Page 53 of Faceless

Flat. Unembroidered. Offered only because she had asked.

“What do you miss?”

He did not answer. She waited through enough silence to know he was not going to, and then she did not ask again. She heard him finish his supper. She heard him say goodnight. She heard the corridor door close behind him.

She lay awake afterward. Not thinking, precisely — the candle was out, and Falstaff was a warm, unreasonable weight across her feet, and the sea made its sounds through the stone — but not sleeping either. She had come here braced to endure. To give whatever was required, hold her dignity, and not make it worse than it had to be. She had been wrong about what would be required. He had asked nothing. She kept waiting for the other thing, the thing she had prepared herself for, and it did not come.

The waiting for it had become its own strangeness. She turned onto her back and looked towards the ceiling she could not see. She was still waiting for the awful thing, for the monster to reveal himself. Instead, she had found herself married to a man who listened, who answered, who left her room every night having asked nothing of her body and far too much of her mind.

She missed Jane. She missed her father. She missed being spoken to by someone who knew how to follow her thoughts where they ran quickest.

During the day, she could almost bear the house. At night, he made her remember everything she lacked.

The weeks began to take a shape. Morning gave her the headland, Falstaff, the road into Craighead, Mrs Fraser’s opinions, Mrs Garrow’s news, Reverend Innes’s calls, and Mr MacAulay’s packets of estate business. She was, in all the ways anyone outside the house could see, the Baroness of Auchengray — present and visible and proper in her place, a woman making a life there.

She was not making a life there. Afternoon was the worst of it. Mrs MacLeod had work and little inclination for society. Angus was usually out. Falstaff slept. She read, and sometimes the reading helped; sometimes it only sharpened the sense that she was spending whole days in anticipation of the one conversation she was allowed in twenty-four hours.

By the fourth week, that knowledge had grown humiliatingly plain. She found herself saving things for supper — some absurdity of Falstaff’s, a remark from Mrs Garrow, a question about the drainage papers — because there was no one else to tell. If Mrs MacLeod came upon her in the library with reddened eyes, Elizabeth attributed it to her father or to the sea air and was not sure she lied. By six o’clock, she was often so starved for engagement that she went into the dark half eager, half angry, and if she snapped now and then, it was because hunger and temper had become difficult to distinguish.

By the end of the fifth week, she had begun to understand the shape of what she could not get him to say.

He would tell her about the house, freely. He would tell her about books, about the coast, about the weather, the tides, and the light off the sea. He would ask her questions — about Falstaff, about her letters, about what she had seen on the headland that morning — with a genuine attention that still occasionally undid her when she was not braced for it. He would answer questions about the practical arrangements of their situation without apparent discomfort. He would, if she offered something small and personal, receive it with a care that made her want to offer something larger, which was itself a reason not to.

He would not tell her about himself.

Not what his history was, not where he was from, not why he had chosen this darkness for this life — she could not approach any of those edges without feeling the conversation solidify around him, his answers becoming more considered, the warmth draining out of them until she was talking to a man who was still present but had drawn a door across himself that she could not see.

On the evening of the fortieth day, she decided to find out what was behind it.

She had been working towards it all evening, approaching from different angles. She asked about his family — parents, siblings — and he told her, without evasion but without detail, that he had a sister, that they were close, that he hoped to see her again when circumstances allowed — and he stopped there, and she did not follow it, and they moved on.

She asked about his education, framed as a question about a book. He answered with the polish of a thorough education he was trying not to place by letting her guess where it had been obtained, and had almost succeeded.

Now they were at the end of the supper, plates pushed back, and she had one question she had been carrying all evening.

“Do you know,” she asked, “what I find strangest about this?”

“There is a great deal that is strange about this,” he said. “You will have to be more exact.”

“Not the darkness,” she said. “Not the whisper. Not the marriage in the dark to a man I had never met — those things are strange, but they have explanations, or at least I have been given something that stands in the place of an explanation, and I have chosen not to challenge it for now. What I find strangest,” she said, “is that you already knew me.”

The whisper did not come. The fork clinked as if he were carrying on with his meal. But he had stopped chewing.

“Not what a solicitor might discover,” she added. “Not the facts of my circumstances — that I was in reduced circumstances, that there were other arrangements in train. You knew what kind of woman I was. You knew I would want a library. You knew what kind of books I would want to find on its shelves. The morning after I arrived, I asked for a dog, and the next morning, a dog appeared, not a small decorative thing like most ladies would ask for, but a clueless brute of an impractical size, which is precisely what anyone who had ever heard me describe what I would want from a dog would have known to send. A solicitor does not assemble that picture.”

His feet had shifted under the table. His wine glass stilled on the cloth.

“So, I want to know — not more about you, because you have made it clear you will not tell me that, and I am not asking it. I am asking how you knew so much about me.”

His silences had become, over these weeks, the most legible thing about him. She waited through this one.

“I had you looked into,” he said at last.

“By the solicitor, yes.”

“By others.”

“What others?”