Faceless (Boundless #1)

XVII The First Day

XVII

The First Day

She had slept.

Her body had made a decision her mind had not finished making. She had not expected to sleep. She was married, in Scotland, in the dark, in a bed made for the laird. She had expected to spend the night counting the price of what she had done, the cost of saving Jane by interposing herself.

Instead, she had slept. Alone, and behind a bolted door.

The fire was already lit when she woke. Mrs MacLeod had come through without waking her.

Elizabeth lay a moment in the warmth — the first warmth she had had in days that was not a cup of tea or her own coat — and looked at the ceiling she had not seen, grey light just beginning to show at the edges of the shutters, the stone above her utterly indifferent to the fact that she was now, apparently, its mistress.

She got up and washed her face and dressed, and when she looked at herself in the small glass above the washstand, she could not quite recognise the face looking back at her — too pale, too hollow about the eyes, carrying something in its expression that she suspected had been there since Longbourn and had not had the occasion to show until now.

She turned away from it and went to the windows. They were shrouded in heavy drapes that blocked out all light, but when she pulled them back, the sea and the rocks rushed to meet her.

She had known what she was coming to in the abstract — coast, cliffs, stone — but knowing it and standing at a window with the whole of it running from one edge of the glass to the other were entirely different things.

It was not picturesque. It was grey and vast and indifferent in a way that had nothing to do with her or her marriage or the man on the other side of the bolted door.

For a moment, that was the most restful thing she had encountered since her father died.

The headland below dropped to cliffs. Beyond the road to the village, the moor stretched out, grey-brown and enormous, running to the sky without apology.

Somewhere past it was the whole of Scotland.

Then England. Then — at a distance she had felt in her body on that crossing deck — the rooming house in London, Jane at the window, her mother’s voice going through the walls.

She stood at the window for a long time — long enough that the light shifted slightly and the sea went on without her — and then she turned away and went to find Mrs MacLeod.

The housekeeper was in the kitchen. The woman was, Elizabeth decided, somewhat older than her father had been.

Not unfriendly, not exactly friendly either, something more durable than both.

Tea appeared in front of Elizabeth without being asked.

Bread appeared. Elizabeth drank the first of the tea and let the warmth find her fingers, and took the measure of the woman across the room while she did, and arrived at the conclusion that this was not a housekeeper who would volunteer anything.

She set the cup down.

“Does the baron keep to the upper floor in the mornings?”

“Aye.”

“And in the afternoons?”

“He has his habits.”

Elizabeth wrapped both hands around the cup. She had questions enough to fill the morning — who he was, where he came from, why the dark, why the whisper, why her, why any of it — and Mrs MacLeod was a very pleasant wall. “He has been here long?”

“Some months.”

“And before that, the house was empty?”

“For some years. The old laird — his mother’s people — they kept it a generation back. It has been quiet since.”

His mother’s people. She turned her cup in her hands.

That figure in the dark had once had a mother.

Someone had stood in this kitchen before either of them was born, had called this place home.

She wanted to ask who — she could see a dozen questions lining up behind the answer — but Mrs MacLeod had already closed the door behind her answer, and Elizabeth was too tired to push at a wall that would not move.

She ate her bread and looked out at the grey sea going about its business, and tried to remember the last time she had sat in a kitchen and not known what day she would leave it.

The house by daylight was extraordinary and strange and nothing like she had imagined it, which was partly because she had not let herself imagine it — had stopped her imagination at the signing of her name and refused to look beyond it.

Now here it was. The walls were eight feet thick in places.

She pressed her palm against one, and the cold living inside went straight through her hand — not draughty cold but the chill of stone that had been standing when the sea was the only road.

The ceilings were low and corbelled. The windows were narrow.

It was not a house built for comfort. It was built to hold, and it held.

Walking through it, she had the disorienting sensation of being inside something entirely indifferent to her circumstances — indifferent to the circumstances of everyone who had ever lived here, and would go on being indifferent long after she was gone.

The library was on the second floor. He had said three walls, floor to ceiling.

She had formed some picture in her mind from those words, and the picture was wrong.

The shelves ran from the floorboards to the low, corbelled ceiling without interruption.

The light from the narrow windows fell grey and clean across the spines. She went in slowly.

The order on the shelves was not alphabetical but argumentative — a logic she could feel without yet mapping. History alongside travel alongside natural philosophy. Poetry in two languages. She ran her finger along the spines and stopped at the novels.

They were so like some of her father’s books.

Not his volumes, not his hand, not the worn, yellowed copies from Longbourn.

But many of them were the same titles. The same shelf of companions he had kept within reach, the same authors he had pressed into her hands over twenty years with his running commentary — this one.

This one. This one again, when you are older.

Some of the books on this shelf were less yellowed than those above and below them, their bindings cleaner, their grouping too deliberate to be accidental.

They stood together at eye level as if someone had drawn them from the larger library and set them here for easy taking.

Her throat closed.

She was in a tower in Scotland, married to a man she could not see, and her father had been dead two months and would never know how any of this had ended, and here was a shelf arranged closely enough to his habits that she could feel his absence in it like pain.

She sat down on the floor with her back against the shelves and wept, properly, for the first time since Longbourn.

Not the controlled weeping she had done in a rooming house bedroom with Mary asleep six inches away and Jane listening from the other pallet, but the kind that had no audience and made no effort to be civilised, the kind her father’s death had deserved from the beginning and had not received because she had not had the room for it.

She cried until she was empty and then found she was not empty at all.

The worst of it was not grief by itself. Grief had plain edges. Her father was dead. Jane was far away. Longbourn was gone. She was in Scotland. Those were facts. Facts, however cruel, at least held still long enough to be looked at.

What she had not prepared for was kindness.

She had come north braced for hardness. For obligation. For something cold and contractual and perhaps humiliating, but intelligible. A brute could be hated. A monster could be feared. Fear built its own armour. Fear simplified. It turned life into the endurance of one thing.

There was no armour to be made against this.

He had put her in a room of books her father would have loved.

He had arranged the supper table so she might move through the dark without fear or embarrassment.

He had spoken to her with restraint instead of triumph.

He had asked nothing. He had left her undefended against every softer thing she had spent the last months teaching herself not to want.

She bent over with her face in her hands and wept again, more quietly now, because the first storm of it had gone, and what remained was worse — not violence but exposure.

She was still a daughter who wanted her father.

Still a sister who wanted Jane. Still herself enough to hunger after wit and company and to feel the shape of the lack when the room closed round her.

How long was she going to be here? She did not know.

She did not know most things about this situation, which was the situation in its entirety — a tower house, a fire, a shelf of books arranged with a knowledge that came too near understanding, and a husband who was more like a wraith, and none of the rest of it yet legible.

By the time it passed, she could not bear to stay there any longer. She opened one of the novels and read three pages without understanding a word of them, then went downstairs in search of bread and something warm.

She was in the kitchen when Angus came in. He opened the door and stood in the frame, and she looked past him, and whatever she had expected from the morning’s practical arrangements, it was not this.

The creature on the end of his rope was enormous — or would be, presumably, when it finished arriving.

At present, its paws had come in considerably ahead of the rest of it, its legs were several inches too long, and the whole design had the look of something still in negotiation with itself.

It had clearly been running and was now applying that energy to the project of inserting its face into her ear.

“Is that—” she started. “Did he actually—” She stopped and looked at Angus. “He sent a dog!”

“Aye,” said Angus, who had carried the dog some distance and had feelings about it.

“He found it so soon! Last night I asked for a dog, and this morning there is a dog?”

She had asked — in the dark, in the first hour of her marriage, half out of bravado and half to see what he would do when the thing she asked for was not one of the arrangements he had prepared — and he had sent it.

The next morning! A deerhound puppy, five months old, with paws like dinner plates and no sense of propriety whatever.

“Aye,” Angus said again. “Paid twice ’is price because the farmer that raised ’im already had ’im sold.”

“Twice his… No, get down,” she told the dog when he plunged against her skirt with muddy paws.

She was not obeyed, either.

She got hold of it around the middle — this required genuine effort — and held it off her and examined it.

It looked back with the total, unguarded devotion of a creature that had decided, somewhere on the road from wherever it had come from, that she was the person it had been waiting for.

Its tail was going at a speed that suggested structural risk.

It was the least complicated thing she had encountered in two months.

Her eyes filled. She put her arms around the ridiculous creature and held on.

She had not laughed in — she counted backward and stopped counting because the number was too large. Her shoulders dropped for the first time since Longbourn.

“Well,” she said to it, when she could speak. “What shall we call you?”

The dog slapped its tail on the flagstones.

“Something dignified,” she said. “Hector. No. You are not remotely Hector.” The tail redoubled.

“Apollo, perhaps. No — too much to live up to. Cuchulainn? Do not make me spell that one twice a day.” She held its enormous paw up, examined the splay of it, and put it gently down. “You require a name for a creature with no sense of his own size.”

Her father had always said that Falstaff was funnier than Hamlet because Hamlet had the luxury of indecision, while Falstaff was too hungry to waste time on it.

He had read her the scenes in the Longbourn library on winter evenings when she was nine, doing all the voices.

She had laughed until her sides ached, and he had said — this one, Lizzy.

The one who knows the value of a good meal and a warm fire and refuses on principle to be tragic.

The dog sneezed magnificently on her shoulder.

“Falstaff,” she said.

Angus looked at the dog. The dog’s tail, if anything, went faster.