Page 59 of Faceless

It was out before he had decided to use her name. He heard her stop at the sound of it.

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me. And for what you wrote.”

Her foot moved under the table. Whether she had meant to move it or had nudged the leg, he could not tell.

“You are not angry?”

“I am the opposite of angry. I cannot tell you why tonight. Perhaps another time.”

He could not read the long silence that followed, nor would he break it. He was not going to explain to her that a letter in her sister’s possession, sent in August or September and preserved in London, stating that Mrs Carlisle of Auchengray had never seen her husband’s face, was the kind of document that might, under certain conditions, protect her. He was going to take it as the gift it was and be grateful.

She was quiet a while longer. When she spoke again, her voice had changed, gone lighter, the tone she used when she was moving sideways towards something. “I have been reading the natural philosophy. The section on coastal geology. Did you know that the cliff face below the headland is younger than the rest of the rock formation? There is a fault line. Angus says it has been slipping for decades.”

He did not know that. He told her so.

“It is in one of the volumes you — one of the volumes on the lower shelf,” she said. He heard the correction. She had been about to say one of the volumes you chose, or one of the volumes you put there, and had caught herself.

They talked about the geology. They talked about Falstaff’s habits on the headland, which were apparently considerable and occasionally alarming. They talked about Mrs MacLeod’s Tipsy Laird cake, by Elizabeth’s account, the best she had encountered in some years. He asked what she had read that afternoon — not the title but the argument of it. She told him. She had opinions about it, sharp ones, occasionally wrong ones, and she was willing to be told so. He told her so. For a stretch of perhaps twenty minutes the evening was what it might have been, if he could have been honest from the beginning.

And then, she fell quiet longer than she had been that evening. “When this ends — whatever this is. Whatever it is that keeps you here...”

He stilled. “You presume much.”

“And I am not wrong, am I? There is too much of the future in your words sometimes. You do not imagine living like this forever. I am not asking what that future is. I know you will not tell me. I am asking something else.” She had turned slightly away — he could tell by the change in her voice, the angle of it. She was approaching something and doing it sideways. “I am asking whether I am part of what comes after. Or whether the arrangement ends here, when whatever is keeping you ends, if I… Am I a part of what comes next?”

He had not prepared for this one. He had prepared for her to return to last night’s evidence by some other route, for her to push on a different edge. He had not prepared for her to ask, directly and without preamble, whether he intended to keep her.

He had backed himself into a wall, and they both knew it. He could not answer without confirming there was a plan, a return, a life he was waiting to resume. He could not refuse to answer without telling her she was not part of it, which was not true and which he was not willing to say.

“Yes,” he said. “You are part of it.”

She was quiet. He heard the shift in her breathing — not relief exactly, something more guarded than relief. “That is the most direct answer you have given me.”

“It is the one I cannot avoid giving.”

He heard her breathe. He heard her take up her glass and set it down again.

“Good,” she said.

That was all. The evening returned to something he did not have a name for — not ease, not warmth exactly, but the shared understanding of two people who have agreed, without saying so, to continue.

He stayed later than usual. He did not note the hour. When he finally rose, they uttered their civil goodnights. He went through the door and along the passage to the stairs.

Behind him, he heard her not bolt the door. She had bolted it every other night — he had always waited for the sound of it, and she had always drawn it home. Not tonight.

XXIV

Enough to Trust

Jane’s letter had arrived at breakfast. Elizabeth read it twice in her bedchamber and then a third time at the writing desk in the library, as though a third reading might yield what the first two had not. It did not. Jane wrote as Jane always wrote — Mama had a cold; Kitty had a new ribbon; Mary was progressing with her sermons in whatever spirits Mary was usually in, which defied description. Jane herself was well.

Jane was never anything other than well in letters. Jane was well in the same way people said the weather was fine when they meant it had not actually rained on them yet.

At the foot of the sheet, in a smaller hand, as though the question had been an afterthought and not the point of the whole letter —

I have been thinking about Papa. Do you believe he would have liked your husband? I cannot stop wondering.

Elizabeth folded the letter away and did not answer it.