Enough to Trust #3
He recovered something of himself. “I am sorry. I have been… preoccupied today. I should not have answered you so warmly about something you offered in fun.”
“You need not apologise. I rather wish people did feel warmly about the principle.”
He did not reply.
The conversation moved on — something about the tide, something about Angus — but she held the exchange carefully in her mind all the way to the end of supper.
She did not bring it back up. She heard him find his way back to the whisper he used with her ordinarily, the dry one, the one whose strings were unstrung.
But she had heard something else for three minutes, and it had not been explained.
She lay awake afterwards with Falstaff an immovable warmth across her feet, and the exchange unspooling against the dark.
She had a list. Some of the pieces she had laid down had been wilder than others.
He had another wife. Upstairs, perhaps; mad or bedridden or something worse.
Or in England, in a house he had abandoned, and the second marriage was an offence he could not acknowledge, but somehow the legal keeping of a second wife clarified his situation.
An heir? No… no, that did not seem to be a priority, but still…
The fancy was so plainly the kind Kitty and Lydia would have entertained between them, over a borrowed novel, that she had laughed at herself for it the first time it came to her.
The provisions he had made for her, the careful arrangements, the settlements on Jane — none of this was the work of a husband practising bigamy.
She had reduced the theory to a small remainder and not eliminated it.
There were upper floors she had not entered.
There were doors that had been kept shut.
She was not so disciplined a thinker as to declare a possibility extinguished merely because she could find it ridiculous.
Perhaps he was mortified of women. A profound incapacity, some deep horror of the female person, that had driven him to construct this whole arrangement so that he might claim a wife without ever being required to face one.
Or even… some men were not attracted to women.
Perhaps having a wife was a cover of sorts for…
other proclivities. She had nearly laughed aloud at that possibility, at two in the morning, staring at a ceiling she could not see.
The hands that had held hers had not been frightened hands, nor had they been disinterested.
Whatever his reasons for the dark, they were not those.
The disfigurement theory had been losing ground for weeks; tonight it lost the rest of it.
A man preoccupied with the unfair conviction of an innocent was not preoccupied with his face.
He was preoccupied with what a man could be made to answer for, and how, and at whose direction — which was a different country entirely.
The possibility she had entertained on three different mornings, and dismissed, and entertained again, had taken its place at the front of her mind.
Her husband was a fugitive of some kind.
Not a vagrant criminal. Not a man hiding from a creditor.
Something larger. Something with the involvement of the law, and possibly the army, and the careful arrangements of solicitors who knew the shape of risks Elizabeth could not see.
The whole shape of their marriage existed because being recognised would do something to him she could not yet know.
It explained the locked floor. It explained the false name — she was almost certain the name was false because he usually held his breath when she said it.
It explained the careful settlements on Jane and the provisions made for her own protection, which had always struck her as the work of one arranging for the survivors of his own ruin.
It explained the hope he sometimes slipped on of something better.
It did not explain why he had been kind.
Criminals, she imagined, could be kind in the abstract; she had no reason to suppose they could not.
But the kindnesses she had been receiving for nearly two months — the dog, the library, the careful retreats from each of his own desires, the refusal to be thanked for repairs to a tenant’s wall — were not the work of someone calculating advantage.
They were the work of one trying to give her every possible thing he could, without ever giving her the one thing he was hiding.
And he was waiting. That was the other thing she had come to know about him — that he was waiting for something, and would not say what.
It was not her trust he waited on; he had made no demand on it and no test of it.
He waited on something outside the two of them, something with its own pace, and when it arrived — if it arrived — the shape of their arrangement would change.
She had heard it tonight, when his whisper had dropped — the held breath, the alert attention of one tracking the approach of a circumstance he could not hasten and could not yet meet.
She did not sleep until very late.