Page 55 of Faceless

He had not slept.

This was not new — sleep at Auchengray had always been provisional, contingent on the investigation being where he had last left it and Richard not having moved and not hearing that Georgiana was despairing — but last night had been different. Last night the thing keeping him awake was not the letter on the table or the clerk in Bristol or the silence from London that meant Richard was somewhere Webb could not find. Last night was George.

He worked at it in the grey light of early morning, holding it up from every angle available to him, and found nothing that improved it. She was getting closer to the shape of it. He had tipped his hand too much, revealed too much about his familiarity with her.

For now, she believed a man had been sent to Meryton with a list of questions and the instruction to take his time, and she believed the picture he had assembled was the picture in her husband's head. She was right about the picture. She was wrong about the man.

The picture had come from him — from a heart that ached every time he heard her crying for her family, from hands that cramped for want of touching her, holding her, comforting her. She had laid the evidence across the table like someone building a case, which was exactly what she had been doing, and which he had told himself would be manageable when the time came.

It was not manageable.

She was not frightened of this place. He had expected weeks of wariness before she took her bearings — time enough to establish the terms before she began testing them. She had been testing them since the first night. She had walked the headland alone on the first morning, before she even had the dog for company, as though she had decided the cliff path was hers. She had received the factor in the great hall as the mistress of the house and sent him away satisfied. And she was building comforts and routines for herself — writing regularly to her family, making friends in the village, devouring the books on the lower shelves. Watching her through the passage slit, he had thought she was coping.

She was not coping. She was working.

Forty nights. In forty nights, she had moved from a woman who could not find the table in the dark to a woman who had mapped the geography of his silences well enough to know which ones took something from him. She had asked him whether he missed England, forcing him to admit something of his past that he had never given. And he, fool that he was, had said yes, and she had heard, in the one word, exactly what he had meant to conceal.

She had not followed it. That restraint had been the most alarming thing she had done in forty nights — it meant she had known that following was not necessary. She had enough.

He sat back down at the table. Webb’s most recent letter was still there, half-answered, the fresh sheet beside it with three lines and a crossed-out fourth. He had been unable to finish it last night. He picked up the pen now.

She was going to work it out. Not in another month, not in the weeks he had told himself he had. She was three deductions away from it now, and did not know it — which was the only mercy available. She still believed he was George Carlisle, and the simplest explanation sat right there for her to take — an enquiry agent thorough enough to have told him the things a solicitor would not think to ask. She was not inclined to take it. That was the problem. That was always the problem with her.

And there was a worse problem beneath that one.

He had thought, when he made the arrangement, about what happened if she worked it out eventually — when the investigation broke, when he could emerge, when the conversation he owed her could finally be had in something approaching honest terms. He had thought about her anger, which would be considerable and entirely deserved. He had thought about the difficulty of explaining himself.

He had not thought carefully enough about what it meant for her to be discovering this while the investigation was still live, while he was still technically dead, while the name George Carlisle was the name on a legal marriage document that connected her, however tenuously, to a man the Home Office had not finished hunting.

She could not know she was living with a man wanted for treason. That ignorance was her protection.

But every layer she peeled back reduced it.

He set the pen down. His hands were on the table — his father’s hands, everyone had always said — the same breadth across the palm, the same bluntness of the fingers for a family otherwise given to elegance. He had inherited his mother’s height and his father’s hands, and from somewhere further back the stubbornness that had made a Darcy of Pemberley for two hundred years. Right now, all three of these things were equally useless to him.

George —

He had walked out while she was saying it.

He had walked out because if he had stayed another thirty seconds, he would have told her everything. Leaving had been the right decision. It was also, in some way he did not have adequate language for, an act he was going to have to live with.

He picked up the pen again. He had begun the letter before dawn; now he finished it.

W.

Your latest reached me this morning. I will be brief.

Do whatever you must to bring the clerk in. I care less now for caution than results. I leave the method to you, and will meet the cost. If he has been kept somewhere, find him. If he has been bought, outbid the buyer. If he is dead, I need to know that as a certainty rather than an inference. I cannot plan against a clerk whose status is in question.

Regarding the colonel, I repeat my earlier instruction, and sharpen it. If he comes to you, turn him away. If he has already come and gone, send word by the returning hand of what he asked and what you told him. I will not have him implicated. He has already done more than he knows.

The situation at this end has altered. I do not propose to set it down here. Understand only that my earlier estimate of the time available to me was wrong. I have considerably less of it, and the reason is not one I can address from here.

Whatever you have been holding for my authorisation, move. I cannot afford the winter.

GC

He had it sealed and ready when Angus came up with the water. That was mid-morning. By noon, the mural chamber had shrunk to something he could no longer remain in, and he took a candle into the hidden passages and went up to the Laird’s Lug.