Enough to Trust #2
He could not bear it. Not because it was unwelcome, but because he could not decide which of him he wanted her to be kind to.
He had been nearly certain, at Rosings, that she was waiting for something from him.
Was she a little broken-hearted, somewhere under everything else, that Fitzwilliam Darcy had died without ever making that offer?
Did his real self still stand somewhere in her so tall that there could be no room for this version of him — the whisper, the dark, the careful distance across a table?
Or was it the other way round, and had this version begun to have a shape in her mind large enough to crowd out the one who had sat across the card tables at Rosings and could not keep his eyes off her? He could not decide which prospect was more horrible. Both were possible.
She tried again. “Falstaff found something on the headland this morning. I have no notion what it was. He was enormously pleased with himself and would not relinquish it until he had rolled in it. I had to negotiate for a considerable time before he conceded the point. I am not, it seems, a natural diplomat.”
He almost said something. He found he could not.
She heard it — the effort of it, probably, or the absence of it. The silence that followed was different from the ones they had shared across two months of suppers. This one sat heavy. She put her fork down.
“What is it?” she asked quietly.
“Nothing that—” He stopped. He started again. “It is not something I can—”
He stopped again.
He had been within thirty seconds of telling her everything for the past hour, and the only thing preventing it was the knowledge that telling her would move her from the protected side of this to the dangerous side, and the knowledge that he did not have the right to make that choice for her when she did not even know there was a choice to make.
Both of those things were true, and neither of them was sufficient, and the insufficiency of them had been accumulating since he read the letter that morning.
He heard her push her chair back. Two steps, three. Her hand found his in the dark, not searching but deliberate — fingers closing over his, warm and certain.
He turned his hand over under hers.
“You need not try to defend yourself. I am not asking anything of you tonight.”
He breathed. Squeezed her fingers lightly. “You have the right to ask.”
“Perhaps.” Her thumb moved, very slightly, against his hand. “But not tonight.”
He faced the sound of her breathing in the dark.
Two months. She had taken every angle available to her and pressed on every edge she could find.
Tonight, she had put her fork down, come around the table, and was standing beside his chair in the dark because she had heard something give way in the whisper.
He had not found a way to account for her since Netherfield. He was no closer to it now.
“What I told you before,” he said at last. “That you were part of what comes after. I meant more than — more than part. I meant I hope, when I can give you something beyond this, beyond a whisper across a table, that you will find it worth the waiting.”
She was still for a long moment.
“I cannot say why I should trust you. You have given me almost nothing to go on, and most of what I have, I have worked out myself. You have hidden a great deal and refused to explain the rest, and I have no certainty of anything.” She let a breath out, and he heard in it something that had been held for a long time.
“And yet you have asked almost nothing of me.”
“Someday, I hope to. Not now.”
“That is — that signifies something. I do not know what to call it. But it signifies.” Her fingers tightened very slightly on his.
He did not answer. Then, because he could not tell her any of the rest of it, he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it.
The next morning, she walked farther than usual. She was not thinking about the previous evening — or rather, she was not thinking about it deliberately, which amounted to the same thing.
She had reached for his hand. She had not planned to.
She had heard something give way in the whisper, and she had come round the table and taken his hand, which was a thing she might have done for her father or for Jane — and apparently, now, for a man she could not see.
At some point in the last weeks, he had become something she brought things to.
His yes when she asked whether he missed England.
The way he listened when she described Falstaff.
The night his hands had come to her shoulders to give her the warmth of a blanket she had not found yet, which she still did not examine directly but which was always at the edge of things.
And still, she did not know his face. She did not know the colour of his eyes.
She did not know whether the mouth that had briefly touched the back of her hand belonged to a man of twenty-three or twenty-nine.
She did not know whether his hair was dark or fair.
She could not have drawn him or picked him out on the street if she had passed him.
The solicitor had implied a disfigurement.
Perhaps a wound or a fire had also damaged his throat, sparing him only enough breath for a whisper.
She had considered it and not been satisfied.
He had given himself away now and again — a syllable before he had remembered, a laugh bitten off, a catch of breath unguarded, most of all on her first night.
His throat worked. The whisper was a discipline, not an injury.
Whatever it was, it was wearing at him.
He had kissed the back of her hand in the dark, which was either the smallest gesture a husband could make to a wife or the largest, depending on which of them one asked.
Days went by in that shape. She wanted the hour now; she had taken to waiting for seven from the moment she woke, and she had no idea whether he wanted her in any corresponding sense. He never touched her save by explicit permission, and did not seem inclined to alter that arrangement.
Three days later, she walked down to Craighead in the morning and came back with the village in her ears, and at supper she retailed the day’s small commotion.
Mrs Henderson had lost a laying hen, a pocket-watch, and, since the spring, she now claimed, some of her salted fish.
She had decided that all three must be the doing of young Tam Pritchard, who lived with his grandmother on the cliff path and was, Elizabeth was told, sullen.
“When I left the shop,” Elizabeth said, “half the town had agreed with her. Mrs Garrow thought he should be turned over to the constable directly. Mrs Fraser was prepared to swear she had seen him on the coast road the morning the watch went missing, which she had not mentioned at the time because she had not wished to get involved.”
She waited for some dry rejoinder. He did not give her one.
“Public opinion,” he said, “is not evidence.”
“Well — no. But Mrs Henderson is losing things at a rate that suggests —”
“Mrs Henderson is losing things at a rate that suggests a carelessness in Mrs Henderson. Or a rat. Or a husband with an appetite. Or a neighbour who has been taking advantage of her inattention, which may well be the Pritchard boy but which may equally well be someone else entirely. The fact that the village is in accord is not a thing to trust. Villages are in accord about a great many things they have no business being in accord about. A laying hen is missing. A watch is missing. A sullen young man lives near the cliff. These are three facts. They do not, between them, constitute a case.”
“I had not imagined you would take up his defence so warmly. The fellow did not strike me as sympathetic when Mrs Fraser described him.”
“I am not defending Tam Pritchard. I am objecting to the reasoning. A man may be guilty in fact and innocent in the evidence against him, or he may be innocent in fact and guilty in the consensus, and the law exists, in theory, to distinguish between those two conditions.” When he went on, his whisper had dropped into something she could not quite name.
“If the village wishes to decide a man is a thief because the village requires a thief, the village should at least have the honesty to say so. There ought to be a limit to the use of suspicion against a man. There ought to be a limit to what a community may do to someone who cannot prove the negative.”
She had expected him to find Mrs Henderson ridiculous, or to call for justice against the thief.
She had not expected this. The tone of there ought to be a limit had an edge she had not heard in him before — not disagreement, not amused disdain, but the quiet determined attention of one speaking from somewhere other than this table, other than this village, other than tonight.
“You are right, of course,” she said, because he was right and because the moment needed cooling. “I will try not to convict Tam Pritchard over my supper.”