Chapter 10 #2
He did not, in fact, say another word on the subject. He merely raised his glass in a small private gesture that was not quite a toast nor a remark, and not quite anything that Edmund could object to.
Edmund accepted it without comment and changed the subject to the question of Jonathan’s plans for the summer, which carried them comfortably to the end of the port.
When they joined the ladies in the drawing room, Sophia was at the small table by the window with Catherine, occupied with a question about a charitable subscription Catherine had been asked to support.
Jonathan crossed to them at once, with the casual, undisguised warmth of a man who had concluded that the new lady of the house was worth his serious regard and saw no reason to disguise the conclusion any longer.
“Lady Ashfield,” he said, drawing up a chair without waiting for an invitation.
“I have meant to ask you, since we did not have the chance at supper. Edmund tells me you know paintings. He does not know paintings. He has been describing your views to me with the slightly desperate air of a man who suspects he is being made a fool of and cannot quite tell.”
“He is not being made a fool of. He is being patient.”
“There it is again, the patience. He produces it as though it were a virtue.”
“In him it is.”
“In him it is a survival skill. I should know. I have been testing it since we were fourteen.”
She laughed, and Edmund, crossing the room to join them, caught the laugh in mid-air and was undone by it.
Sophia’s head was tilted slightly back, her composure entirely abandoned, her gray eyes bright with the unforced amusement of a woman who had been ambushed by an honest joke and not yet remembered to dress her face for the room.
It was, he thought, the most thoroughly unguarded he had ever seen her. He stopped where he stood. He stared, by his own subsequent reckoning, for several seconds longer than was anywhere near defensible.
Jonathan, with the cheerful absence of mercy that had characterized his friendship since they were boys, noticed.
He turned his head a fraction, caught Edmund’s eye over the back of his chair, and raised one brow in an expression that managed, with extraordinary economy, to convey both deep amusement and the words I told you so, plain as if they had been pasted on a placard.
Edmund composed his face. Jonathan composed his. The exchange lasted perhaps a second and a half. Sophia, recovering, did not appear to have caught it. Catherine, who had caught all of it, sat down with her sewing and did not raise her eyes.
Edmund took the chair opposite Sophia. He picked up the cup of tea Catherine handed him and directed his attention firmly to Jonathan, who was telling Sophia a story about a Venetian painter he had once been swindled by, and reminded himself that he was thirty years old, had passed through Oxford, had managed an estate, and was perfectly capable of attending to a conversation in his own drawing room without behaving like a schoolboy.
The reminder was useful for approximately four minutes. Then Sophia laughed again, and Edmund discovered that the reminder would require administering at regular intervals for the rest of the evening, resigining himself to the administration.
Arabella appeared near the end of the visit. She arrived in the drawing room nominally to retrieve a book she had left on the small table by the fire, and apparently to deliver a verdict on the current state of the household, which she had been formulating upstairs and was ready to share.
She was wearing an evening dress in a pale apricot that did not suit her coloring and that she insisted, against all evidence, made her look sophisticated, and she swept in with the entirely innocent expectation of being greeted as the most interesting addition to the evening.
She had not realized Jonathan was present.
Edmund saw it happen. He saw the precise instant Arabella registered Jonathan in the room, the small involuntary check in her step, the way her hand went up automatically to a curl that had not strayed and to a ribbon that needed no adjusting.
He saw Jonathan rise to his feet before Edmund had registered the movement, which was, Edmund noted with a detached fascination he had not previously thought himself capable of summoning over a sister, faster than Jonathan generally rose for anyone short of a duchess.
“Miss Cavendish.”
“Mr. Weston.” Arabella’s voice was an octave higher than usual. “I had not realized you were here. I would have come down earlier.”
“I am sorry to have missed you at supper. Tell me, how are you finding London? Edmund has been deliberately uninformative on the subject and I have been obliged to form my impression from inference, which has been unsatisfactory.”
Arabella sat down on the edge of the sofa, in the considered, slightly upright posture of a girl who had not previously thought about how to sit on a sofa and was clearly thinking about it with great application. She told him at some length how she was finding London.
Jonathan, who had asked the question for the express purpose of being told, listened to the answer with the focused, unhurried attention of a man who was paying her the courtesy of full regard, and Edmund watched the entire exchange with the dawning awareness that he was going to need to have a conversation with someone at some point in the not too distant future, and that he did not yet know with whom.
Sophia, in the chair beside him, observed the same scene with the same attention, and her voice, when she spoke, was very low.
“She has not stopped smiling for ten minutes.”
“I am aware.”
“He has not stopped looking at her.”
“I am aware of that as well.”
“How long has this been the case?”
“Since approximately the time she was sixteen, by my reckoning. Possibly earlier. Jonathan would know more precisely. He has been managing it, with varying success, for the better part of a decade.””
Sophia considered his words. “He has not said anything?”
“He has not. He is, in his own way, more discreet than I am.”
“That seems an extraordinarily low bar.”
“It has been, recently,” Edmund agreed. ”She almost smiled.
She had been almost smiling at him for a week.
He was beginning to suspect that the almost was, in fact, a smile, and that the full smile was something she did not give without permission.
He had not yet earned that permission. He intended to.
***
After Jonathan had left, and Arabella had floated upstairs with the dazed satisfaction of a young woman who had spent an evening being looked at by someone she had begun to wonder about, the house settled into its usual late quiet. Catherine retired. Sophia went upstairs.
Edmund went to his study.
The anonymous note was still in his desk drawer where he had locked it the day after the wedding. He took it out and turned it over in his hands, reading it again, though he knew it by heart.
You do not know what you have married into. Ask your wife about certain letters.
He considered asking Sophia. He could walk down the hall to her sitting room, knock on the door, and confront her directly.
He trusted her in the precise way he had not known he could trust anyone, which was without conditions and without the running a mental audit of evidence that he applied to almost every other person in his life.
The question was not whether to trust her.
The question was why someone wanted him to doubt her, and what they knew that Edmund did not. He wondered whether not knowing was a thing he could continue to live with.
He decided he could not.
Edmund folded the note carefully along its original creases and locked it back in the drawer.
He sat in the chair by the fire for some time, not paying much attention to the small late-evening sounds of the house, and turned over the names of people in London who might have any reason to write him such a note, arriving at no satisfactory answer.
The list of people who wished him ill, was on the whole, short. The list of people who wished Sophia ill, was one name.
Edmund went to bed eventually. He passed Sophia’s door on the landing. There was no light beneath it. She was presumably, asleep, untroubled by the questions that had begun, very slowly, to wake him.
He went to his own room and lay in the dark.
The thought that arrived, uninvited and unwelcome just before sleep finally took him, was that whatever Lord Graystone had set in motion was not finished, and whatever was coming next would arrive in his house, where Sophia lived.
Edmund had agreed to keep her safe though he did not yet know precisely from what.