Page 62 of Faceless

“That is — that signifies something. I do not know what to call it. But it signifies.” Her fingers tightened very slightly on his.

He did not answer. Then, because he could not tell her any of the rest of it, he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it.

The next morning, she walked farther than usual. She was not thinking about the previous evening — or rather, she was not thinking about it deliberately, which amounted to the same thing.

She had reached for his hand. She had not planned to. She had heard something give way in the whisper, and she had come round the table and taken his hand, which was a thing she might have done for her father or for Jane — and apparently, now, for a man she could not see. At some point in the last weeks, he had become something she brought things to. His yes when she asked whether he missed England. The way he listened when she described Falstaff. The night his hands had come to her shoulders to give her the warmth of a blanket she had not found yet, which she still did not examine directly but which was always at the edge of things.

And still, she did not know his face. She did not know the colour of his eyes. She did not know whether the mouth that had briefly touched the back of her hand belonged to a man of twenty-three or twenty-nine. She did not know whether his hair was dark or fair. She could not have drawn him or picked him out on the street if she had passed him.

The solicitor had implied a disfigurement. Perhaps a wound or a fire had also damaged his throat, sparing him only enough breath for a whisper. She had considered it and not been satisfied. He had given himself away now and again — a syllable before he had remembered, a laugh bitten off, a catch of breath unguarded, most of all on her first night. His throat worked. The whisper was a discipline, not an injury.

Whatever it was, it was wearing at him.

He had kissed the back of her hand in the dark, which was either the smallest gesture a husband could make to a wife or the largest, depending on which of them one asked.

Days went by in that shape. She wanted the hour now; she had taken to waiting for seven from the moment she woke, and she had no idea whether he wanted her in any corresponding sense. He never touched her save by explicit permission, and did not seem inclined to alter that arrangement.

Three days later, she walked down to Craighead in the morning and came back with the village in her ears, and at supper she retailed the day’s small commotion. Mrs Henderson had lost a laying hen, a pocket-watch, and, since the spring, she now claimed, some of her salted fish. She had decided that all three must be the doing of young Tam Pritchard, who lived with his grandmother on the cliff path and was, Elizabeth was told, sullen.

“When I left the shop,” Elizabeth said, “half the town had agreed with her. Mrs Garrow thought he should be turned over to the constable directly. Mrs Fraser was prepared to swear she had seen him on the coast road the morning the watch went missing, which she had not mentioned at the time because she had not wished to get involved.”

She waited for some dry rejoinder. He did not give her one.

“Public opinion,” he said, “is not evidence.”

“Well — no. But Mrs Henderson is losing things at a rate that suggests —”

“Mrs Henderson is losing things at a rate that suggests a carelessness in Mrs Henderson. Or a rat. Or a husband with an appetite. Or a neighbour who has been taking advantage of her inattention, which may well be the Pritchard boy but which may equally well be someone else entirely. The fact that the village is in accord is not a thing to trust. Villages are in accord about a great many things they have no business being in accord about. A laying hen is missing. A watch is missing. A sullen young man lives near the cliff. These are three facts. They do not, between them, constitute a case.”

“I had not imagined you would take up his defence so warmly. The fellow did not strike me as sympathetic when Mrs Fraser described him.”

“I am not defending Tam Pritchard. I am objecting to the reasoning. A man may be guilty in fact and innocent in the evidence against him, or he may be innocent in fact and guilty in the consensus, and the law exists, in theory, to distinguish between those two conditions.” When he went on, his whisper had dropped into something she could not quite name. “If the village wishes to decide a man is a thief because the village requires a thief, the village should at least have the honesty to say so. There ought to be a limit to the use of suspicion against a man. There ought to be a limit to what a community may do to someone who cannot prove the negative.”

She had expected him to find Mrs Henderson ridiculous, or to call for justice against the thief. She had not expected this. The tone of there ought to be a limit had an edge she had not heard in him before — not disagreement, not amused disdain, but the quiet determined attention of one speaking from somewhere other than this table, other than this village, other than tonight.

“You are right, of course,” she said, because he was right and because the moment needed cooling. “I will try not to convict Tam Pritchard over my supper.”

He recovered something of himself. “I am sorry. I have been… preoccupied today. I should not have answered you so warmly about something you offered in fun.”

“You need not apologise. I rather wish people did feel warmly about the principle.”

He did not reply.

The conversation moved on — something about the tide, something about Angus — but she held the exchange carefully in her mind all the way to the end of supper. She did not bring it back up. She heard him find his way back to the whisper he used with her ordinarily, the dry one, the one whose strings were unstrung. But she had heard something else for three minutes, and it had not been explained.

She lay awake afterwards with Falstaff an immovable warmth across her feet, and the exchange unspooling against the dark.

She had a list. Some of the pieces she had laid down had been wilder than others.

He had another wife. Upstairs, perhaps; mad or bedridden or something worse. Or in England, in a house he had abandoned, and the second marriage was an offence he could not acknowledge, but somehow the legal keeping of a second wife clarified his situation. An heir? No… no, that did not seem to be a priority, but still… The fancy was so plainly the kind Kitty and Lydia would have entertained between them, over a borrowed novel, that she had laughed at herself for it the first time it came to her.

The provisions he had made for her, the careful arrangements, the settlements on Jane — none of this was the work of a husband practising bigamy. She had reduced the theory to a small remainder and not eliminated it. There were upper floors she had not entered. There were doors that had been kept shut. She was not so disciplined a thinker as to declare a possibility extinguished merely because she could find it ridiculous.

Perhaps he was mortified of women. A profound incapacity, some deep horror of the female person, that had driven him to construct this whole arrangement so that he might claim a wife without ever being required to face one.

Or even… some men were not attracted to women. Perhaps having a wife was a cover of sorts for… other proclivities. She had nearly laughed aloud at that possibility, at two in the morning, staring at a ceiling she could not see. The hands that had held hers had not been frightened hands, nor had they been disinterested. Whatever his reasons for the dark, they were not those.

The disfigurement theory had been losing ground for weeks; tonight it lost the rest of it. A man preoccupied with the unfair conviction of an innocent was not preoccupied with his face. He was preoccupied with what a man could be made to answer for, and how, and at whose direction — which was a different country entirely. The possibility she had entertained on three different mornings, and dismissed, and entertained again, had taken its place at the front of her mind.