Chapter 9 #2
Sophia did not turn around. She nodded once, so that he would see it, and continued to the breakfast room, where she sat down at her place and discovered that her hands were not entirely steady when she picked up her teacup.
In the first week of married life that followed, she learned the rhythms of the Cavendish household with the patience of a woman who understood that habits were a form of love and that the way a household ran was a record of the people who lived in it.
Catherine preferred to be undisturbed between eleven and noon, when she dealt with the household accounts and the day’s correspondence.
Henry took his breakfast at precisely half past eight, and the precise quantity of marmalade permitted to him was a daily negotiation that had reached the formality of treaty law.
Arabella talked in long, opinionated arcs that did not require interruption and resented being given any.
Her favorite subjects were, in order: the inadequacies of London modistes, the manifest superiority of Catherine when she had been Arabella’s age, the question of whether Mr. Foster of Hampshire was as well-favored as everyone claimed, and the precise nature of her own emotional weather, which she reported with the meteorological detail of a woman who considered herself a phenomenon worth tracking.
Sophia learned these things without appearing to have studied them. She had always been a careful observer of rooms and the people in them, and the Cavendish household was a room she was living in. Sophia arranged the morning post on a small table in the hall where Catherine would find it first.
She suggested, very mildly, that Mrs. Pratt might be relieved by having an afternoon to herself once a week, and the suggestion was received with such immediate gratitude that Sophia understood the household had been waiting for someone to notice.
She did not announce the arrangements. They simply occurred, the way weather occurred, and the household adjusted itself around them without any of its members quite being able to identify what had changed.
It was on the third afternoon, during one of her quiet tours of the house, that she came across the writing box.
Edmund had walked her through the rooms the day after the wedding, with a careful formality that suggested he was not certain he had the authority to be showing her the house she lived in, and he had paused at one of the doors on the upper floor to say, briefly, that the room had been Margaret’s, and that he had not yet decided what to do with it.
He had not gone in. Sophia had not asked to, either. She had walked past the door several times since.
That afternoon, she stopped. The morning light was particularly fine through the eastern windows; she pushed the door open and went in.
The room was small and sparsely furnished; the kind of room a household kept open without quite knowing what to do with.
There was a sofa, two chairs, and a single bookshelf.
On the bookshelf, alongside three volumes of Cowper and a small, leather-bound book of devotionals, sat a writing box made of Walnut.
It was finely made, with brass fittings and a small, ornate lock of the sort that suggested its contents had once mattered to someone enough to be secured.
The brass had darkened with age. The wood had the soft patina of an object that had been handled often and then, for a long time, not handled at all.
It sat at eye level on the second shelf, between the Cowper and the devotionals, in the particular way that objects sat when they had been put down by someone who intended to come back for them and had not.
Sophia did not touch it. She stood in front of the bookshelf and looked at it for perhaps a full minute; and she understood, with a clarity she could not entirely justify, that the box had been Margaret’s.
It was a woman’s box, for a woman’s correspondence, and it had been sitting on the shelf for some time, in the room nobody used.
She left it where it was. She was not certain why she did not mention it. The room that once belonged to the late countess had been passed to Sophia. In the broad sense in which any room of the house was hers, and she had every right to investigate its contents.
But the box belonged, in some way she could not articulate, to whoever had last set it down, and Sophia had never been a woman who opened other people’s correspondence.
Once in her life had been enough to last her permanently. She closed the door of Margaret’s sitting room behind her and went downstairs to find Henry, who required arbitration concerning the deployment of his soldiers on the morning room sill.
’’’’She and Edmund were, by then, developing a routine.
It was domestic in a way Sophia had not expected and was unexpectedly intimate for two people who had agreed their marriage was a formality.
They took breakfast together briefly, before the rest of the household stirred, and reviewed the day’s engagements with the matter-of-fact efficiency of partners with work to do.
Edmund took his tea with a single lump of sugar and a precise amount of milk that Sophia identified within the first morning and began arranging for the footman to deliver in the correct proportions thereafter.
He read his correspondence at the table, but he set it down when she spoke, which was a courtesy Lord Graystone had never extended.
In the evenings, after Henry had been put to bed and Arabella had retired upstairs with a novel or to write to a school friend whose name Sophia could not keep track of, she and Edmund spent an hour in the drawing room reading.
Sometimes one of them would read a passage aloud, or remark on something, and the other would answer, and then the quiet would settle again. The silence between them was comfortable and Sophia found herself looking forward to it with a quiet anticipation she did not examine.
The longer they spent in each other’s company, Sophia began to notice things about her husband.
She noticed the precise sound of his tread on the stairs, which was lighter than a man of his height ought to produce, the result of years on a country estate where one did not announce one’s arrival unless one wished to be observed.
She noticed the low, level register of his voice when he read aloud to Henry, and she discovered, almost by accident, that he had taken up the habit of reading the boy a chapter of something before bed; a practice that had begun, Catherine told her, only after Sophia’s arrival and that Henry had received it with grave delight.
Sophia listened from the hallway one evening and heard the low murmur of Edmund’s voice telling Henry about Greek heroes, and the careful, patient way Edmund answered the boy’s interruptions.
She stood in the hallway for longer than she had intended, leaning slightly against the wall, and discovered that her chest was doing something she did not have a name for.
Each small discovery felt like a thread being pulled from a spool she had not realized she was holding. She began to feel, tentatively, provisionally, as though the ground beneath her had become solid again.
One evening at the end of that first week, she was in the upstairs corridor on her way to her room when Edmund passed below in the entrance hall. She did not know where he had come in from, and he paused to say something to the footman about a horse before he went into his study.
She watched from the landing without meaning to: The particulars of his movements, the way he listened before he spoke, the slight tilt of his head when he was paying attention. He did not look up. He had no idea she was watching.
She stood on the landing in the darkness above the lit hall and felt, with a quietness that frightened her, that she had been looking at him with the attention of a woman who was learning a face she meant to keep.
She had expected, in marrying an old friend, to feel at ease in a familiar way. Comfortable. Settled. The feeling of a room one had always known. She had not expected to find herself noticing him. The grain of his voice. The line of his shoulders.
The way he set his hand on the newel post when he turned toward the study. She looked at him a moment longer, went to her room and dressed for bed refusing to examine any of it for very long, because examining it would have required her to admit something she was not yet prepared to admit.
She lay in the dark for some time, listening to the house settle around her, and discovered she could not sleep.
***
The library at the back of the house was a comfortable room with a coal fire that the housekeeper banked low and kept burning through the night. Sophia had taken to going down to it on the nights when sleep refused to come. She had done that twice already in the first week.
The third time, in the small hours of the morning when the house was at its quietest, she went down in her wrap with the intention of finding the volume of Cowper she had noticed on the upper shelf and reading until her mind grew quiet.
She did not bring a candle. The corridor lamp was lit. She moved on bare feet because she did not wish to wake anyone, and she pushed open the library door without knocking, because she was the lady of the house and the library belonged to her, and that was when she saw him.
Edmund was standing at the window.
He had not heard her come in. He was holding a glass of brandy that he had not been drinking from, and he was looking out at nothing, because there was nothing to see at that hour but the dim shape of the garden and the dark shoulders of the neighboring houses.
His shoulders were set in a way Sophia had not seen them set before.
He looked tired. He looked lonely. He looked, more than anything, like a man carrying something too heavy for one person to carry on their own, and he was carrying it in the dark because he did not know how, or who, to ask for help.
She had seen Edmund Cavendish in many configurations over the years. The boy who had carried her piggyback; the youth at his father’s shoulder; the man who had married Margaret and lost her; the steady, controlled figure who had crossed a ballroom floor to rescue her from her own composure.
She had never seen him in the way he was that moment. She had never seen him when he thought no one was watching, and the sight of it produced in her chest a tenderness so acute it was almost painful.
She backed out of the library before he could notice her.
Sophia closed the door with the silent precision of a woman who had practiced silence her whole life.
She climbed the stairs to her room without making a sound, she got back into bed and lay in the dark with her eyes open, and she did not sleep for a long time after.
She had agreed to a marriage of convenience. She had agreed to a name and a household and to be a steady hand at his side. She had not agreed to fall in love with him.