Faceless (Boundless #1)

The Dark

The candle went out before the door opened.

She stayed standing in the middle of the bed chamber, her hands loose at her sides and shaking, while the door closed again and she was no longer alone with only Mrs MacLeod. She could not count them by sound. The floor gave nothing. The walls gave back only the sea.

Mrs MacLeod had shown her the room only ten minutes ago, when she arrived — had opened the door, stood aside, and said only “this will be yours, my lady,” in an accent Elizabeth had not yet learned to understand.

There was a bed in it. A large one, old, with hangings she could not see now and had registered them only by their colour and the weight of the wool.

There was a washstand. There was a press.

A long table had been laid at the far end of the room with what she took for supper under silver covers — she had not crossed to look, but the smell of the food came faintly across the space without resolving into anything familiar.

And it was in this room — this room, with the bed — that she was being married. Not a drawing room, and certainly not a church. Her bedroom. She had not asked the reason. She had been asking no questions since Aberdeen. The answer would not alter the fact of the bed.

A man’s whisper, low and to her left, greeted the servants who were to stand as witness. Not even her family to stand with her today, but servants, under this man’s employ. “Mrs MacLeod?”

“Aye.” Somewhere behind her.

“Angus.”

“Aye.” Near the door.

He did not greet her yet. Did not say her name, but she felt him pass by, the whisper of her skirts as his boots approached. He was inches from her now, and all she knew of him was the smell of his shaving lotion and the sound of his footsteps.

The solicitor, she had already placed by his breathing and the rustle of papers that had not ceased since the light went out.

He was to her right, a yard perhaps, and she fixed her attention in the direction of his sound the way she might fix it on the horizon in a rough crossing.

It did not help. It was the only thing she had.

She was cold. She had been cold since Aberdeen, since the road turned north along the coast and the wind came off the water and did not stop.

The cold here was different from Hertfordshire cold — it was older, it lived in the stone, and the stone was everywhere.

It rose from the walls she could not see and from the floor through the thin soles of her travelling shoes, and she thought, absurdly, that she had not brought enough wool.

The solicitor cleared his throat. “The parties present are George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray, and Miss Elizabeth Bennet of Longbourn in Hertfordshire. If each is freely resolved to proceed, you may speak your declarations.”

George.

She had not known the name before this moment. She let it find its place with the rest, because one more unknown was only one more unknown, and she had stopped counting them somewhere on the road north.

“Miss Bennet.”

The whisper came almost choked, as if he could hardly bring himself to form the syllables. But it was this fresh reminder of his proximity that shuddered through her before she could prevent it. She made herself stay still, but she did manage a “I am here.”

“Are you determined?”

Three words in a whisper she could not place, could not recognise, pitched so low it seemed to belong to the room rather than to any man in it.

He would not use his full voice, and she did not know why.

The candle had been extinguished before the door opened.

She knew nothing at all about the man standing two feet away from her in the dark — and in four minutes she would be his wife, and Jane would be safe, and Lydia would be safe, and her mother would not die of nerves in a hedgerow, and that was the whole of what she knew.

“Yes,” she said.

A small rustle moved in front of her — the man turning towards her, she thought. Then the whisper that would seal her fate.

“I, George Carlisle, Baron of Auchengray, take you, Elizabeth Bennet, as my wife. From this hour, before these witnesses. Before God.”

The whisper was deliberate, and it had in it something she had not expected — not the brisk detachment of a legal transaction, but attention, close and unguarded, as though each word were being given rather than merely spoken.

“I take you into my care and into my house and into my name. I will ask nothing of you that you have not agreed to give. Whatever honour belongs to me, I pledge to you, and whatever protection, and whatever peace I am able to find. From this hour, until death do we part.”

She had prepared for the speaking. She had not prepared for the hearing.

He spoke her name, and the darkness swallowed his face, and the whisper stripped his voice of everything she might have used to learn to understand him, and she stood in the middle of all of it and she shook.

Silence. The solicitor did not speak. Mrs MacLeod did not speak. No one filled it with murmurs of approval or attendance. They were waiting for her.

She had to speak. She had to speak now. The silence was asking her to.

The phrases she had said over to herself in the carriage — I take you, I take you, I take you — had gone.

The words from the book of Common Prayer, the vows she had thought she might use instead — she reached after them, and they were not there.

Nothing was there. She had already forgotten what he had said to her a minute ago except that it had been kind, and the solicitor was waiting, and the man in front of her was waiting, and she had nothing to say.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came.

She closed it. She tried to think. She thought of Jane. She thought of the carriage. She thought of the words the man in front of her had spoken and she reached for them because they were the only words that had been in the room.

“I, Elizabeth Bennet —” Her voice came out thinner than she had meant it to. She cleared her throat. “I, Elizabeth Bennet, take you… George Carlisle… Baron of Auchengray, as my… my husband. From this hour. Be- before these witnesses. Before God.”

She stopped. There was more to say, and she did not know what. The man in front of her had said more. She fumbled to remember what he had said.

“Whatever honour belongs to me is yours. Whatever —” Her voice caught. She did not let it break. “Whatever I have, I give. From this hour. Until death.”

She was not going to weep. She had decided that in the carriage, and she held to it now — not for dignity, she was long past dignity, but because if she wept she could not see, and she could not see anyway, and tears on top of darkness seemed like more than she could carry.

“So it is declared,” the solicitor said. Behind her, Mrs MacLeod said something low in Gaelic, and Angus answered it, a single syllable, and that was all.

She was married.

She stood in the dark in Scotland with the sea against the cliffs and the cold in the stone and the whole of her previous life on the other side of a door she had walked through of her own will, and her hands would not stop shaking.

The man two feet in front of her drew a breath, and she did not know what came next.

She had traded one cage for another with full knowledge and clear eyes — or as clear as eyes could be in absolute darkness.

Jane was safe, and her mother and sisters would have a home, and it had to be enough.

She made herself believe it would be enough, and she stood like a stone, and she waited.

His hands found hers in the dark.

She had not let herself think this far. She had stopped her imagination at the vows, at the solicitor’s pen, at the door closing behind the witnesses, and now there were hands — warm, both of them, and very careful, enclosing hers completely, not moving, not demanding, only there — and something gave way in her chest that she had been holding shut since London, and she could not get it back.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Not it is done. Not the formal language the moment might have warranted, not a single word of legal closure. Thank you, as though she had given him something freely, as though any part of what she had just spoken had been a gift or choice she could reasonably have withheld.

She had no answer for that. She did not look for one.

“Mrs MacLeod. Angus. Leave us.”

He did not let go of her hands. The door opened. The door closed.

She stood in the dark holding the hands of a stranger who had thanked her, and she waited to find out what she had done.