Page 63 of Faceless

Her husband was a fugitive of some kind.

Not a vagrant criminal. Not a man hiding from a creditor. Something larger. Something with the involvement of the law, and possibly the army, and the careful arrangements of solicitors who knew the shape of risks Elizabeth could not see. The whole shape of their marriage existed because being recognised would do something to him she could not yet know.

It explained the locked floor. It explained the false name — she was almost certain the name was false because he usually held his breath when she said it. It explained the careful settlements on Jane and the provisions made for her own protection, which had always struck her as the work of one arranging for the survivors of his own ruin. It explained the hope he sometimes slipped on of something better.

It did not explain why he had been kind. Criminals, she imagined, could be kind in the abstract; she had no reason to suppose they could not. But the kindnesses she had been receiving for nearly two months — the dog, the library, the careful retreats from each of his own desires, the refusal to be thanked for repairs to a tenant’s wall — were not the work of someone calculating advantage. They were the work of one trying to give her every possible thing he could, without ever giving her the one thing he was hiding.

And he was waiting. That was the other thing she had come to know about him — that he was waiting for something, and would not say what. It was not her trust he waited on; he had made no demand on it and no test of it. He waited on something outside the two of them, something with its own pace, and when it arrived — if it arrived — the shape of their arrangement would change. She had heard it tonight, when his whisper had dropped — the held breath, the alert attention of one tracking the approach of a circumstance he could not hasten and could not yet meet.

She did not sleep until very late.

XXV

The Lesser Thing

The parcel was on the writing desk in her bedchamber when she came up from the library after breakfast. The brown paper was tied and addressed in a clerk’s hand to Mrs Carlisle, Auchengray, Aberdeenshire, and a sealed note had been slipped under the cord.

She broke the seal first.

Madam,

The enclosed volume was reserved for the late Mr Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, and held in our shop on his account; it has been duly forwarded as instructed.

Your most obedient servant, J. Dawkins, bookseller, Paternoster Row.

Her hands began to shake.

She put the note down. She fumbled at the cord, could not get her fingers to close on the knot, dragged it loose at last with both hands. The brown paper opened. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.

She opened the cover. Papa.

The sound came up out of her before she had braced for it. Not a sob — not yet — something rougher, as though her throat had not asked her permission. Her knees gave out before she could think to lower herself; she went down hard against the floor with the book in both hands and an arm wrapped around it as though it would otherwise be taken away.

Then the crying came.

It came in a way she had not known she was capable of. It bent her in half. It made her shoulders heave, and her chest hurt. Her face was wet at once, then wet to her chin, then wet on her hands where she had pressed them up to it. She could not get a breath that did not come back as a sound — gasping, ugly, loud enough that part of her was distantly humiliated, and the larger part of her did not care. Her nose ran. Her hair came down on one side and stuck to her cheek. She bent over the book until her forehead was against the leather of the cover, and she could smell the dust of a London bookseller’s shop and feel the binding under her skin, and the smell and the leather were not her father, but they were the closest she had been to him since May.

Papa! She said it aloud, into the cover. Papa.

The dog came in against her like a wall. The whole side of him pressed her ribs. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept into the dog’s coat with the book in her lap, and the noise did not stop for a long time. Each time she thought she had spent it, a fresh wave came up — fresher, almost — opening rooms inside her she had had locked since the funeral, since the first morning in this house when she had stood at the narrow window of a strange bedchamber and made her face go still because she did not yet know what would happen if she let it move.

It moved now.

She wept until her ribs ached. She wept until her eyes had nothing more in them and her breath came in shudders that were almost dry. She clutched the book to her chest the whole time. When the worst of it was past, she sat up slowly, the dog still pressed against her, her sleeve dragged across her face, leaving it streaked, the book not relinquished. She stayed on the floor.

She could not have said how long. Long enough that the morning sun moved on the boards. Long enough that Falstaff had given up urgency and laid his head on her knee and gone half asleep.

Eventually, she stood. Her hands were unsteady. She did not put the book on the shelf. She set it on the writing desk, on top of Dawkins’ note, where she would see it for the rest of the day.

She did not know what to call what had happened in her. She only knew it had moved. Whatever had held firm in her about her husband, since the night he had kissed the back of her hand in the dark, had moved.

Her list had been no good to her tonight.

She had taken it down anyway, out of habit alone, and she had run her finger along the items and found that the morning had blunted every one of them. The book was on the writing desk, not three feet from her chair. It had been the work of someone she did not know how to fit into any of the categories she had been laying out for him. The categories had been a kind of ground she had been standing on, and the ground was no longer there.

The face was the thing he protected most completely. The face was the part of him she could ask for tonight without violating the rest. She did not need an explanation. She needed to know, with her hands, that he was a person.

The supper was on the table; she would not be eating much of it tonight. She tried to begin with the seal she had seen from the headland that morning. Her voice came out evenly, and the seal sounded ordinary on her tongue, which surprised her, because nothing in her was ordinary. He answered her. He had a thing or two to say about seals and what they did at this time of year, and his whisper went on for half a minute, and she heard her hand close around her fork too tight when he had finished.