Page 88 of Faceless

He was not going to leave.

Not today. Not with her curled against his side in a room that smelled of her, in the dark where she had asked him to stay, and he had said yes with everything he had. He would deal with the after when it came. He pulled her closer. She settled against him, and her body went limp. He lay in the dark of his wife’s bedroom and, for the first time since April, understood what it meant to be exactly where he ought to be.

She woke to knocking.

Not his door — the corridor door, the outer one, and then Mrs MacLeod’s voice saying that supper was getting cold and she had brought the tray up, but the door was bolted and she hoped all was well and she’d leave it on the hall table if the baroness was not —

Elizabeth was sitting upright before she was fully awake, her heart going hard, his arms still around her from sleep. The room was the wrong dark — not night dark, still the thick afternoon dark of the drawn drapes. She had no idea how long they had been asleep. None of it mattered. Mrs MacLeod was on the other side of that door.

“Leave it in the hall, please,” she called. Her voice came out steadier than she deserved. “I will fetch it presently.”

There came a pause of the most eloquent kind. Mrs MacLeod, on the other side, was assembling what she knew and adding it to what she suspected — the suppositions of a competent housekeeper arriving at the only possible sum.

“Aye,” Mrs MacLeod said, in a tone that contained an entire paragraph.

The tray was set down on the hall table. Footsteps retreated down the corridor.

Elizabeth pressed her face into her hands. Beside her, she heard the smallest possible sound — not quite a laugh, not quite a breath, somewhere in the careful dark between the two — and she turned towards it.

“She knows,” Elizabeth said.

He made the sighing sort of laugh again, warmer this time, right against her hair. His arms tightened briefly and loosened. He moved, shifting and drawing himself out of a bed he had been entirely comfortable in — and she heard him finding his clothes in the dark.

“She has probably been thinking whatever she thinks since July,” he said.

“She has known more specifically since approximately two minutes ago.”

He made another sound that was almost certainly the nearest thing he permitted himself to a laugh, and she found herself pressing her lips together against her own, still mortified and also — she could not quite prevent it — mercilessly delighted.

“Shall I retrieve the tray?” he asked.

The image arrived before she could stop it. George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray, or whatever his actual name was — tall, broad, the shape of him she had learned by hand in the dark — walking to the corridor to collect a supper tray in the state God had made him, with the complete self-possession he used for everything— including, apparently, this. She bit her lip hard.

“You cannot,” she said. “You have no — you would need—” She waved a hand uselessly in the dark and could not finish the sentence because finishing it required picturing it more clearly than she had intended.

“I am not, in fact, proposing to retrieve the tray unclothed. Besides, you cannot see me anyway.”

“No, I — yes, of course, I know, I only—” She stopped. The laughter was winning. “I am sorry. I am not laughing. I am not laughing at all.”

“You are laughing.”

“I am absolutely not!” She was, thoroughly, for the first time in what felt like weeks — the helpless kind, the kind that arrived in the middle of something unsuitable and refused to leave. She pressed her hand over her mouth and heard him across the room doing something about his state of undress with an equanimity she found, in the circumstances, extremely funny.

“I am only sorry,” she said, when she had herself approximately under control, “that I cannot see you.”

She heard an article of clothing drop back to the floor. “I am aware.”

She had not meant it to land like that. She had meant it as part of the joke — the comic image, the dark, the general absurdity of the situation. But it had gone somewhere else on its way across the room, and she heard it arrive differently than she had sent it. And there was no harm in letting him hear that.

“Go,” she said. “Before it gets any colder.”

XXXV

Small Talk

She was in her dressing gown. He was — she was reasonably confident — dressed, or dressed enough. In the dark, it made very little difference, except that she was more aware of him than usual, his arm coming past her to reach something on the tray, his hand finding her knee under the table and staying there.

The bottle was at her right hand, where Mrs MacLeod always set it; she had got into the habit, these last weeks, of filling the glasses herself. The trick was easy enough once she had worked it out. One finger over the rim of the glass, the other hand bringing the bottle up — the finger told her when the wine had reached it and how full was full enough. Mrs MacLeod had not remarked on the first morning Elizabeth had sent down a request for a smaller bottle that would be easier in her hand. The smaller bottle had been on the tray every evening since.