XVI The First Hour #3
“I did not wish to disturb you.”
“You are also invisible. I am beginning to wonder whether I am dining with a ghost. Or my own delusions.”
“I am still here.”
“That is exactly what a ghost would say.” She picked up her wine. “Or a delusion.”
“I assure you, I am neither.”
“Very well.” He heard her set the glass down. “Then you will not object to a question.”
“Of course not.”
“Why me? Why me, and not some other woman in want of a marriage? You could have sent that solicitor anywhere. I was as encumbered as a woman could possibly be, and you settled no little sum to secure my hand. A perfect stranger! What is it you want from this arrangement?”
He had prepared an answer for this question, prepared it again, taken it apart, and rebuilt it, and the answer he had arrived at was the true one.
“Company,” he said. “Someone to talk to.”
“You… you arranged a proxy marriage in Scotland to a woman you had never met because you wanted company.”
“Yes.”
“And I am to believe—” She stopped. He heard the wine glass lift again.
“You will forgive me, but you are a reclusive man, plainly. You will not be seen. You conduct your affairs through a solicitor. You could not be troubled to make the usual acquaintance of a woman before marrying her. Such a man, in my experience, does not go to this considerable trouble merely because he wants someone to talk to.” The wine glass came down. “Such a man must want—”
She stopped.
The silence was different now. He could hear it — her breath, a fraction faster. The hard swallow as she finished her wine.
“Put out your hand,” he said.
Then came the sound of her palm sliding across the cloth towards him. He reached, found her fingers, and closed his over them.
“You had expected something unspeakable,” he said. “Another kind of fear. Possibly worse than the one you were running from.”
“How do you know I was running from something?”
“It is the only arrangement of the facts that makes sense. A woman does not travel alone to Scotland to marry a stranger in the dark unless what she is leaving behind is worse than what she is travelling towards.”
She did not answer. Her hand had not withdrawn.
“As for what I want from you.” Her hand was warm now, warmer than it had been through the vows, and he was holding it across a table in the dark in her bedchamber on their wedding night and talking himself very carefully towards a cliff edge.
“I am not eager to father an heir. I am not eager to take your body. I do not even ask for your affections, for you could not honestly bestow them where you are so thoroughly blinded.”
The warmth of her hand went up his arm, and he kept his whisper low and his grip loose and his mind on the words and not on the three feet of dark between them or the fact that she was there, present, real, safe, his.
“That is not… What I require of this marriage does not include… That is to say, not at present, and perhaps not…”
He could hear her breathing. He could hear his own blood. “In due course, if things were to progress differently, I would hope—”
He lurched from the chair.
He was still holding her hand. He held it a moment longer, standing in the dark beside the table, his heart making itself known against the inside of his ribs in a way that was not controllable and was getting less so.
Then he let her hand go, took up the shallow dish with the candle and the flint from the corner of the table, and set them down at her right hand.
“There will always be a candle at your place,” he said.
“A candle, a flint, within reach of your hand. Whatever else you may have to endure in this arrangement, you will never be left in the dark. That is my word to you, and it will hold. I ask one thing in return. Do not light it until I have gone. Once I have drawn the door behind me, you may light it whenever you please. Open the other door then, and Mrs MacLeod will come directly. She will see to the fire. You will be warm.”
He found her hand with both of his and pressed his mouth briefly to her knuckles. “I wish you a pleasant night, Mrs Carlisle.”
He let go. He crossed the room by memory — four steps from her corner of the table to the door — and went through it.
The servant’s corridor was dark and cold and smelled of stone. He stood against the closed door with his back against the wood and his hands at his sides and his heart doing what it was doing, and he did not move.
Elizabeth Bennet was his wife.
She was here, and she was as safe as he could make her.
She was four steps away on the other side of a door she would rise and bolt from the inside, and she was going to have the fire lit, and she was going to sleep in the bed Mrs MacLeod had made up — the one he had slept in when he first came here — and he was standing in a servant’s corridor in the dark, and none of this was anything like the wedding night he had ever dreamed of. Not one moment of it.
He stood there until his heart had made its point. Then he turned and walked back towards his own room in the dark.