Page 85 of Faceless

She was quiet. He had said more than was wise and less than was true, which was all he had.

“You… you would do that?”

“If it is possible. Yes.”

“She is not wicked. She is foolish, and she was sixteen, and she wanted to be married young, and she fell for a handsome officer, and none of those are wicked things. They are foolish things that I have done nothing useful to prevent. I should have written to her more. I thought I was too far away and too uncertain to be of any use.”

“You were not her keeper.”

“No. But I was her sister, and I might have… She married someone she thought loved her. She was convinced of it — utterly convinced, the way you can only be at sixteen when you have no evidence of the contrary. She trusted him entirely, and it was a lie from the first word of it. She will spend the rest of her life knowing that.”

“She was deceived,” he said. “That is not the same as trust being wrong.”

“I know,” she said. “I know that. Or I think… I think I understand. I feel what it is to give yourself to someone and find out afterward that the whole of it was — that they were never — that you—”

She stopped and pulled his hand closer.

“Elizabeth, if this is about—”

“I trusted you,” she said. “I had nothing to go on. A proxy and a settlement and a solicitor I had met once. There was no reason to trust you except that I knew what I was escaping. What was worse than the dark, and I have not regretted it. But I do not know you. Not fully. I know what you have given me, and I do not know what lies under it, and there are things you will not tell me, and tonight of all nights I—”

“There are people who would suffer were I to speak plainly about certain things. You are among them. It is the only protection I have left to give any of you.”

“You are running,” she said. “From the law, or from someone who has authority in law. That is what this is.”

His heart gave one ugly lurch. His tongue almost stuck to his throat. “I…”

“I am not asking you to confirm it. But I need to ask you one thing, and I need you to answer it honestly.” Her hands tightened on his. “Did you harm someone? Have I any reason to be afraid of you?”

“No.”

One word. He had never meant anything more completely in his life.

Her thumbs moved against his hands. Her breathing slowed. “You promised me,” she said, and the voice was wet and unsteady and very near him, “when you offered. You said that if at the end of a year I asked to go, you would let me go.”

He was a long way past the careful instrument the whisper had been an hour ago. He was not sure what was holding it together at all.

“Yes,” he said. “By Scottish law, with every protection it allows. The contract is in your favour. It would be honoured to the letter. You would not be forced to stay, and you would not be destitute if you choose to leave.”

“After a year?”

The cold of it went through him. She was making it real — not in argument, not in anger, only the small, near voice in the dark setting the terms of the door he had built her. His own hand had gone cold inside hers, and because she would feel it and would know what it meant, he made himself answer before she could ask him a second time.

“I would not have you wait the year. The year was never a condition. It was the longest stretch of your life I believed myself entitled to ask for. If you ask it sooner, you have only to say so. And —” he had to make himself draw the breath for it — “should there prove to be a child, the same is true. Provision will be made. For both of you. Whatever you choose, neither of you will be left.”

Her hands had tightened on his at the sooner. They tightened again at the child. He had given up trying to read her feelings in the dark months ago and was only now, sitting at her knee in this room, learning what it was to be without her face when he needed it.

“Then why?” Her voice was not the voice he knew. “If you would let me go for the asking, why bring me here at all? Why marry me? Why three months of suppers and a fire screen and a dog and my father’s book and every careful evening you have given me, if any of it could be undone by my asking? What is this for?”

He tried to begin twice. He did not know how to answer her without naming what he could not name.

“When I was made aware of your situation, I was made aware of the marriage you were being forced into. I had the means to give you another door. I had no honourable way to do it but the one I chose, and I could not… I could not know what was about to be done to you and do nothing. It was enough that I could prevent it. The year was so that you might have time to discover whether you could bear me, and a way out if you could not.

“What you have given me since has been more than I have any honest claim to. I do not know how to tell you what three months at this table have been for me. I am not asking you for an answer tonight, Elizabeth. I am only asking that you not think it was a transaction. It has never been a transaction to me.”

She sniffed. “I am not going. There is nothing for me to go to. My sister thought she was loved, and she was being used. I have been wearing this ring for three months, and I have not had one hour at this table that I would call a lie. The strangest thing that has ever been done for me has been the kindest. I am choosing you.”

A sound came out of him that he had not given permission for. It left him before he heard it, and then he heard it — low, broken, more breath than voice — and then her hands closed on his with something that was not quite holding and not quite shaking, and he knew that she had heard it too, and what she had taken from it.