The Wine Breathes
XLII
He had been counting since noon.
Not continuously — the work took him in patches — but underneath all of it the count ran on without his permission.
November the twenty-fifth, give or take a day, which was yesterday.
She was almost exactly in the middle of her monthly.
The damage of the last nine nights was either done by now, or it was not, and he would not know for three weeks — with every chance that other parties would settle the question before he could.
He had not meant to carry this kind of knowledge. He had acquired it at seven, on a stair outside his mother’s difficult confinement, and had come to possess it since with an intimacy he would have preferred to be spared.
Through her courses, he had kept out of the bed but not out of her room — he could not stay out of her presence, not since the night she reached for him and his careful intention to please her without settling his own wants proved as unequal to her as every such intention before it.
He had meant to hold to some resolve afterward, to sit with her in the dark and lay no hand on her.
It had lasted just long enough for her to push him onto his back.
He had been to her bed every night since, and not once had he been able to check himself.
He needed to send her away.
He had been arriving at this conclusion all day, and the reasons for it had only hardened. She had Lizzy now, and the feel of his face, and five months of accumulated evidence, and a mind that had been building the case since July.
And Webb was being traced. The walls were closing from two directions.
Any person in this house, when they closed, was a person who could be brought in, held, questioned — and though his wife could not be compelled to testify against him, a woman who had been sharing her husband's bed for weeks could not honestly be thought ignorant of his name.
She had the marriage contract; she had the letter to her sister recording that she had never seen his face and had married a man called George Carlisle.
The veil had been her defence.
A child, if she were found to be carrying one when the moment came, would shred that defence entirely. No court in England would believe a wife visibly with child had remained honestly ignorant of the man who had got it on her.
The dark had begun as her protection — the one thing that let her swear she had never seen his face.
Somewhere between October and now, it had become something else as well, and that was the part he could least forgive in himself.
In the dark, she took what he could give and answered it without hesitation, without the interruption of Fitzwilliam Darcy and all the history attached to him.
In the dark, he could come to her bed and, for a few hours, live inside the disastrous fiction that being known and being recognised were not the same event.
He had known the difference from the first night she touched his face after he had broken in her bed, and he had kept returning to it with an appetite that knew better and came regardless.
He had not returned on appetite alone. That would have been simpler, if uglier.
He had returned because she was lonely and because he was lonelier; because he had trapped her in a life too narrow for her and could not bear to be the reason she starved inside it; because their whispered suppers and the hours in her bed were the only forms of marriage he could safely offer; because once George Carlisle had begun to matter to her he had not been able to stop hoping that love might do what reason would not — that if she loved George enough, she might someday endure Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Each reason contaminated the next. By the time he reached her door, he could no longer have separated generosity from desire, pity from hunger, hope from cowardice.
And then he had gone to her bed, and gone again. He had told himself, night after night, that he was giving her what comfort he could. The more honest version was that he could not live on the scraps he had left himself any better than she could.
He had to tell her. He had to sit across the table from her tonight and say at least one thing plainly — that she must go to her family, before Christmas, that she must tell anyone who asked that her husband was in Scotland and in good health, that she must not come back.
He had to say it and mean it and hold the position when she resisted, because she would resist.
She would not take the offer with open relief.
She was too well-bred for that. She would protest — properly, with all the right objections about duty and her place and what was owed between husband and wife — and she would press them with the wit that had been dismantling him since Hertfordshire.
But it would be the protest of good manners, not of grief, and he knew her well enough now to tell the one from the other.
She had been good to him these four months.
She had borne a marriage no woman could have wanted, borne it with grace, and set herself — visibly, stubbornly — to make some contentment of it, because she was the kind of woman who would.
He had expected no less of her. But a contentment one had to work at was not happiness, and he had never mistaken the one for the other.
Sending her home would give her back the people she loved, the rooms she knew, a table she could sit down to without first arranging her courage.
It would be better for her. It was, beneath everything she would say against it, what she wanted.
She would be happier with her family than she had been here.
Probably.
And he would have to hold the position regardless — not against her objections, which would be the easy part, but against the instinct that had not left him since July, to reach across the table and gather her to him and tell her she was not going anywhere.
He made himself picture it. A closed carriage on the road south, her in it, the wheels on the frozen ground carrying her away from Auchengray while he stood somewhere he could not stand without being seen.
Her arriving at her uncle's house in Pentonville without a husband and without an explanation that bore examination.
Jane Bennet's face at the door. The questions that would come.
And beneath all of that, worse than all of it, the possibility he could not stop following to its end.
If she were already carrying, she would go south not knowing it, would discover it alone in her uncle’s house, would bear his child in a borrowed room with no name she could speak aloud, no face she could show, no word from him that could safely travel.
She would do it without him because he had sent her away to protect her, and the protection and the abandonment were the same action, and there was no version of it that did not cost her something he had no right to ask her to pay.
But he could not keep her here. Pregnant or not, the answer was the same.
She was too close, and the only reason she had not yet closed her hand on the whole of it was that she had chosen not to — had held what she knew at a distance and not pressed it, a grace she had extended deliberately, and he had recognised it for what it was and repaid her by going to her bed every night with no apparent memory of what was at stake.
He lit the candle and went downstairs.
She had the wine already open when he came in.
He heard the soft knock of bottle against glass, the deliberate pour of a hand that had learned to do this without light, and then she slid the glass towards him across the cloth, her fingers finding his wrist first to place it correctly.
He lifted it and drank and the heat of it went deep into his pores in an instant.
“That is very good,” he said.
“Yes.” Her voice carried a warmth she did not bother to hide. “I thought so.”
He drank again. Whatever he needed to say tonight required the clearest possible head. He drank again regardless, because it was very good and because she had given it to him and because small resistances had never yet served him where she was concerned.
“Mrs MacLeod brought it out of the cellar today,” she said.
“Madeira, the label says — sixty-three, which I am told is a year of some political distinction, though I claim no expertise. The bottle is larger than the ones we have been getting through, and gave such a good account of itself when she sounded it out that she insisted it merited a more serious approach than the usual supper wine. I had told her I would keep it for Christmas, but she will forgive me, because I had good news today, and a wife who has had good news cannot be expected to wait a whole month to drink upon it.”
“Good news?”
“George.” He could hear the pleasure in it before she had said another word. “Mary is to be married.”
He set down his glass. “Oh?”
“To Mr Peele — do you remember? I mentioned him once. My uncle had thought he might suit her, back in the summer, before everything went sideways, and then the matter was set aside when — well. When things changed.”
“The bookkeeper?”
“The very one.” She drank. “He has done a steady business in shipping insurance from a small office, lives modestly, attends his sister on Sundays, and — by Mary’s own account — has read more sermons than any man currently above ground.”
He lifted his glass and drank. “Mary will keep him in countenance, then.”
“Mary will improve him. He will improve Mary. They are well matched in earnestness.” She refilled her own glass, and the click of the rim was small and exact. “The wedding is to be quiet, in January.”
She lifted the bottle, found the rim of his glass with the back of her finger, and poured. He waited until the sound of it stopped, then drank. The wine had gone down a little easier this time than the first.
“And does Peele know what he is taking on?”