Page 81 of Faceless

Tam Pritchard had been behaving respectably, by the look of him, for a fortnight. He had been outside the smithy when Elizabeth passed, hat in his hand, talking to one of the McKinnon men about a piece of harness. Elizabeth had not stopped to greet him; one did not, with a young man whose recent past one knew. But Mrs Henderson, walking back to her cottage, had remarked aloud to the air — and to Elizabeth, standing within hearing — that perhaps the hen had wandered off after all, the way hens did, and she had found the missing watch was at the back of a drawer, and perhaps a great deal had been laid at one man’s door that ought not to have been laid there. Mrs Henderson had not looked at Tam when she said it. Tam had not turned his head when she said it. They had each known the other’s meaning entirely.

The McGregor girl was about to have her baby. Mrs McGregor had told Elizabeth this without telling her, in the way of village women — a remark about how full the house had been getting and a long, careful look towards the road. Elizabeth had given the long, careful look back and said she hoped Mrs McGregor’s daughter was finding the cold tolerable, and Mrs McGregor had said we are well prepared, my lady, and that had been the conversation.

She had been thinking all the way home about how she would tell him these things at supper. Elizabeth had been bringing him the village in fragments for weeks now; the more she brought, the more closely he listened, and she had begun to suspect that her accounts were rationed bread to him.

The walk back up the road brought a cart pulling out of the courtyard — two men on the bench, a tarpaulin lashed over the bed, half a forge’s worth of black iron underneath by the look of it. The driver touched his hat. The cart moved off. Falstaff regarded it with mild official interest as it went, then turned his attention to the kitchen door.

Asking Mrs MacLeod about the cart was pointless. The housekeeper would tell her nothing she had not been instructed to tell her, and pressing would put them both in a position of being unable to answer civilly. The library was a better option. The afternoon was a long one.

By the time the light had gone, she had nearly forgotten the cart.

The stair was cold under her hand. She climbed slowly, expecting the room she had been entering for three months — the laid fire waiting for the flint, the slow ten minutes of the kindling taking. The latch lifted. The door swung in.

Heat met her at the threshold.

Not the gradual warming of a room with a fire newly lit. Real heat — air that had been holding heat for hours, that pressed against her face the moment the door opened, that drew the cold out of her hands at once. She stepped in and could not, at first, identify what was wrong with the room, because what was wrong was that nothing was wrong with it. Along the wall, behind a black iron front, hooded and shut, a fire she could not see was throwing the whole of its heat into the chamber from inside an enclosure designed to show no light at all.

A blackout grate. The kind of thing that took a man with money and an idea and a craftsman willing to come from Aberdeen on short notice to construct.

The iron cast such heat against her palm that she could not touch it. Her face was still cold. The two facts together did something to her she had not been prepared for — a small foolish sting behind her eyes that she chased back at once, because she was not going to cry over a fireplace.

The bed met the back of her knees, and she sat down on it.

She had not known a room could be like this. Could be present with the fire, could be in possession of the heat without sacrificing the dark.

She had not decided what she was going to say to him about it by the time he knocked.

She lifted the latch. The hinges were quiet — Angus had oiled them in September, and they had been quiet ever since. The corridor was not lit, precisely, but there was a lantern round the bend somewhere; she could see the shape of him for the half-second before he stepped past the line of the lamp into her dark.

She caught his hands as he came in.

Both of them. He had not been expecting it. He stopped where he was, half a step inside the room, and before he could speak, she lifted his hands and put them against her face.

She heard the small intake of his breath.

“Feel,” she said. “I am warm. The whole of me. I have been warm since I came up the stairs.”

He did not answer at once. His palms had gone still against her cheeks and then, very slightly, moved — fingertips at her temple, the heel of his hand at the line of her jaw, a half-second longer than was permitted by the recent unspoken agreement about what might pass between them. His hands were cold from the stair, and her face was warm from the grate, and the difference was its own evidence.

“Thank you,” she said into his palms.

“You are welcome.” The whisper was not what it usually was.

“I do not say it lightly.”

“I heard you the first time.” His thumb moved once at her temple. He took his hands back. “Sit down before the supper goes cold.”

She found her chair. He found his.

She had been planning to lead up to it more elegantly than this. “When?”

“The night we — the night I stayed — I noticed it then. I should have noticed sooner.”

Several seconds passed before she could answer. He had named, with no fuss, the night neither of them had named since.

“Thank you,” she said.

“The cold was intolerable. You should not have been asked to bear it. There is nothing here to thank me for.”