Page 97 of Faceless

Then her mind, which had never permitted itself to be governed for long, came back to her. He cannot have done it.

The Mr Darcy she had known would no more have arranged twenty-five thousand pounds and a tower house in Aberdeenshire than he would have crossed a ballroom to ask her to dance a second time. He would not have spent four months at a small table teaching himself her mind. He would not, on any earth she had ever lived in, have sent her a large, clumsy dog.

And the man who had come to her in the dark — patient, attentive, generous past anything she had been led to expect of married life by anyone who had been in a position to instruct her, with a passion she had not known a husband was capable of giving to a wife — was not, could not be, the cold man who had stood in Charlotte’s drawing room at Hunsford, refusing to take a chair until he had been pressed three times.

And yet, some man had done all of those things. And the resonance under the whisper was Hertfordshire. And the half-laugh on her wedding night had been a man startled by her wit. And…

She did not finish the sentence.

She turned for home. She had until supper.

Falstaff came bounding back. She put her hand on his head and walked into the wind.

She had been listening to him since he came in the door, and she had nothing she had not already had on the headland. The man across the small table from her in her bedchamber, eating his soup, talking to her about the most mundane of domestic arrangements — all of him at her disposal in the dark, and none of it sufficient to put the name down or to take it up.

He was on the north fence again — Angus had told him about its frost-heaved post on the seaward end, the question of whether to reset it before the ground hardened or wait until spring, the opinion of the elder herd boy, the opinion of the herd boy’s grandmother. He had been on it for some minutes. She had been letting him.

“You have been very dutiful with that fence.”

“It is a great deal of fence to be serious about.”

“You have not seen it.”

“I have heard about it for a quarter of an hour.”

“Then you have only heard about a third of it.”

She heard Falstaff give a small, contented noise from somewhere near his ankles.

“That dog,” she said, “has been leaning on your leg through the whole of our supper, which I do not think he has been once since you sent him to me. I am compelled to suspect a conspiracy.”

“He is a very disciplined dog.” The whisper had the deadpan in it that so perfectly echoed the Netherfield drawing room, and which, the longer she dwelt on it, was the worst piece of evidence she had against the man she was being asked to believe he was.

“He is a very bribed dog.”

“That is a slander against a household member who cannot answer for himself.”

“Then I shall answer for him.” She set down her spoon and addressed the dark below the table-cloth in the gravest voice she could summon. “Sir Falstaff, do you confess to having received favours below the cloth?”

Falstaff, hearing his name, gave the tail-thump that was the most useful confession in the world.

She heard him shift slightly. The dog had laid his head on his knee, she thought, perhaps both paws too, the way he sometimes did at the end of an evening when his master had been generous with his fork.

“I have been attempting to teach him stoicism. We are not making rapid progress.”

She had been smiling for some moments without having decided to. She heard her own breath gone uneven with it, and could not, for the life of her, govern the next thing she said.

“The teacher is not at all what one would call a stoic. You have just been induced into a confession by your own dog.”

“I was not induced. I was betrayed.”

“By a stoic?”

He made a small huff. “I retract the curriculum.”

Her hand was still on the stem of the wine glass. It could not be him. Mr Darcy of Pemberley had not joked. The man at the small table four feet from her had just been caught in some foolishness by his own dog and had let her tease him into a laugh. The two facts could not coexist in the same man.

Unless the man at Netherfield had been someone she had not been permitted to see, who had been there all the same.