Page 69 of Faceless

There was no contest left in it. No duty. No endurance. Only the terrible sweetness of discovering that the woman he had spent so many months wanting in absolute silence wanted him back. Or wanted something, a something he had failed to give her, and so this was the nearest thing she could grasp.

He pulled back again because if he did not, he was going to lose the last of his sense. He was breathing as though he had been running. His hands were still in her hair. She was still holding his neck. Her lips were parted, and under his thumb at her jaw her pulse beat so fast it seemed to answer his.

“You should not—” he began.

Her hands stayed where they were. She did not release him. “You cannot just leave,” she said. Her voice was not entirely steady, but there was nothing weak in it. “You do not get to argue a point you refuse to make with such conviction, then kiss me and walk away like it did not happen.”

He could not speak. The whisper had deserted him.

“If you will not give me your words,” she said, quieter now, and that quietness was worse because it carried more, “give me something else. But not nothing. I have had nothing for nearly three months. I was promised a husband, not a ghost.”

He stood in the dark and held her face. He had kept her blind — the literal dark of this room, the larger dark of who he was and what he owed her — and worse than blind, he had kept her hungry and called it honour. She had been here for months, asking better and better questions, building a picture from almost nothing, taking the small scraps of him he let fall and making a man out of them. And still she was here, in his hands, demanding what she was owed.

Not merely because she wanted him, though it almost seemed like she did. Because she had a right to something, and because he had begun, God help him, to want to give her everything.

She deserved more than a man she could not see, who would not even fight with her properly.

He let go. He stepped back. Her hands released his coat slowly, as though she was making a point of it.

“That was not the argument I intended to make.”

“No. I did not think it was.”

He crossed to the corridor door and through it. He stood in the passage with his hand still on the door.

Then he went upstairs.

XXVIII

The Pemberley That Did Not Happen

She had kissed him back.

Not once — twice. The second time she had pulled him towards her, her hands in his coat. She had not been frightened. She had wanted him.

George Carlisle. A whisper in the dark. A man she had never seen, whose name was borrowed from a dead barony and a family that was not entirely his own. She had wanted him, and the wanting was the best and worst thing that had happened since he had stood on a ship in the North Sea watching England disappear.

He set the heels of his hands against his eyes and sat in the dark behind them.

What he wanted — what he had wanted, what he would have done if Sterling had not spent those years building a frame patient enough to withstand a Home Office investigation and make a dead man of Fitzwilliam Darcy — was very clear this morning. It had always been clear. Now it had so much pain in it that his insides felt like water, and his heart was beating somewhere outside his chest.

What he wanted, this morning, was to wake up at Pemberley with his wife.

The morning after a marriage neither of them had been required to hide or accept from desperation. The light off the lake. Her hair down, the muslin gown slipping off her shoulder. The smell of the library when the fires had been burning since September. Georgiana, coming in to interrupt them and being delighted she had finally been allowed to. He had wanted that for nearly a year. He had carried the image of it through Hertfordshire and Kent, through the road out of Hunsford and the ship out of Dover and six months of stone walls in this place, and he carried it now with her face fixed in it. It had not gone away when he had given up the right to it. It had only become more exact.

He put her in the window seat where his mother had sat, a book she had opinions about in her hands, the October morning through the glass. Falstaff on the floor. He stood in the doorway of the room in his mind and saw her there.

Home. That was the word he kept returning to and could not use without the rest of it — home, Pemberley, his name, the life he had been going to have. He had wanted to put her in it and watch her make it hers and argue with her about everything for forty years.

The candle on the table had burned to a stub. He had not seen the room go dark around it.

His face was wet. He did not know when that had happened.

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. He raised his eyes to the wall. Nothing had changed. Pemberley was still lost to him. He had been so far gone that he had not pulled back the way he should have. He had stood there in the dark holding her face after, and eventually he had made himself let go.

He had done nothing to deserve her affection. She had taken George Carlisle in her arms in the dark. A fiction. She had never been given the chance to choose Fitzwilliam Darcy in the light, which was what he had wanted for her and what she was owed. If she had been indifferent, it would have been bad enough. That she wanted him — that she had pulled him back, that she had said give me something else but not nothing — that was the thing he was going to have to carry.

He pulled Webb’s letter towards him and read it through again. He had already answered it. The reply was in Aberdeen, on its way to London, and there was nothing in the original he had not addressed. He read it through anyway, looking for the thing he had missed, the angle he had not tried. He did not find one. He had the clerk, and he did not have the clerk, and until he had the clerk, there was nothing to do but wait, which he had been doing since April, and which he was less able to do this morning than he had been yesterday.