Page 70 of Faceless

She was in the library with Rasselas open on her knee. The October light was flat and grey through the window. She had been three pages into the same chapter since yesterday. She was not reading. She was thinking about him, which was a habit she had apparently acquired somewhere in the last weeks without deciding to.

She closed the book.

She had been turning over a new theory. It had started the night of the kiss — she did not call it that directly, but it was there, the fact of it. She had kissed him back, and for a moment there, he had been entirely lost. Entirely hers, wanting her and clinging to her as if she were the only breath of life he had known in months.

So much for her theory that he did not like women.

Then he had apologised and left. The behaviour of one in retreat. She had assumed guilt — the wrongness of nearly seducing her when his argument failed to divert her. But there was another possibility she had not considered until she was lying awake two nights ago, and it sat at the edge of the other theories with the quiet persistence of something that had not yet been dismissed.

Some men could not.

She had heard it spoken of, obliquely, the way such things were spoken of between women who knew each other well enough. A marriage that remained in name only because the husband was… incapable was the word that had been used, with a delicacy that made the word itself a kind of door. She did not know all the particulars of it. She knew enough to know it was not rare and not chosen, and not a judgement on the wife.

She gave this thought. It would explain the separation, the careful refusal to ask, the way he had been tending to her ease rather than his own for nearly three months. It did not explain the darkness and the whisper.

And it did not truly explain the kiss, which had not been the kiss of one who “could not” — or it did not seem that way. She was not so naive that she could not sense that raw, animal tension that had quickened his body in that moment.

She found, examining this theory, that while it did not answer for the whole of it, she did not find it repellent. She found it sad. She found herself constructing a version of him — this sharp, exacting, private man who had arranged a marriage in the dark and made her a library and named her exactly and kissed her against all apparent intention — in which he had been carrying this as well. All of it at once. She found herself willing to carry it with him, which was a new thing to know about herself.

She also found herself quite certain, sitting in the library with Falstaff drooling on her boot, that she wanted him. Not the arrangement, not the house, not the estate documents, and the letters she wrote on his behalf and the careful evenings in the dark — him. The quickness of him, the argument, the attention. Whatever had made him send Falstaff the next morning when she asked. Whatever had made him say something better as though her situation was a thing he found genuinely intolerable, and whatever had made him secretly send for her father’s Rasselas. She wanted the person that those choices pointed to, and she was increasingly convinced that person was in the room with her every evening, and she was only getting half of him, and the half she was not getting was the half she wanted most.

Whether he would ever offer it was the question she could not answer.

Falstaff stirred and shook himself and looked up at her with the pale, serious eyes he used when he thought it might be approaching dinnertime. She had started letting Falstaff in before supper.

It had happened by degrees. First, she had stopped putting him out when the knock came, reasoning that he was asleep and would not be a disturbance, and he had not been. He sprawled across the hearthrug with his legs extended at angles that seemed structurally improbable, and had twice snored with sufficient volume that she had held her breath waiting for some acknowledgement from across the table. None had come. Her husband was either more tolerant than she had expected, or his hearing was less acute than hers, which she doubted.

So, Falstaff stayed. He arrived at the hearthrug at a quarter past six each evening and went to sleep with the air of a dog who had found the one arrangement of the world that made complete sense. Elizabeth found this unreasonably cheering. She had made one decision about one room, and a dog had ratified it immediately. That was, at present, the clearest domestic authority she possessed.

“Not yet,” she told him.

He accepted this with dignity and put his head back down.

She opened the book to the page she had not read and began again.

XXIX

The Warrant

The Aberdeen packet arrived at mid-morning with a single letter in it. Webb’s hand on the outer fold.

He opened it.

I am writing this on the understanding that speed matters more than my customary care. What I have to tell you, I have confirmed through two channels before committing it to paper, and I would not write it if I were not certain.

A formal proceeding has been opened by the Home Office into the circumstances of your death. The inquiry has been initiated by persons I have not yet been able to identify; I have my suspicions and will pursue them; the proceeding itself is real and is moving. The question under examination is whether the carriage accident of April last was a genuine accident or a deliberate disappearance arranged to evade a warrant. They have the Dover road testimony. They have the inn records. They have not found the coachman; he was your own man and is well hidden. But they have spoken to the innkeeper at the staging house where the carriage was held the days before its journey, and his account has raised questions I will not detail here.

The consequence of this proceeding, should it find against you, is as follows. The warrant issued in April, which was suspended upon your apparent death, will be formally reinstated. Your estate, currently in the care of your solicitors and administered under the assumption of your death until Miss Darcy’s majority, will become subject to seizure pending resolution of the original charge. Your solicitors are at present defending a dead man. If that man is found to be alive, they will be defending a fugitive, which is a position I do not believe Mr Trevelyan is prepared to occupy.

The colonel has been brought in, as you instructed. He has the outline; he has been given the freedom of London, such as I can provide him; he has accepted the constraint of remaining in London for the present. He has not yet been told of today’s development. I will tell him before this letter leaves my hand. He will hear of the proceeding through his own channels regardless, and I would rather he hear it from me.

I await your instruction with some urgency.

W.

The sound that came out of him was not a word. It came from somewhere below deliberate thought, loud in the small room, and he shut it off with both hands hard against the table and his head down between his shoulders.

Pemberley.