did he keep?”

“Keep?”

“In the library. Read to you.”

He had caught the tell. She had not been quick enough. She took a sip of her wine to buy a breath, and when she had it, she gave him a very small answer in the hope it would satisfy him.

“Whatever he was reading at the moment, he read aloud. My mother was never in the room for any of it. Jane and I were.”

“Jane is—”

“My elder sister.”

“Of course. Miss Bennet of Longbourn. The solicitor’s report named her. I had not wanted to presume.” He did not leave a space for her to answer, which she found a kindness. “Did your father’s tastes run to novels?”

“When they were well written. He thought Fielding vulgar on principle and read him anyway. He defended Sterne. He thought Burney had been wasted on a pension.”

“Burney?”

“Frances Burney. Evelina. Cecilia.”

“I know who Burney is.”

She heard something in that — the faint edge of having been mistaken for a person who did not read, and feeling compelled to defend his honour. She fumbled with her spoon to have something to do with her hands.

“What about the poets?” he asked.

“Which poets?”

“The ones he was fondest of.”

This was the kind of question her father would have asked her. Which was a thing she had not prepared herself for, and she had no defences against from across a supper-table, in the dark, from a man she had known for a day.

“Cowper. He read The Task the way other men read scripture. Pope, when he wanted teeth. Milton, twice a year. He was not fond of Wordsworth, which was a disappointment in him that I have only lately forgiven.”

She was saying too much. She knew she was saying too much and could not stop.

“What was he reading at the end?”

It was a direct question, without apology, asked gently enough that she could not have taken offence if she had wanted to. She did not want to. She wanted, to her own surprise, to answer it.

“Johnson. He had got out Rasselas again and had been reading it in the mornings. It was the last thing. He had finished his copy twenty times over the years, and it was falling apart at the spine, and he had ordered another from Dawkins in London —” She stopped. She had not thought about this in weeks. “He died the afternoon he sent in the order. I cancelled it myself the second day after the funeral because I could not bear the thought of it arriving to a house that no longer had him in it.”

“I am sorry,” he said.

Elizabeth made no reply. She tried her knife, missed the poultry completely, and hoped he did not hear the sound of the meat skidding off her plate. She set the silverware down and frowned into the darkness. She would not cry. She would not.