The Weight of What Is Known #3
“You’ll nae see ’im well from there. There’s the old passage off the chapel stair. East wall, this floor. Slit in the wall — been there long as the house. Looks doon intae what’s the library now.”
Darcy turned to stare at him. There was a place in the house where he might spy on his wife? “Where is the entrance to the passage?”
Angus told him. Then he nodded once and left.
The entrance was where Angus had said it would be — a section of wall in the upper east corridor that moved inward when he pressed the stone at shoulder height, swinging on a pivot the way the Laird’s Lug door did, the same four-hundred-year-old engineering.
Beyond it, a passage barely wide enough to stand in, the ceiling low, the air cold and close and smelling of stone that had not seen a candle in years.
He did not take a candle. He moved by touch along the passage wall until the wall on his left opened slightly — not a door, a recess — and there it was.
A slit in the outer stone, perhaps two inches wide and eight tall, cut at an angle into the eight-foot wall.
It had the look of something old enough to have had a purpose he no longer needed to guess at.
The room below had been a chapel once. Someone had wanted to see into it. His first guess was an invalid who desired to partake in holy services. His second guess, and probably the more likely one, rang a little closer to his present purpose… seeing without being seen.
He put his eye to the slit.
He had not been in the library since he arranged the books — had not permitted himself to go in after she arrived. It was hers now.
She was at the far shelves, her back to him, running one finger along the spines — he had imagined this for weeks, from the day after he had constructed that offer and begun to allow himself to imagine she would come, and the reality was…
He had to swallow and place his forehead against the cool stone before he could look back.
She was smaller than he remembered. This was not rational — she was the same height she had been at Rosings, the same height she had been last night when he had guided her hands to his shoulders and had the shock of her there, at the height of his chest. But seen through a two-inch slit, she was made slight by the scale of the shelves, by the window behind her throwing the grey Aberdeenshire light across the room, by the sheer age of everything around her that had no interest in accommodating human scale.
Falstaff was asleep under the writing table. One enormous paw. The arc of a tail. The slow rise and fall of a flank. Angus had said muckle great paws. Darcy had not entirely grasped what he meant until now.
Elizabeth pulled a book from the shelf. She turned it over — examining the spine, then the boards, then opening it near the middle the way a passionate reader does, not at the beginning, going straight for the texture of it.
She read standing up, one hand still resting on the shelf beside her, the book held in the other. She did not move for a long time.
He had watched her read before. At Netherfield, at Rosings, in the parsonage parlour where she always found the corner of the settee that caught the best light.
He had stood across rooms then with the knowledge that he was looking at something he was not entitled to look at — a woman entirely absorbed in her reading — and he had looked anyway.
He was looking now with the same knowledge.
The cold stone under his hands was not meaningfully different from the drawing room wall he had stood against at Netherfield in November, telling himself he was not looking at her.
Falstaff woke. He lifted his great head, looked around the room, found nothing, and dropped his chin back to the floor with a sound that carried even through the stone.
Elizabeth did not look up from the book.
She was absorbed. This was how she read when no one was looking — unstaged, standing, moving along the shelves as she went, because there was no witness to perform for. It was the thing he would never be shown at supper in the dark, and he devoured it as a starving man.
She turned a page. She shifted her weight. She reached up without looking and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
He closed his eyes and stepped back from the slit. He was in a hidden passage watching his wife read through a two-inch gap in a wall as if that were the last thread anchoring him to reality.
She was going to be here for months. He was going to be here with her. She had a question she was not yet asking — Are you the man I knew? — and when it came… egad, when it came, he would have to lie to the woman he loved.
He felt his way back along the passage to the entrance, pressed the stone, stepped through.
Below him, through the floor, he heard her laugh.
He did not know what had produced it — Falstaff, probably, some piece of canine absurdity she had no witness for and no need of one. It came up through the stone the way sounds sometimes did in this house, catching the acoustics at the right angle, arriving whole and undiminished.
He stood on the landing and listened to it.
Then he went back up to his room and finished the letter to Webb.