Page 95 of Faceless

That caution had failed her utterly here. She had lost her heart to a voice in the dark, to a mind she could never quite resist, to a pair of warm hands that knew her needs before she could name them, and she could not bring herself to regret a moment of it.

The fire had been going since before she came downstairs. The library was warm. She had her tea and her book and Falstaff across her feet. There was nothing wrong with any of it.

She read the same paragraph three times.

The book was a good one — she had been enjoying it for a week, had even mentioned it at supper two nights ago, and been drawn into an argument about it that had lasted through the cold soup and halfway through the fish, which was the best kind of argument, the kind that made her forget where she was. She remembered exactly what he had said and could not find the same pleasure in the page without the person she wanted to argue with sitting six feet away in the dark.

She set the book on her knee and regarded her hand.

The ring was plain gold, nothing remarkable. She had worn it since July and had thought very little of it for the first weeks — it was a fact of her situation, like the dark and the whisper and the name she called him that may or may not have been his name. She had stopped thinking of it as a symbol somewhere around September. It was his. That was all. It was his ring. He had put it on her finger with the witnesses standing somewhere in the dark, and she had worn it every day since, and it was the only part of him that existed in the daylight.

She turned it. Once, twice.

The words had been in her head since she woke. They arrived sometimes before she was properly conscious, whole and intact, as a song does when it has been running beneath her sleeping thoughts all night. There are people who would suffer were I to speak plainly. You are among them. The silence is not indifference. It is the only protection I have left to give any of you.

She had believed him. She had asked her one question and believed his answer without hesitation — trust or foolishness or both, and she had stopped worrying about which. He had not harmed anyone. He was protecting people. He was protecting her. The rest of it — whatever he was running from, she had chosen to let stand without demanding to understand it.

Only now, she was thinking about the shape of the speech itself.

Not the words exactly. The bones under them. The cadence of one explaining why he could not speak and naming the silence a form of care.

She had heard that before.

She was nearly certain she had heard exactly that before, from someone who had said something similar in a different tone, a colder one, on a different occasion, in a place with daylight and other people and the full ordinary distance of society between them.

She could not place it.

Last winter, she thought. Or spring. One of those months when she had a father still alive, four sisters underfoot, and a life that looked entirely unlike this one. She had been in so many drawing rooms in those months, had argued with so many people, had been exasperated by so many…

Exasperated — she stopped on that word.

There was one man.

She regarded the ring again. Plain gold. Warm from her skin.

There was one man she had found persistently, maddeningly confusing — considerable ability hidden behind manners so careful they read as coldness, an argument on a park path in Kent that she had found infuriating and had occasionally thought about since.

He had said something. She was nearly certain he had said something about people he was protecting, an innocent party, a matter of decency he could not set aside just because she required him to satisfy her curiosity. She had thought he was being evasive. She had thought he was deflecting.

She could not remember the exact words. Only the shape of them.

The same shape.

XXXVII

Three Good Reasons

She walked when she could not read, and today she could not read, so she walked.

The headland in November was a different country from the headland in July. July had been enormous and pale, the sea almost gentle. November was grey all the way down — grey sky meeting grey water with no discernible horizon between them. The wind off the water cut through everything she was wearing without asking permission. Falstaff ran ahead on the cliff path, large and ridiculous and entirely happy. She watched him and was glad of him and thought about money.

Five thousand pounds for Mary, Kitty, Lydia. Ten thousand for Jane, and another ten settled on her. Plus whatever had been paid to release her uncle from the bonds.

She had known about the settlements since before the wedding — part of the arrangement, the provision that made it possible for her to accept the proxy offer with something other than desperation. She had not thought carefully about the sum at the time. She had been thinking about Thomas Sibley and whether a blind marriage to an anonymous Scottish baron constituted a better option. The answer had been yes. She had signed.

Twenty-five thousand pounds was not a modest sum. It was not an extraordinary one, for a man of significant means. But it was not Auchengray money. She knew the Auchengray accounts tolerably well by now — not because he had shown them to her but because she had found the estate ledgers in the library. The barony was comfortable. It was not twenty-five thousand pounds comfortable. It was not five hundred pounds in a single disbursement comfortable, let alone twenty-five thousand.

Someone else had funded the settlements.