The Lesser Thing
XXV
The parcel was on the writing desk in her bedchamber when she came up from the library after breakfast. The brown paper was tied and addressed in a clerk’s hand to Mrs Carlisle, Auchengray, Aberdeenshire, and a sealed note had been slipped under the cord.
She broke the seal first.
Madam,
The enclosed volume was reserved for the late Mr Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, and held in our shop on his account; it has been duly forwarded as instructed.
Your most obedient servant, J. Dawkins, bookseller, Paternoster Row.
Her hands began to shake.
She put the note down. She fumbled at the cord, could not get her fingers to close on the knot, dragged it loose at last with both hands. The brown paper opened. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
She opened the cover. Papa.
The sound came up out of her before she had braced for it.
Not a sob — not yet — something rougher, as though her throat had not asked her permission.
Her knees gave out before she could think to lower herself; she went down hard against the floor with the book in both hands and an arm wrapped around it as though it would otherwise be taken away.
Then the crying came.
It came in a way she had not known she was capable of.
It bent her in half. It made her shoulders heave, and her chest hurt.
Her face was wet at once, then wet to her chin, then wet on her hands where she had pressed them up to it.
She could not get a breath that did not come back as a sound — gasping, ugly, loud enough that part of her was distantly humiliated, and the larger part of her did not care.
Her nose ran. Her hair came down on one side and stuck to her cheek.
She bent over the book until her forehead was against the leather of the cover, and she could smell the dust of a London bookseller’s shop and feel the binding under her skin, and the smell and the leather were not her father, but they were the closest she had been to him since May.
Papa! She said it aloud, into the cover. Papa.
The dog came in against her like a wall.
The whole side of him pressed her ribs. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept into the dog’s coat with the book in her lap, and the noise did not stop for a long time.
Each time she thought she had spent it, a fresh wave came up — fresher, almost — opening rooms inside her she had had locked since the funeral, since the first morning in this house when she had stood at the narrow window of a strange bedchamber and made her face go still because she did not yet know what would happen if she let it move.
It moved now.
She wept until her ribs ached. She wept until her eyes had nothing more in them and her breath came in shudders that were almost dry.
She clutched the book to her chest the whole time.
When the worst of it was past, she sat up slowly, the dog still pressed against her, her sleeve dragged across her face, leaving it streaked, the book not relinquished. She stayed on the floor.
She could not have said how long. Long enough that the morning sun moved on the boards. Long enough that Falstaff had given up urgency and laid his head on her knee and gone half asleep.
Eventually, she stood. Her hands were unsteady. She did not put the book on the shelf. She set it on the writing desk, on top of Dawkins’ note, where she would see it for the rest of the day.
She did not know what to call what had happened in her. She only knew it had moved. Whatever had held firm in her about her husband, since the night he had kissed the back of her hand in the dark, had moved.
Her list had been no good to her tonight.
She had taken it down anyway, out of habit alone, and she had run her finger along the items and found that the morning had blunted every one of them.
The book was on the writing desk, not three feet from her chair.
It had been the work of someone she did not know how to fit into any of the categories she had been laying out for him.
The categories had been a kind of ground she had been standing on, and the ground was no longer there.
The face was the thing he protected most completely. The face was the part of him she could ask for tonight without violating the rest. She did not need an explanation. She needed to know, with her hands, that he was a person.
The supper was on the table; she would not be eating much of it tonight.
She tried to begin with the seal she had seen from the headland that morning.
Her voice came out evenly, and the seal sounded ordinary on her tongue, which surprised her, because nothing in her was ordinary.
He answered her. He had a thing or two to say about seals and what they did at this time of year, and his whisper went on for half a minute, and she heard her hand close around her fork too tight when he had finished.
She put the fork down again. “There is something I want to ask you.”
“Then ask it.”
“I want to ask it, and I want you to listen to the whole of it before you answer.”
She heard him set his glass down. “Very well.”
“I want to know about you. Where did you come from? Why are you hiding even from me? Whom would I tell… what? And you have never seen me any more than I have seen you. Are you not curious? Have you never once wondered what I look like, sitting across from you in the dark?”
She heard him stop breathing.
Then, after some moments — long enough that she had decided he would not answer, and then thought perhaps he might, and decided again that he would not —
“I have a report that you are handsome.” His whisper was careful, polite, the most ceremonious he had given her since their wedding night.
“It was your character that drew me, and your character that has held me, and I do not flatter myself that an evening of seeing you would have altered either. I confess to being as intrigued by a handsome woman as any other man might be, and I should not pretend otherwise. But it is, unhappily, a pleasure I will have to forego for the present.”
A pleasure he would have to forego. As though seeing her would have been a pleasure he had any reason to anticipate. As though he had given the matter thought.
“Then I am the less patient of us,” she said.
“I had told myself that a man hiding his face for cosmetic reasons — a scar, a wound, any disfigurement — would not also need to hide his voice. The voice is a separate concealment, and it tells me there is more than a face. I know that. So, I am not asking only about the face. I am asking everything. If there is another name, I would like to know the name. If there is a country, I would like to know the country. If there is a man somewhere who has driven you here, I would like to know him as well, by name and by deed. I am asking it because I am the woman you married, and I have been here for two months, and I have given you my word on more than one occasion not to use what you tell me against you, and I do not break my word. That is my request.”
She heard him breathe again.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I cannot give you any of it. Not for a refusal of you. For your safety, for mine, for things I cannot describe to you without already giving you part of what you have asked. Please.” Another silence.
“Please do not press me. Do not ask me again tonight. I am not — I am not equal to refusing you again tonight.”
She had him.
It was not what she had been after; it was a great deal more than she had reason to expect. She had asked the impossible, knowing he would refuse it, and he had refused with something close to apology, and she had only to wait now until he had recovered enough to think she had let the matter go.
She gave him a long minute.
“Then let me ask a lesser thing,” she said.
“I am not asking what your true voice means or where you came from or why. I am not asking to see your face. I am asking for it under my hands. That is all. I will not ask about what I learn there. I will not speak of what I find. I want only to have some shape to put to the whisper I have been listening to for two months.”
She heard his breath catching in a different way — the relief of being asked for less. He had been braced for further pursuit. He had been given reprieve. “I cannot… that is not…”
“Please,” she said, very quietly, in the moment of his relief.
She heard his chair shift. She heard him cross to her — she counted the steps — and then she heard him kneel. The fabric of his coat moved against the leg of her chair as he came down. The warmth of him reached her in the dark, close but not touching. His hands found hers, both of them.
“You must tell me,” he said, “if I am to permit this, that you will hold yourself to the lesser question.”
“I give you my word.”
He was quiet for another moment. Then, very slowly, he guided her hands upward.
His jaw first. She had not been prepared for any of this — for the warmth of a human face, for the breadth of him under her palms, for the slight scratchiness of a jaw shaved that morning and already wanting attention again.
She had thought that to put her hands on his face would be to know him.
She found instead that her hands were not eyes.
A jaw was a jaw. A mouth was a mouth. A nose was a nose.
The pieces would not assemble into recognition.
She knew faces by sight, by no other sense, and she had not known until now how much of recognition was the eyes’ work and not the hand’s.
She moved her fingers carefully. The line of his jaw was clean and strong.
Not a soft face. Not a man gone to ease or age.
The chin, the angle of it. The mouth, which she did not linger on.
The nose — straight, unremarkable, wholly intact.
His breath fluttered across her fingers, and she heard him check it, heard the effort of the checking.
She moved higher. The cheekbones. There ought to have been the damage the solicitor told her about. There ought to have been the irregularity that explained the dark. There was nothing. The skin was smooth and unmarked where she could reach.
She moved to his brow. His sideburns. The temples.
Her left hand stayed at his temple. Her right hand moved a half-inch back into the hair at the corner of his brow and stayed there.
She tipped his forehead a little closer to her, with care, the way one might draw an unfamiliar book down off a shelf.
And then she whispered into the space between his skin and hers.
“Thank you for the Rasselas.”
What came up under her fingers was not the lurching awareness she had been bracing for.
It was warm. Open. A breath drawn in pleasure that he had not had time to disguise — the small involuntary upward adjustment of a face being given a thing it had wanted to give, the heat of a husband pleased with himself for having pleased her.
She had thought he might tense; he did not, not at first. He bloomed under her hands. She had not known a man could do that, and she had certainly not known her husband could, and her hands stilled because she did not entirely know how to interpret what they had just learned.
Then he caught up to himself.
She did not know what shape his face went into next; it happened too fast. She had only the after — the going-still, the hardening, the discipline reasserted with a force that snapped through his jaw under her palm.
The pleasure had been there for half a breath.
He had clamped down on it as though it were the worst thing she could have caught him at.
His hands came up over hers and drew them down, not roughly, but firmly. He was breathing hard. He had risen before she had finished knowing that he was moving, and stepped back from her.
“Forgive me,” he said. It came out uneven. He was gathering himself back in — she heard it in the breath, in the control, in what the control was taking from him.
“There is nothing to forgive,” she said.
He did not answer. She heard him move to the corridor door — three steps, four — and then the door, and then the passage, and then nothing.
He had not said goodnight.
After he left, she sat for some time with both hands in her lap, as though they might tell her more if she kept them still enough.
Brow. Nose. Mouth. Jaw. Cheekbone. She tried, against her own good sense, to make a face out of what they had touched and could not.
Every attempt dissolved almost at once. The image would begin and then break apart, because touch had not given her the whole of him, only interruptions and edges.
That ought to have been the end of it. She had given her word.
She was not going to use what he had permitted as an instrument against him.
But the mind, once given part of a map, worried at the missing country without permission.
She was not trying to catch him out. She could not stop herself from reaching again, inwardly, for the rest of the face her hands had failed to build.