Page 58 of Faceless

He heard her set her glass down. “My sister writes that her situation has resolved,” she said carefully. “The… arrangement that had been made for her, before all of this. Blackwood has released the bond.”

“Your uncle’s liability is negated?”

“Yes.”

He waited. There was more — he could hear it in the way she had stopped, in the care with which she had chosen the word arrangement. He could have told her he already knew. He did not.

“She was afraid,” Elizabeth said, at last. “She did not say so. She would not say so. But she told me… certain things that horrified me. She would have gone through with it regardless because there was no other way. She is — Jane does not make a fuss. She would have borne it.” She stopped. “I am glad she does not have to.”

“How many sisters do you have?” There. That would throw her off the scent.

“Four, but you already knew that, because you arranged their settlements. The question you ask, I think is who they are, not merely their number. Jane is the eldest. Then after me came Mary, then Kitty, then Lydia.”

“And they are all… provided for? Comfortable?”

“After a fashion.” She picked up her fork, set it down again. “My mother and younger sisters are with my aunt and uncle in London. Mary has her books. Kitty and Lydia adapt to things more readily than anyone expects them to. Jane is the one I worry for. She feels everything and shows nothing. It is a very exhausting thing to watch from a distance.”

“You have spent a great deal of your life translating for her.”

He said it and heard it land — the way she went still, the slight shift in her breathing.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “That is exactly what it is.”

He had known this about her — had known that Jane was the person she protected, that the Bennet sisters existed in an order in which Elizabeth was the one who saw clearly and Jane was the one who would not fight her own battles, and would accept whatever she was told to accept. He had known it from the drawing room at Longbourn, the ballroom at Netherfield, even from Webb’s report. He had not expected it to sound like this when she said it herself.

“I am glad she is free of it,” he said.

“Are you?” He had learned to recognise that tone — the one she used when she was not asking but watching — the way he recognised changes in barometric pressure. As a physical thing. A shift in the room.

“I am.” He set his glass down. “You did not accept this offer for yourself. I know that.”

He heard her fork scratch the edge of the plate as she set it down. “I am that transparent, am I?”

“Your previous arrangement was… unpalatable. But you are not a woman who accepts a marriage in the dark out of fear for herself. You accepted it for her.”

The silence went on long enough to make him doubt it.

“That explains something.”

“What does it explain?”

“The condition.” She had been turning her glass in her hands, as she did when she was thinking. “His release from her engagement had to be a condition of the contract. You made it ironclad. You knew something about what she was facing. No… not what. Whom.”

He did not answer.

“You need not confirm it, for I can hear it as plainly as if you said it aloud. I suppose anyone might learn about Blackwood, and Sibley, for that matter. Have you had dealings with him? A former enemy? I imagine he — or is it they? — would be very put out if they knew your face and where to find you.”

He smiled at that in the dark. “An interesting conclusion, but no. May I ask what you have written to your sister about me?”

He heard the fork come to rest against the plate once more. A brief scrape of china, as though she had shifted it without meaning to. She cleared her throat.

“I have not betrayed any confidence. I would not. I told her the house is extraordinary, and that I have a library and a dog. I told her you have been… that you are not unkind. That you do not come to my bed. I hope that does not…”

“I have no objections to you writing the truth.”

A small sigh escaped her, as if in relief. “And I told her that I have never seen your face. I understand that last may be a violation of what you asked of me, but she heard it when the offer was made, so it is not… If you wish me to amend what I write in future —”

“Elizabeth.”