A Torn Veil for Your Trouble
It's like a broken mirror. Shards and pieces of things.
Faced with the fact that there is nothing beautiful about Walden Macnair, Eleanor Macnair finds she cannot forgive him, or herself.
But then, neither can he.
Her cold horror seems to sting him for a moment, before he storms out of the house on the first day she sees his Mark. She's left there, clutching like a child or a life preserver the congealing bowl of porridge she was going to serve.
I'm an executioner, he'd introduced himself.
Such a mysterious word, such a fascinating, fetching word to her then. A clean word, endings and full stops, and neat like his tidy mustache, the clean lines of his muscular arm, the shapely, curling bows on her presents - the phrase beautiful even occurs to her, beautiful like tamed flowerbeds and perfectly round pearls.
He is a relief to her, to her sensibilities, a balm for her protracted and public spinsterhood, and she chops her vegetables into neat cubes and trims trailing threads from her clothes with a new feeling of security.
Now she's found the stain, the indelible Mark, the poison, the rot -
Such a beautiful man he was, she thinks, once, faintly, as the bowl of porridge shudders once, violently, and smashes on the floor.