Page 56 of Faceless

He did not know what he expected to hear. She was not in the habit of spending time in the Great Hall — she crossed it, she passed through it on her way from one part of the house to another, but she did not sit in it. The hall was cold and formal and too large for one person to occupy comfortably. Elizabeth had the library for reading, the headland for walking, the kitchen for whatever conversations she was extracting from Mrs MacLeod. The Great Hall was nobody’s destination.

He went anyway. He lay flat on the cold stone with his ear to the slit and listened to the empty hall below.

It breathed. That was the only word for it. Four hundred years of stone and timber breathed in a way that had nothing to do with the people passing through it — the acoustics of the space, the way sound moved through the vaulted ceiling and gathered at the slit and arrived at his ear transformed. He had spent hours up here before Elizabeth arrived, lying on the stone with his ear to the silence, and he had thought himself accustomed to it.

He was not accustomed to listening for someone.

For a long time, there was nothing — Mrs MacLeod’s footsteps somewhere below, a door, the distant sound of wind off the headland finding a gap in the shutters. Then Falstaff’s nails on the flagstones, rapid and ungainly, the distinctive sound of a young dog covering distance at speed, and then — briefly, below and to the left, near the passage to the kitchen — her voice. Not words. Just the sound of it, warm and short, addressed to the dog. Then a door, and then nothing.

She had gone to the library. He could not hear her there, for the Lug gave him the hall and nothing else — but he knew the sounds of her morning well enough by now to read their absence. The headland walk first, Falstaff’s nails on the flags when they came back in, her voice to the dog in the kitchen passage, and then quiet. She had gone upstairs. She was in the library.

The pattern had changed.

He lay on the stone and thought about what that meant. She had been at Netherfield long enough for him to know the difference between Elizabeth Bennet at rest and Elizabeth Bennet in motion — when she had to walk and when she could be still. She walked when she was restless, when something required physical resolution, when she could not think through a problem while standing still. Walking was what her body did when her mind had not finished with something.

She had not gone to the headland this morning. She had gone to the library.

That meant she was not restless. She had the shape of what she needed, and she was in the library with it, reading, working at it because she had enough to hand and only needed time. He had given her a new piece, and she had taken it back to the library, and she was adding it to the rest. She was not going to stop, and she was not going to ask him again directly — she was going to find another angle, and then another, and she was going to be right.

He got up, took his candle, and went back through the passage and down to the chapel stair, to the slit in the east wall that gave him the library.

Her feet were pulled up under her skirt, and there was a book open across her knees, but she did not seem attentive — eyes at rest on the page, not tracking, a hand on the edge of the book but not turning anything.

He knew this Elizabeth. He had seen her at Netherfield the morning after her sister’s fever broke, when she had finally let herself sit — her walking done because the problem was resolved — and she had read a book for an hour on the window seat and turned two pages. She had not been reading; she was deciding something. He did not know what she had decided that morning. He had spent the rest of the week wanting very much to know.

He made himself step back. He had been careless, and now must tend the breach.

The thing he could not afford to do was be more careful in a way she could detect. This was the trap of it. If he became evasive where he had been open, circumspect where he had been direct — if his answers changed in a way she could map against the questions that had produced the change — she would have another piece of evidence. She would know that last night had frightened him, and knowing he could be frightened by a line of inquiry was itself a form of knowledge, and she would pull that thread.

He had to close the door she had found without her being able to see him closing it, while sitting six feet away from her in the dark, where she could hear the difference between the silences.

She was already the most difficult person he had ever tried to conceal anything from. He had known that before he arranged the marriage. He had arranged it anyway, and would do it again without question. But that did not solve the problem of tonight. He had to walk through that door and sit down in the dark and be George Carlisle convincingly enough that Elizabeth Bennet could not see through it. The only thing between her and the rest was the part she had got wrong.

She believed the picture had come to him second-hand.

He needed that to hold.

XXIII

The Bolt

She opened the door herself, as she had every evening so far. He had not expected that the first time, and he had not quite prepared himself for it tonight either — the door opening, and her there, two feet away in the dark, and the heightened awareness of her that he carried now whenever she was close. He found his chair. She found hers. The supper was on the table.

Neither of them mentioned the night before.

“I have been thinking about your Hume,” she said.

She had asked him at supper, the week before, whether the library had a copy of Hume — she had not yet seen every title on the shelves. It did, as it happened, but he had taken it up to his rooms because he had been reading it himself. He had brought it down with him the following night and left it on the table between them when he went. He had known what would follow and had been looking forward to it all week with a pleasure he ought not to have been permitting himself.

He answered as neutrally as he could. “And?”

“I think he has arranged for himself a rather convenient exit from every argument he dislikes. Any claim one puts to him that he cannot disprove, he reclassifies as a sentiment or a custom or a habit of mind, and pronounces it beneath the scope of philosophy. He makes the fallibility of reasoning so complete that I cannot see how he expects us to credit his own arguments with any force, except that we like them, which is exactly the sort of sentiment he would, at the next page, derisively denounce as insufficient.”

“You have read him closely.”

“I have read him angrily, which I find is the same thing.”

He very nearly answered the tone of that and did not. “You are conflating two of his arguments. Hume distinguishes between relations of ideas, which are demonstrable, and matters of fact, which are probabilistic. Neither category admits of the kind of certainty you are asking him for. He is not saying all reasoning is equivalent. He is saying that causal inference is a form of inductive habit rather than a form of rational demonstration, which is a narrower claim than the one you are attacking.”