"No one," he said, and his voice was the low, dangerous thing she had heard only in fragments, "will ever touch you in anger again. Do you understand me, Elizabeth?"
She understood. She understood that his promise was also a claim, that his protection was also possession, that the gentleness of his touch was backed by a capacity for violence that he did not bother to disguise. She understood that she was standing in a wood with a man who had just agreed to conceal a killing in exchange for her hand, and that his fingers on her bruised face were the gentlest thing she had ever felt, and that she could not reconcile these facts and did not know if they could be reconciled. Care and coercion in the same hand. The oldest trick in the world, and the most effective.
"I understand," she said.
He withdrew his hand. The absence of his touch left a cold spot on her cheek that the April air rushed to fill. He stepped back, and the composed mask resettled over his features like a visor coming down, and the man who had touched her with that terrible gentleness disappeared behind the man who gave orders and expected obedience.
"We should return," he said. "There is much to be done before tomorrow."
They walked back to the parsonage in silence. He did not touch her again. He did not need to. The impression of his fingers on her skin remained, a ghost of contact that pulsed in time with the bruise beneath.
At the garden gate, he paused. "You will need a salve for the bruising. I will have something sent from the apothecary. The discolouration should fade within a fortnight."
"And if it does not?"
"Then we will postpone the announcement until it does. I will not have my future wife wearing another man's marks."
The possessiveness of it —my future wife,another man's marks— should have repelled her. Instead, something tightened behind her ribs — not quite anger, not quite its opposite — and she shoved it aside. There would be time later to decide what it meant.
He left. Elizabeth stood at the gate and watched him walk away — the straight back, the controlled stride, the hands that had shaken at the end of the garden path this morning and now hung steady at his sides — and pressed her own shaking fingers to the cheek he had touched.
The skin was warm. That meant something. She was no longer certain what.
CHAPTER 6
ELIZABETH
The scream came at half past ten the following morning.
Elizabeth heard it from the parlour, where she sat with Charlotte pretending to read while they both listened to the sounds of a house that had become a stage set. The maid, Jenny — a Rosings girl, sent daily to assist at the parsonage — had gone out an hour earlier on an errand to the village. The path took her past the embankment. Fitzwilliam had ensured this. The scream was high and raw and carried through the open window like a blade.
Charlotte's teacup rattled against its saucer. Elizabeth reached over and steadied it without looking. They had rehearsed this. They had spent the previous afternoon in Elizabeth's room, speaking in whispers, building the scaffolding of their performance with the desperate thoroughness of women whose lives depended on getting it right.
When the body is found, we panic. Not too much — enough to seem shocked, not so much that it looks theatrical. Charlotte cries. I hold her. We did not know he went out last night.We assumed he was in his study. We went to bed. We heard nothing.
Elizabeth set down her own cup, rose, and crossed to the window with a pace that she calculated — quick enough to suggest alarm, controlled enough to suggest composure. Through the glass, she could see Jenny running up the path from the village, her cap askew, her face a mask of terror. Behind her, the embankment dropped away toward the stream, and somewhere down there, arranged with Fitzwilliam's careful precision on the rocks below, lay what remained of William Collins.
"Something has happened," Elizabeth said, and her voice emerged with exactly the right quality of concern — steady, urgent, not yet afraid. She turned to Charlotte. "Stay here. I will go."
Charlotte shook her head. The movement was small and convincing — a wife's instinct, overriding a friend's instruction. "No. I'm coming."
They went out together. Jenny met them at the gate, sobbing so violently that her words came out in fragments —body, sir, the rocks, oh God, oh God— and Elizabeth gripped the girl's shoulders and spoke with an authority she did not feel.
"Jenny. Breathe. Tell me what you saw."
"Mr. Collins, miss. Down by the stream. On the rocks. He's — oh, miss, I think he's dead."
Charlotte made a sound. It was masterful — a small, choked gasp that could have been shock or grief or simple disbelief, and that contained, beneath its surface, the genuine horror of a woman confronting a reality she had created. Her handfound Elizabeth's arm and gripped hard, and Elizabeth felt the tremor running through her friend's body and thought:She is not acting. She is terrified. And no one will ever know that the terror is not for the reasons they imagine.
They went down the path. Elizabeth kept Charlotte's arm and guided her, which served the dual purpose of providing physical support and ensuring that Charlotte's approach to the body was controlled. They could not rush. They could not seem too knowing. They had to let the scene arrive at them with the full force of apparent surprise.
The embankment was steep — a ten-foot drop to the stream bed, where moss-covered rocks jutted from the shallow water. Collins lay at the base, face-down, his left arm extended and his right folded beneath his body. His coat was torn. His hat lay upside-down in the stream, rocking gently in the current. The wound on his head — the wound that Charlotte's paperweight had made — was hidden beneath him, and the rocks beneath his skull were dark with what could only be blood.
Fitzwilliam had done expert work. The scene told a simple story: a man walking in the dark, an uneven path, a misstep, a fall. The torn coat suggested impact with branches during the descent. The position of the body was consistent with a headlong tumble, the kind of accident that killed country parsons with reliable frequency. There was nothing — nothing — to suggest that this man had died anywhere other than the spot where he now lay.
Charlotte began to cry. Real tears — Elizabeth could see them tracking down her cheeks — though whether they were grief or relief or the simple physiological response to a terror that had been building for hours, Elizabeth could not say. She put her arm around Charlotte's shoulders and drew her close.
"Don't look," she murmured. "Don't look, Charlotte."