Page 52 of Faceless

I have a dog. His name is Falstaff, which you will understand immediately. He is five months old and roughly the size of a small horse, and has clearly decided he was born for me specifically and will brook no argument on the point. He knocked Mrs MacLeod’s bread off the table on his second day, and she has not yet entirely forgiven him, but she feeds him from the kitchen regardless, which tells you everything you need to know about Mrs MacLeod. She speaks to me as little as the duties of her position permit, and does not speak to me at all on the subject of the master. I am, to her, a question not yet answered. I do not mind. She is the kind of woman who lets tea appear without comment and leaves me alone, and after everything that has happened, that is more than I had hoped for.

The household is very small. Mrs MacLeod is housekeeper, cook, and judge in most matters. Her husband Angus is steward, valet, stablehand, and anything else that requires a man. There is a girl called Isa who comes up from the village on wash-days and speaks to me in single-syllable Gaelic on principle. I understand a quarter of it and reply in whole English sentences on principle of my own. We have arrived at a friendliness that does not depend on either of us being understood.

Yesterday, I attended the kirk. Reverend Innes preached forty-three minutes on the subject of patience, which was exactly as many as I could bear, and half the congregation turned and inspected me with the same frank attention I had in the chandler’s and the baker’s and every other shop I have visited. I think I passed. They stood for me when I came in and when I left, and Mrs Garrow gripped my elbow at the door and told me I would do. I have not enjoyed being taken in hand so much since Aunt Gardiner.

The food is the strangest part. I have eaten more smoked fish in a fortnight than I had eaten in my life. I have learned to like oatcakes. The chicken is good when there is some. Beef is rare. Game comes in when Angus shoots it, and I have given up any expectation of asparagus until the spring. I had one Yorkshire pudding on my first night, ordered specially, I was told, by my husband. You will recognise that as a kindness. You may also recognise it as the kind of thing that gives me pause.

I walk every day. I could not have told you a year ago what walking meant until I had tried it on this coast. The headland runs north for miles, and Falstaff and I have gone further along it every morning. Two miles at first, now closer to four, and the plan is to walk the whole way to the next village before the weather turns. The wind makes my ears ache. I come back having felt more awake than I did at any point in the last three months, and I think this is because at Longbourn and at Gracechurch Street, I was never alone and was never quiet long enough to search out the shards of grief. Here I am alone for most of the day. I am beginning to find that I have opinions about how I want to spend my hours.

And now, because I know you have been waiting for me to come to him, my husband. Jane, you were frightened for me when I took this offer, and you were right to be. I was frightened for me too, under everything. I cannot tell you how much of the fear I had prepared myself for turned out to be needed and how much did not.

What I can tell you is that he asks nothing of me that I have not agreed to. He does not come to my bed. He does not raise his voice. He does not, so far as I can see, lie. There are things he will not tell me, and he says so, and we have both agreed that I may ask whatever I wish and he will answer what he can. Whether I believe everything he has told me is a different question, and one I am still working on.

He keeps to the upper rooms. I have never seen his face, nor heard his proper voice, because he speaks only in whispers and our conversations happen in the dark. I know this will be harder for you to read than I wish it were. Please trust me, Jane: I am not locked in with a monster. I am married to a very careful man who has been made so by something he has not yet told me about, and who has given me considerably more liberty than the terms of our arrangement required him to give. He who comes down each evening to ask me how my day has been and listens to the answer as though my answer were the only question he had asked all day.

He is not unkind. He has given me more than I asked for and asked for less than he was owed, and I believe him when he tells me he means me no harm. You were not wrong to let me do this. I think you may sleep tonight, knowing that.

Give my love to Mama and to Kitty and Lydia. Tell Mary her book of sermons arrived safely with my trunk, and I will read them when I can. And Jane, did Blackwood accept the broken engagement without incident? I am asking you directly, so that you cannot evade it by pretending I had not.

Write soon. I am very far away.

Lizzy

She sealed the letter. Below her, somewhere in the walls, a door she could not see opened and closed, and she set the pen down and stayed where she was, listening for him on the stair, which was not a thing she had told Jane either.

XXI

Saving Things for Supper

The supper came every night. The knock came every night. Every night she unbolted the corridor door and stepped back into the dark, and every night he found his chair, and she found hers, and they sat across a table she could not see from a man she could not see, and she asked him things.

She had found out, by the second week, that she was spending her days moving towards those hours. Mrs MacLeod answered what was necessary and very little more. Angus spent most of his time about the estate. Falstaff adored her and could not engage her mind. By the time the knock came, she had usually been starved for conversation long enough that the sound of it went through her like relief.

She asked him everything she could think of. She asked about the house — its history, its age, the hidden passages she had begun to map by touch. He answered these without evasion and with what sounded like pleasure, or the closest she had yet heard from him. He knew the house in the way of someone who had explored it carefully and recently, which added to the list.

She asked about Scotland. His knowledge of it was large in some respects and strikingly absent in others — the coastal geography, yes, the fishing industry, yes, the history of the land, yes; the local families, the village politics, the feuds that Mrs MacLeod mentioned in passing with a careful neutrality that kept her own views to herself — these he did not know and did not pretend to know, and she added that to the list.

She asked him once what he had read recently, naming a title she had found on the shelves without preface.

“I have not read that one,” he said.

“It was on the lower shelf,” she said. “The novels.”

“I know which shelf it is.”

“I thought perhaps you had read everything in the library.”

“Not quite,” he said. “Some of the novels I have not got to yet.”

Yet. He had been in this house since spring, and a man who read as he read would have made a considerable dent in those shelves by now — but yet was still a word that assumed a future here, with intentions that extended beyond the immediate. She weighed it and added it to what she was building.

It was not only the words he chose. A whisper carried no clear accent — she could not tell from the sound of his voice where he had been raised — but it carried everything else. How he constructed a counter-argument. Which verb he reached for when the easier verb was closer to hand. The cadence of his irony, very dry and very controlled, rooted in a tradition she had grown up inside because she had grown up in the English countryside listening to her father read aloud. A Scottish gentleman — even one educated in England, even one who had spent years in London — would have kept something of the other country’s inflection. This man had kept nothing of it. When he spoke, she heard the drawing rooms of England in every sentence; he had been formed entirely by one country and was performing belonging to another.

One night, she decided to test him on the matter. “Do you miss England?”

The silence before his answer was longer than the others. Not the silence of choosing careful words — the silence of being taken somewhere by the question before he could decide how much of where it had taken him to give back.

“Yes,” he said at last.