Page 77 of Faceless

She had enjoyed it. That was the part she could not make peace with.

She had not merely endured it. She had cradled him, caressed his face, arched into him. She had said his name. Small helpless things had come out of her mouth that she would not repeat aloud in a lit room for any sum. She had not been afraid, and she had not wanted it to stop. What a woman was supposed to feel in the marriage bed was duty and perhaps a distant warmth of affection and the reasonable hope that it would be brief.

She had been none of those things. She had been wanting — inconvenient, unmistakable, entirely driven by instinct. She had wanted not merely the act but the nearness in it, the terrible sweetness of being gathered up and answered. She had acted on it.

Worse, she had acted on it blind. She had yielded herself to a man she could not describe, could not have picked out of a crowd if daylight and Providence had conspired together. Now, all that reaching after closeness looked, in retrospect, perilously like humiliation.

What sort of woman seduces a man?

She pressed her fingers over her mouth and breathed.

She was not going to cry. Crying would require her to name the thing exactly. She was not ready to name it. She knew what it was. She had known it for some weeks, and she was choosing not to say it, because once she did, she could not unsay it.

Falstaff exhaled magnificently and set his paw over her foot.

She sat up until the cold was genuinely unreasonable, and then she pulled the blankets over herself. She lay in the dark and listened to the sea and did not cry, for all the reasons she could not say aloud.

On the third night, he lay in the dark and thought about the room below him. What was she doing, alone in it for a third evening? He had come to her every night for nearly three months. He had built something in those evenings — he had no name for what it was, only the knowledge that it was real, that it mattered, that three nights of silence from the only other person in this house would tell her something that was not the truth.

He was her husband. The marriage was legal. What had occurred on Thursday was within the bounds of a lawful union. She had said yes and meant it. There had been no wrong in fact.

She did not know why he had gone quiet. She could not know that he had broken a vow he had made to himself, or what the vow had meant to him, or what breaking it said about the state of him. She had what he had done on Thursday, the way he had taken and gloried in her, and then three closed doors. Whatever she was making of that, alone in the dark, was something he had caused.

And what, exactly, had he left her with in his absence? A large house by the sea, winter closing in, distant neighbours she could like but never wholly belong to, and a husband who had taught her to expect companionship in whispers and then withdrawn it without explanation. He had narrowed her world with his own hands and then meant to congratulate himself for leaving her to bear it bravely.

She was not made for a life of polite fragments. She required conversation, warmth, the quick answering spark of another mind, and he knew it because he had seen her diminish without it and revive the instant he gave her even this maimed version of a marriage. Whispered talk across a supper table and the intimacy of a dark bed were pitiful offerings beside what she ought to have had, but they were the only offerings in his power.

He could tell himself that going back to her was kindness. He could even make a shape of duty around it.

He wanted her company with a selfishness so immediate he could nearly pass it off, even to himself, as concern for her. He wanted the room below him because it held the one place in the world where he was no longer required to be alone. He had believed these three nights were a form of penance. Sitting in the mural chamber with his guilt, keeping himself from her, not asking any more of her than he had already taken. It had been discipline, or had told itself it was.

In the dark of the third night, it was what it was — one hiding from a reckoning behind the pretence of honour, while the woman below him sat alone and paid for it.

He got up. He put on his coat. He walked the passage and stopped at her door.

He knocked.

Her footsteps — a dozen or more, which meant she had not been waiting at the table. She had given up. Gone to bed.

The door opened.

“Can you bear my company?” The whisper came out smaller than he intended.

“What I cannot bear is another night alone.” She stepped back.

He came in and found his chair in the dark. She found hers. The supper was cold, but still laid as it always was. He had not expected that — had thought the three evenings might have changed the arrangement — and the ordinariness of it was its own thing to bear.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“You do not.”

“Elizabeth—”

“If this is a legal marriage, and you have sworn to me that it is, then neither of us committed a wrong. I will not receive an apology for something that was not a wrong.”

“I cannot hold that to be entirely true,” he said.

“Which part is false?”