Page 54 of Faceless

“People whose business it is to find out things.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “How long had you been looking?”

Nothing.

“Was it weeks? Months? Did you know about my father’s death before it happened?”

“No.” Immediate. She believed it because it made sense, but there was still something…

“After, then. How soon after?”

“Not long. But almost too long.”

“And you decided — on what basis does a man who has never met a woman decide she is the person he wants for this?”

This silence was different entirely. She heard him breathe. She heard the careful control of it. She heard the beginning of a sentence attempted and abandoned, and then another, and then nothing.

“You are not going to answer that.”

“I cannot answer that.”

“Cannot? Or will not?”

The dark gave nothing back.

“You sent someone to Meryton. Not a solicitor with a list of questions, because that sort of thing gets noticed and would have got back to me. Someone who can look inconspicuous. Someone who knew how to ask after me from the people who have known me since I was a child without raising suspicion — Mrs Long, who taught me the pianoforte when Mary gave up on me; the Gouldings, who had me to dinner with my father a hundred times; the vicar, who held me at my christening. The picture you were working from was not built in a week at a London desk. It was built out of many hours in a place you have never been. Had you?”

The silence that followed was the longest she had yet produced from him.

Then his boots scuffed the floor, and his chair rattled.

“Goodnight, Mrs Carlisle.”

She heard him cross to the corridor door. The door opened.

“George—”

The door closed.

She went over everything she had just said. She was right. She knew she was right. She knew he knew she was right, and she knew the rightness of it had sent him out of the room. The triumph of it, and the loss of it, and the strange ache of having pushed on something and felt it give — she held all of this in the dark until the candles went out one by one.

He stood in the passage with his hand still on the door.

George —

The syllable had been cut off by the closing of the door, but he had heard the beginning of it, the shape of his father’s name in her mouth, and the sound of it had moved through him the way the cold moved through the walls of this house — directly, comprehensively, without any concern for what lay in its path. He had been four steps from the table when she began the word, and he had closed the door on her.

She had called him George. Not “Mr Carlisle,” the name on the proxy contract, the way his mother had called his father “Mr Darcy” until the day she died. She had taken the name he had built for himself from his father’s Christian name and his mother’s family barony, and she had used it the way people used a name when they needed a person to call out to — across a room, across a closing door. The intimacy of it from her mouth had not felt like the manufactured name he had given her.

It had felt, somehow, like the name he had hidden.

In the mural chamber, he sat at the table with the lamp unlit and looked at the dark. The letter to Webb was half-finished and would stay that way tonight. He had nothing useful left for Webb. He had nothing useful left for anyone. He had closed a door in his wife’s face while she was saying a name she thought was his, and he was going to have to go back into that room tomorrow and be George Carlisle convincingly enough that the ground he had just lost could be recovered.

He was not certain how much ground there was left to lose.

XXII

The Shape of the Problem