Page 61 of Faceless

“The storm last week brought down the section of wall along the north field,” she said. “Angus says it has been failing for years. Do you know it?”

“I know of it,” he said.

“He thinks it will need to come down entirely and be rebuilt before spring.” She ate a little in silence. “There is a question of stone. Whether to quarry local or bring it from Inverurie.”

“Angus will know what is right.”

She waited. He could hear her waiting — a silence heavier than the ones she had let fall earlier in the evening, the kind she held when she had more to say and was choosing whether to say it. “The Hendersons came to call this week,” she said at last. “From the village. Mrs Henderson and her daughter. They were very kind. I told them that you were not receiving.”

“Thank you.”

“They asked how long we had been married. I told them July. They said the house had been dark a long time.”

He had nothing to give back to that. He picked up his glass and set it down.

She was trying to cheer him. He knew she was trying to cheer him. She had passed him the north wall and the Hendersons and made the kind of low, easy conversation a wife offered when she wished her husband to come back to her from wherever he had gone, and she had done it without asking him a single direct question, which was the kindest version of that effort available to her.

He could not bear it. Not because it was unwelcome, but because he could not decide which of him he wanted her to be kind to.

He had been nearly certain, at Rosings, that she was waiting for something from him. Was she a little broken-hearted, somewhere under everything else, that Fitzwilliam Darcy had died without ever making that offer? Did his real self still stand somewhere in her so tall that there could be no room for this version of him — the whisper, the dark, the careful distance across a table?

Or was it the other way round, and had this version begun to have a shape in her mind large enough to crowd out the one who had sat across the card tables at Rosings and could not keep his eyes off her? He could not decide which prospect was more horrible. Both were possible.

She tried again. “Falstaff found something on the headland this morning. I have no notion what it was. He was enormously pleased with himself and would not relinquish it until he had rolled in it. I had to negotiate for a considerable time before he conceded the point. I am not, it seems, a natural diplomat.”

He almost said something. He found he could not.

She heard it — the effort of it, probably, or the absence of it. The silence that followed was different from the ones they had shared across two months of suppers. This one sat heavy. She put her fork down.

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

“Nothing that—” He stopped. He started again. “It is not something I can—”

He stopped again.

He had been within thirty seconds of telling her everything for the past hour, and the only thing preventing it was the knowledge that telling her would move her from the protected side of this to the dangerous side, and the knowledge that he did not have the right to make that choice for her when she did not even know there was a choice to make. Both of those things were true, and neither of them was sufficient, and the insufficiency of them had been accumulating since he read the letter that morning.

He heard her push her chair back. Two steps, three. Her hand found his in the dark, not searching but deliberate — fingers closing over his, warm and certain.

He turned his hand over under hers.

“You need not try to defend yourself. I am not asking anything of you tonight.”

He breathed. Squeezed her fingers lightly. “You have the right to ask.”

“Perhaps.” Her thumb moved, very slightly, against his hand. “But not tonight.”

He faced the sound of her breathing in the dark. Two months. She had taken every angle available to her and pressed on every edge she could find. Tonight, she had put her fork down, come around the table, and was standing beside his chair in the dark because she had heard something give way in the whisper.

He had not found a way to account for her since Netherfield. He was no closer to it now.

“What I told you before,” he said at last. “That you were part of what comes after. I meant more than — more than part. I meant I hope, when I can give you something beyond this, beyond a whisper across a table, that you will find it worth the waiting.”

She was still for a long moment.

“I cannot say why I should trust you. You have given me almost nothing to go on, and most of what I have, I have worked out myself. You have hidden a great deal and refused to explain the rest, and I have no certainty of anything.” She let a breath out, and he heard in it something that had been held for a long time. “And yet you have asked almost nothing of me.”

“Someday, I hope to. Not now.”