Page 75 of Faceless

Her hand found his arm, then his wrist, and she followed it up to where his hands covered his face, and she laid her hand against the back of his. The tension in him was in his hands, in the held sound behind them, the effort of the holding.

“Let me see you.”

He went very still.

She brought her other hand up and found his face in the dark — his jaw, the wet at the corners of his eyes, the sharp angle of cheekbone that she had mapped so many times in her mind and was touching now, and he was letting her. She held his face in her palms the way she had at the table, earlier, when she had tried to give him something he could carry.

He took her wrists. Gently. Not removing her hands — just holding them where they were, his grip careful and close, his head bowed into her palms.

“I know,” she said. She did not know what she knew. She knew something. “I know you cannot tell me yet. I know there is a reason. I am not asking for the reason tonight.”

His grip on her wrists tightened the smallest amount.

“But you are not nothing,” she said. “I am not sorry, and you are not nothing to me.”

He turned his face slightly and pressed his mouth to her palm — not a kiss, exactly, more a bracing press against something — and then he released her wrists, and her hands fell away, and he stood up.

She heard him gather his clothing in the dark, each movement deliberate and quiet. Then he stopped.

She waited.

He did not speak. He moved towards the door.

From the hearthrug came a low rumble — Falstaff roused, a sudden, sharp growl directed at the figure moving in the dark.

A muttered curse came back at the dog. Not the whisper — lower than that, rougher, briefly real — one unguarded syllable of actual voice before the habit of months caught it. She lay still and held it in her mind like a key she had no lock for.

The corridor door opened. It closed.

She lay in the dark and listened to the sea.

XXX

The Absence

He pressed his fist to his mouth.

God forgive me.

Not the words he would have chosen if he were choosing. They came from somewhere below choosing, somewhere below the part of him that schooled his face and held his voice in line and knew how to be George Carlisle when required. They came from the part of him that had stood in a church at twenty-two with his hand on his father's coffin and known for the first time that some things could not be fixed. He did not know whether he had said them aloud.

She had come around the table in the dark and put her hand on his shoulder. He had not asked for that. He had never asked for any of it — the evenings, the arguments, the way she held his face in her palms and told him what she told him — and she had given it anyway, on terms he had set, in the dark he had arranged, with the name he had given her which was not his name. She had taken stock of everything she had been given and found it enough to choose from, and she had chosen him.

And God help him, he had let her. The rest of it was him — all his doing, from the moment he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. He could have stopped at any time, but he had wanted, and by Heaven, he had taken.

She would argue with him on that. She would claim that the choosing had been real and hers and that it had been freely made. But it had been made without the one piece of information that would have changed the balance of it.

He had known that. He had known it at the table, and he had known it when she said I cannot live on nothing and he had known it every moment after that, and he had not stopped.

He made it to the mural chamber. The lamp was cold. He did not light it.

Elizabeth.

Not the woman he had married, not the Baroness of Auchengray, not the voice across the supper table that he had been rationing himself to for three months.

Elizabeth Bennet, the girl from Hertfordshire who had walked three miles in the mud to tend her sister. Elizabeth Bennet, who had danced with him at Netherfield and made him lose the last of his sodded reason when she looked up at him with those eyes so full of spark and life.

She had offered herself not to Fitzwilliam Darcy, but to George Carlisle. She had gone to a whisper in the dark, put her hands on him, said yes — believing she was saying yes to some scarred Scottish baron she had agreed to marry.