Chapter 12 #2
The first reading had told Edmund that Lord Graystone considered himself owed. The second reading had confirmed it. The third reading, which Edmund had begun undertaking, in the dim light of his study with the afternoon turning slowly toward evening, told him something he had not noticed before.
That the letter was patient. That it was the letter of a man who was prepared to wait.
That Lord Graystone considered the matter of his denied fortune not an injury he would simply nurse but an account he intended to bring to settlement, and that he had been signaling, in the careful grammar of the gentleman’s correspondence, that the settlement would be at the time and by the method of his choosing.
The promenade had been part of it. The conversation with Arabella had been part of it. Whatever was coming next would also be part of it.
Edmund locked the letter back in the drawer.
He sat for some time with his hand resting on the closed drawer, and then he stood up and went down to the drawing room, where Sophia and Henry had moved their campaign and where Sophia, looking up at him as he came in, gave him a small smile that he received with more gratitude than he was prepared to acknowledge.
Edmund sat down in the chair across from her. He did not tell her about the promenade. He told himself he would, in time, when he had a clearer sense of what to do with Arabella. He did not, in fact, know whether that was true.
***
That evening, after the household had retired, Sophia came down to his study with a cup of tea.
He had not asked her to. She arrived in the doorway in her wrap, her hair loose down her back in a way he was decidedly not going to think about.
She carried a small tray with two cups on it and set the tray down on the corner of his desk with the air of a woman who had decided to do it and saw no reason to negotiate it.
“I am not certain whether you take milk in the evening,” she said.
“I do.”
“I have brought a small jug.”
“Thank you.”
She handed him the cup. Their fingers brushed, though neither of them remarked on it.
Sophia arranged herself in the chair opposite his desk with a small, settled motion that suggested she intended to stay for an interval she had not specified, and she took up the book she had brought with her, a volume of poetry he saw was Cowper, and began to read.
Edmund looked at his correspondence. He was reading a letter from his steward for the second time and not retaining any of it. He set the letter down and watched her instead.
She had not noticed. She was reading. The lamp on the corner of the desk lit her face from the side, throwing one half into warm gold and leaving the other half in soft shadow, and the small line of concentration between her brows was the expression he had been cataloging at breakfast all week.
She turned a page. He watched her thumb move along the edge of the paper with the careful, automatic motion belonging to those who had grown up handling books.
The silence between them was a thing of their own, made up of the small steady sounds of a fire and a turning page and two people sitting in the same room without needing to fill the quiet.
He thought, with the clarity that arrived in him only at very late hours, that it was the silence he had been missing for three years and had not, until that night, been able to name.
Sophia looked up and caught him.
He did not look away in time.
For a long moment they simply looked at each other across the desk. The lamp was warm. The room was very quiet. The clock on the mantel ticked once, and again, and a third time, and Edmund did not, on either of the first two, find a reason to look away.
What he felt, looking at his wife in his study at ten o’clock at night, was a precise, unguarded longing he had not permitted himself to feel in any context for the entirety of his adult life.
He said, quietly, that he was glad she was there. He meant it with more weight than the words could carry.
Sophia watched him for a moment and set the book down in her lap.
She said she was glad to be there. She said it in a voice that knew what he had meant, and he knew she heard him.
The moment held for a count of just a few seconds that he did not measure and that he suspected she did not measure either.
Sophia’s gaze dropped to the cup in her hand. She lifted it and drank as he picked up his pen, and they returned to their separate tasks, resuming the silence.
But the silence had changed. It contained the specific weight of two people who had each looked at the other and not looked away, and Edmund was aware, with a clarity that was both terrifying and entirely welcome, that he had crossed a threshold he could not uncross.
Sophia left, after a while, and wished him a good night. Her voice was soft.
Edmund sat for some time in the empty study after she had left, with the lamp still burning and the second cup of tea still on the tray, and he understood, with the dry clarity he applied to every administrative truth of his life, that he was going to do whatever needed doing about Percival Cummings and Arabella and the steady, unsettling encroachment of unanswered questions.
He was going to do all of it as a man who had begun, in the space of nine days, to love his wife.
This is dangerous, he thought. He discovered, with the small, surprised honesty of a man who had been telling himself otherwise for some time, that he did not, after all, care.
***
A second anonymous note arrived in the morning post.
Edmund was alone at the breakfast table. Sophia had not yet come down; Catherine was upstairs with Henry, who had refused to dress until certain conditions regarding the morning room window had been renegotiated.
The footman set the post beside Edmund’s plate with the small bow of a servant who had been trained not to comment on the volume of his master’s correspondence and withdrew.
Edmund went through the letters in the order he always did.
A bill. A note from a Yorkshire neighbor.
An invitation. And, at the bottom of the pile, in the same cramped, unfamiliar hand he had seen once before, written with the same cheap ink on the same kind of paper, was an unsealed folded note that bore no direction.
He opened it.
The nurse knows the truth.
So did your wife.
Edmund went very still.
He read it again. He read it a third time.
He set it flat on the linen of the breakfast table and looked at it, and his mind moved with the careful, methodical precision of a man who had been trained by years of estate management, to assess a piece of information without permitting the assessment to be hurried by his own feelings.
The note referred to two things. The nurse was nameless. Your wife was Margaret, because Sophia would not have been referred to as your wife by anyone outside the household, and certainly not in the tone of past knowledge the sentence implied. So did your wife.
Margaret had known something. Margaret had known a truth that someone wanted him to investigate, and that someone wanted him to investigate it via a nurse he could not identify.
He folded the note and put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He finished his coffee, with hands that were almost steady, and went to his study.
It was only when he had closed the door behind him that he sat down, put both notes side by side on the blotter, and confirmed, in the cold, practical way he confirmed the alignment of any two pieces of evidence, that they had been written by the same hand.
He sat with it for some time.
Someone in London was trying to tell him something. Someone in London wanted him to know that Margaret had died of something other than the slow illness the physician had attributed her death to.
Someone in London was sending him notes anonymously, in cheap ink, in the handwriting of a person who could write but had never been taught to write well, and the message was that there had been a nurse, and that the nurse knew the truth.
He thought about Margaret’s final illness, which had come on in the autumn and progressed through the winter, and which had been attributed by the physician to a wasting of the constitution that had no clear origin.
He thought about the particular care he and Catherine had taken in those final months, the nurses they had employed, the way Margaret had grown thinner and weaker and more silent through November and December.
How she had taken her final breath in February, with her hand in his and a calm on her face that he had taken at the time for resignation and that he suddenly wondered whether he had read correctly.
He thought about Robert. His younger brother had died in the autumn of the previous year, less than a year before Margaret’s illness began. ’Robert had been twenty-four and reckless and had taken a fall from a curricle on a country road that was reasonably traveled.
The coroner had declared it an accident. Edmund had buried his brother and absorbed the loss with the controlled grief of a man who had been reminded he was a Cavendish and to behave accordingly.
He thought about Lord Graystone’s congratulatory letter.
He thought about the anonymous note that had been tucked in alongside it.
He thought about the fact that Lord Graystone had been at Robert’s funeral and had called on Edmund and Margaret some weeks later.
He had been a fixture, in a quiet way, of the Cavendish circle for several years before Edmund had gone North.
He thought, finally, about the question of whether he should tell Sophia.
He suspected, increasingly, that the answer to a great many questions was Sophia, and that the discipline of his marriage of convenience had begun, very rapidly, to require him to redraw the map of his own behavior. He had not told her about the first note.
He had not told her about Lord Graystone’s letter. He had not told her about the conversation in the park. He was beginning to wonder whether the not-telling had been out of kindness or cowardice, and whether the difference between the two was something he could afford to keep ignoring.
He locked both notes in the lower drawer and went down to breakfast, where Sophia was at the table with her tea. He sat across from her and did not say a word. Not yet.
He told himself it was because he was waiting for more information. He suspected, with the small private honesty that had begun to attend most of his thinking in the past several days, that it was at least half a lie.