Page 72 of Faceless

He was quiet for nearly a minute. Elizabeth shifted in her chair and determined not to help him. Not to even breathe in a loud way, lest he think she had lost interest in his response.

“Music.”

One word, with everything he had not said underneath. She heard it all.

“What kind?”

She heard him breathe and not answer.

“I used to play,” she said. “Not well, but with a great deal of feeling and very little restraint, which my sister Jane said made up for the technical deficiencies. Handel was one composer I tormented with regularity, as well as Clementi, whose work my aunt assures me is just glorified scales. I missed it when we left Longbourn. I still miss it now. There is no pianoforte here.”

“There was none to be had… Perhaps in Aberdeenshire…”

“Oh, no. You shall not evade my question by giving me more gifts. What sort, then? The opera? The symphony? Is there something you used to play yourself — or heard played — that you miss more than the rest of it?”

She heard it then. Low, involuntary, cut off almost before it began — untold months of not thinking about something breaking open all at once because she had asked the wrong question and he had answered it honestly, and there was no putting it back.

It was a sob. Muffled behind a hand, but that gasp, that sniff, that deep, voiceless moan in his chest.

The man was shattering.

She pushed her chair back and rose. She knew the table by now — its corners and its length, the distance between her chair and his — and she came around it with one hand trailing the edge and stopped beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.

He went still beneath her palm — not recoil but its opposite, a stillness that told her the hand had found exactly where the day had been pressing. The shoulder under her palm was rigid, every muscle in it braced, and she kept her hand there. She had no speech for this. She had only the steadiness of her hand and the dark and the patience to leave it there and wait.

The rigidity eased, his head dropping only a little, and she brought her other hand up and cupped his face between her palms. His jaw was rougher than the last time her hands had been here — two days at least, possibly more, the careful daily shave neglected.

He made a sound that had nothing to do with the whisper.

He came to his feet. She had to tilt her face up to keep her hands where they were, the whole height and breadth of him in the dark going past anything she had prepared for. His hands came to her waist and drew her in hard against him — not gently, not cautiously, the restraint of months gone all at once — and then his mouth was on hers, and there was nothing controlled in it, nothing careful, and she held on.

Then he stopped.

He wrenched back. His hands came to her shoulders and held her at arm’s length in the dark, both of them breathing hard.

“No.” The whisper was ragged. “I cannot — this is not — I should not have—”

“Why?” She had hold of his coat, and she did not release it. “Tell me why.”

“You do not — there are things you do not know—”

“Then tell me one of them.” She kept her hands in his coat. “Tell me one true thing. Start there.”

She heard him struggle with it.

“Are we married?”

He stiffened. “Yes. Of course we are. You were there, we both gave our vows.”

“Legally? Truly? Not some convenient fiction that dissolves when your circumstances change?”

“Yes.” More force in it this time, the whisper straining at its edges. “It is binding. Entirely.”

“By Scottish law? Even though we were not married in a kirk? Even though we have not…”

“Scottish law holds us entirely bound. No other… forms were necessary.” He said it as though it cost him. “By every law that governs this country, you are my wife. In every sense that the law allows.”

“Then explain to me,” she said, not letting go of his coat, “why you keep pulling away.”