Page 94 of Faceless

“She is not destitute, and she is not alone. There was someone who anticipated what Wickham would do before you or I had heard of it. Before the letter arrived. There are funds arranged. She is in Norwich. She is well.”

Her mouth fell open. “How do you know this?”

“I cannot tell you the mechanism entirely. There is someone — another party, not myself — who acted first. I had some role in confirming what was already in motion, but I cannot take credit I do not deserve.”

The grain of truth in it was the grain she had been cataloguing for almost four months — the cadence he used when he said things that were not the whole truth and were not lies.

“You are behind it,” she said. “In some way.”

“In some way.”

“And you will not tell me how?”

“All I can tell you is that she is not alone, and she is not hungry, and the situation is being attended to by people who knew what it required before it became a crisis.”

The breath went out of her — the long, ragged kind, the kind that had been waiting since the afternoon she sat in the cold library with Jane’s letter in her hands. Lydia. Not hungry. Not alone. Someone wiser than herself had seen it coming and moved before the ground fell out entirely.

“How long have you known?”

“This morning.”

“Thank you,” she said. It was inadequate to what she meant, but she did not have the words for what she meant, and he would know that.

“It was not me.”

“I heard what you claimed.” She picked up her fork. “I thanked you, anyway.”

They ate. He told her something about the winter stores, about the fence on the north field that needed tending before the ground froze. She told him about a visit from Mrs Garrow and the minister’s opinion on the matter of the parish subscription, which was apparently robust. The ordinary work of a shared life. She had not known, last July, that she would come to want this so much — not the evenings of tension and argument and circling — invigorating as those had been — but this — the table, the dark, the whisper she knew in all its registers, telling her about a fence.

He rose and came round the table to her, found her cheek with his fingertips, and kissed her. “I will go back to my room,” he whispered against her lips.

He was sparing her. Without her having asked, without her having said a word, he had decided that tonight he would not require her to explain what she could not give and still wished to.

He kissed her, slowly, with no haste in it, and the consideration of it pressed like a kind hand on a bruise.

Her hands stayed in his coat. Her face was turned up towards where his was in the dark, and she could not bring herself to release him. She could not say what she needed to say, that she wanted him, and also could not have him tonight in the way that staying had come to mean.

“Elizabeth.” The whisper was scarcely a sound at all. Then his hands moved, sliding to her waist, then lower, pressing warm and firm and deliberate against her middle, against the ache.

Of course. He knew.

Mrs MacLeod must have spoken to him at some point in the day. That was the only way she could think to account for it. He had come to supper, knowing. He had offered to leave, knowing. He had kissed her, knowing.

But he had not gone yet, and she did not intend to let him.

He bent and gathered her up, both arms, without asking. She made a startled sound and caught his shoulder. He carried her to the bed, set her down, drew the covers back, and tucked them around her.

Then he lay down behind her, chest to her back, drew her against him, and pulled the blankets up over them both.

His hand pressed flat and warm on her stomach, over the aching place, and stayed. The crying built without her permission. She was too tired and too relieved and too full of him to stop it.

She pressed her hand over his, where it lay against her stomach. His mouth came down against the back of her hair, not a kiss exactly, more intimate than a kiss because it asked for nothing and promised only presence.

“Lydia is safe,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Lydia is safe,” he said against her neck, and the whisper carried no doubt.

She closed her eyes. A man she could not see held her where she hurt and eased it by degrees, and she thought how much of her life she had spent being sensible, and clever, and careful not to want what she could not reasonably expect to have.