Page 51 of Faceless

She bought thread at the chandler’s. She had no need of thread. She had gone into the chandler’s because she needed to go somewhere, to do something ordinary, to be a person who did things rather than a person who sat in a library waiting for dark.

The woman behind the counter was perhaps fifty, with a curious look that she deployed without apology. “You’ll be the new lady up at Auchengray,” she said.

“I will,” Elizabeth said.

“Mrs Fraser,” the woman said, as if it were information Elizabeth ought already to have had. “We’ve wondered when we’d see you. The laird doesnae come down himself.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “He is in mourning. He does not like company.”

Mrs Fraser nodded as though this explained everything, which it apparently did, because she moved on to the price of thread and the weather and the matter of Falstaff, who had wedged himself behind a display of rope and was regarding the cat on the windowsill with a hopefulness the cat was not reciprocating.

When Elizabeth stepped back into the road, another woman hailed her from across it — broad-shouldered, shawl pinned tight, basket on her arm.

“Mrs Carlisle? I’m Mrs Garrow. My sister’s girl comes up on wash-days. She said I’d know ye by the dog.”

Elizabeth looked down at Falstaff, who was attempting to eat a piece of seaweed. “He does make identification easier.”

Mrs Garrow laughed. “If the laird’s keeping tae himself, folk will look tae you. That’s the way of it.”

The remark was plain enough to pass for casual, but Elizabeth carried it home and considered it all afternoon. If she was seen, if she answered questions, if she sat in the hall and received the people who had business with Auchengray, then her husband’s seclusion ceased to look odd and became merely temperament.

He had brought a wife into the house, and a wife in the house made the whole arrangement seem more natural. So he had told himself, perhaps. It was not a foolish calculation, and it answered at least one of the questions she had as to why.

The factor came the following week and introduced himself as Mr MacAulay, a careful man somewhere in his sixties, long enough in his post that the change in tenancy still sat slightly uneasy on him.

“The laird is well, I hope,” Mr MacAulay said, taking the chair Mrs MacLeod indicated and keeping his hat very straight upon his knee.

“He keeps to himself,” Elizabeth said. “He has had a difficult year. He does not receive visitors.”

“Of course, of course.” Mr MacAulay accepted the tea Mrs MacLeod brought without looking at it. “Mrs Carlisle, if I may — there are one or two matters of the estate that will require the baron’s attention before the quarter. The Inverurie timber, and the matter of the east field drainage—”

“Send me the documents,” Elizabeth said. “I will see that they reach him.”

Mr MacAulay looked at her and revised an assumption. “You take an interest in the estate, then?”

“I take an interest in not making your work harder than it already is.”

That won her the smallest shift in his face — not respect, precisely, but the beginning of regard. He drank his tea, set out the particulars with greater directness than before, and left apparently satisfied.

She had just managed her husband’s affairs. She did not know who her husband was.

Two days later, the minister called. Reverend Innes was a lean man with a long, patient face and the air of having spent twenty years persuading fishermen not to quarrel over doctrine. He stayed half an hour, discovered that she could speak of books and parish collections and the weather without disgracing anybody, and left with the promise that Mrs Garrow would call again and that Mrs Fraser’s niece might be usefully directed towards service if ever an additional maid were wanted.

By the time he was gone Elizabeth had, without any deliberate effort, acquired three names, one small history of the village, and the first faint outline of a life in it.

Jane had had a brief letter from her two days after her arrival — in her own hand, saying she was safely at Auchengray, the journey uneventful, more to follow when there was more to say. Elizabeth had written it sitting in her bedchamber in the afternoon with Falstaff across her feet. It had been everything that could be fitted on a single sheet and nothing she had wanted to say.

Now, with nearly a fortnight behind her, she sat down to give her sister the fuller account she had promised.

Dear Jane,

You will have had my first note by now. The house, as I said, is extraordinary, but extraordinary wants particulars, and you shall have them. Auchengray is a tower house, a real one, four hundred years old. Mrs MacLeod tells me that the laird who built it rode with Robert the Bruce, but I have learned the tales around here can be as tall as the towers.

Regardless, it is quite imposing, with walls that make our sitting-room walls at Longbourn look apologetic, and hidden passages in them, and the sea directly below the headland. The whole is built from grey stone that has no interest in me, or in anyone who has ever been here, or in anyone who ever will be. I cannot decide whether that is comforting or terrible so I have decided it is both.

The weather is not what I was promised. There has not yet been the relentless wet grey Aunt warned me to expect. The days have been cold and bright and impossibly windy, and I have begun to respect rather than resent the wind off the sea. I do not go out without a proper coat any longer.

Jane, I have a library. All my own. Three walls of it, floor to ceiling, and a fourth of windows facing the sea. I sat down and counted the shelves the afternoon of my third day because I did not know what else to do with myself, and stopped at three hundred and twenty volumes on the east wall alone. I decided I did not wish to know the whole total because that somehow ruins the thrill of discovery. I fancy I shall have time enough to read them all. I have been reading for days and have not yet made a significant impression on it. Papa would have wept. Under the sea-facing windows, there is a seat broad enough to stretch out on, which is where I spend my mornings.