Page 65 of Faceless

“Thank you for the Rasselas.”

What came up under her fingers was not the lurching awareness she had been bracing for. It was warm. Open. A breath drawn in pleasure that he had not had time to disguise — the small involuntary upward adjustment of a face being given a thing it had wanted to give, the heat of a husband pleased with himself for having pleased her.

She had thought he might tense; he did not, not at first. He bloomed under her hands. She had not known a man could do that, and she had certainly not known her husband could, and her hands stilled because she did not entirely know how to interpret what they had just learned.

Then he caught up to himself.

She did not know what shape his face went into next; it happened too fast. She had only the after — the going-still, the hardening, the discipline reasserted with a force that snapped through his jaw under her palm. The pleasure had been there for half a breath. He had clamped down on it as though it were the worst thing she could have caught him at.

His hands came up over hers and drew them down, not roughly, but firmly. He was breathing hard. He had risen before she had finished knowing that he was moving, and stepped back from her.

“Forgive me,” he said. It came out uneven. He was gathering himself back in — she heard it in the breath, in the control, in what the control was taking from him.

“There is nothing to forgive,” she said.

He did not answer. She heard him move to the corridor door — three steps, four — and then the door, and then the passage, and then nothing.

He had not said goodnight.

After he left, she sat for some time with both hands in her lap, as though they might tell her more if she kept them still enough. Brow. Nose. Mouth. Jaw. Cheekbone. She tried, against her own good sense, to make a face out of what they had touched and could not. Every attempt dissolved almost at once. The image would begin and then break apart, because touch had not given her the whole of him, only interruptions and edges.

That ought to have been the end of it. She had given her word. She was not going to use what he had permitted as an instrument against him. But the mind, once given part of a map, worried at the missing country without permission. She was not trying to catch him out. She could not stop herself from reaching again, inwardly, for the rest of the face her hands had failed to build.

XXVI

A Door I Have Opened

She had set him up.

He saw it now — saw it as a thing already done, already finished, the move and counter-move laid out before him like a hand of cards he had played the night before without knowing the deal. Her opening request had been a feint. She had asked the impossible, knowing he would refuse it and knowing the refusal would soften him. Are you not curious about me? — that had been the gambit. He had given her the chivalrous answer because it was the only answer he had, and she had heard everything inside it, including the part where the seeing of her was already arranged in his head.

Then the lesser question, which was the question she had been working towards all along. She had timed her please for the moment he would have least defence against it.

He had walked into all of it.

And the worst of it — the part that had kept him at the table since two — was that he had taken her hands and guided them up himself. He had agreed, with everything he had, to be touched. And when she had thanked him for the book, his face had betrayed him as if he had been waiting all those weeks for the chance to be thanked. He had gone moonish under her hands, and she had felt every flicker of feeling he had offered.

He should have been sorry.

He was not. He was sorry that he had risen and fled and left her sitting in the dark with a face she could still feel on her hands and no explanation. That he was sorry for. The pleasure in being caught at being pleased — no. He had been hidden for months. He had been visible for one half of one breath, and his body had gone towards it like a creature towards water.

He had underestimated her in Hertfordshire. He had underestimated her in Kent. He had imagined — he could see now how absurd it was — that this arrangement would be a structure he had built and would hold. She had walked into it and begun reading him as if he were a book he had imperfectly hidden on a high shelf. And the only reason she did not have more of him already was that she, for some reason, was biding her time.

He was going to have to think about what to give her, because he could no longer pretend to be in charge of what she took.

Angus brought the Aberdeen packet at mid-morning. Darcy recognised Webb’s hand on the outer fold and broke the seal at the table with the candle still burning from the night before.

He read it once. The blood was loud in his ears before he reached the third line.

I am obliged to report a development I should have anticipated. The name of Sibley has been in circulation. The broken engagement, the last-minute intervention, Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s disappearance from London. The colonel has heard it. I do not yet know the channel, though Sibley has been vocal about his losses and not particular about his audience. He has said Miss Bennet’s name in several clubs and made no effort to be discreet about his grievance. Blackwood’s broken engagement has also circulated, which means both sisters feature in the same story, and the colonel is not a man who misses that sort of coincidence.

He came to the Bermondsey address again on Thursday. He did not ask anything. He sat down, which he has not done on either previous visit, and he said he knew I had been involved in the arrangements surrounding Mr Darcy’s death. He knew the staged accident was not an accident. He knew someone had intervened in the Bennet sisters’ situation and that the intervention had originated with me or through me. He said he did not care what I told him or did not tell him. He had enough to proceed on his own, and he would do so unless I gave him a reason not to. He said this without anger, which I found more persuasive than anger would have been. I told him I could not help him. He said he understood, stood up, and left. He did not thank me.

He will proceed. He has not found the Bennet family. I am watching for any approach to them. But he has the mechanism, and he will not stop.

I await your instruction.

Richard had the shape of it. He had always been going to have the shape of it; it had been a matter of when, and the when was the second week of October. Elizabeth was in the room below this one with the dog and the books and no idea that her husband’s cousin was in London assembling the evidence of where she was.