Chapter 13
Arabella’s manner shifted on a Thursday.
It was not dramatic. Arabella was not a girl who did anything without drama, and the absence of drama was, in her, the more eloquent signal. There were no scenes. There were no accusations. There was only a series of small adjustments.
The slight withdrawal of warmth from her morning greetings, the careful blankness when she and Sophia happened to meet in a corridor; the small silences where, the week before, there had been the chatter of a girl who had decided that her brother’s new wife was an interesting addition to her household and was prepared to use her accordingly.
In the evenings, Arabella, who had previously settled in the drawing room with the rest of the household for the after-supper hour, began carrying her novel up to her own sitting room with the small announcement that she would prefer the quiet, and Sophia, watching her go, knew it was not the quiet she had retreated to find.
Sophia noticed within the first morning. By the afternoon she was certain. By the second day she was beginning to understand that whatever had occurred between Tuesday and Thursday had not, in Arabella’s mind, occurred between them.
It had occurred to Arabella alone, in some private architecture of grievance that Sophia did not yet know how to enter, and Arabella had begun treating Sophia with the cool, polite distance of a girl who had been told something and had elected to believe it.
Sophia tried, on the third day, to be warmer.
She suspected that had been a mistake almost immediately.
Warmth, applied without invitation, read as performance, and performance was the precise quality Arabella seemed to be looking out for.
The harder Sophia tried, the more deliberately Arabella looked away.
The tension came to a head at breakfast.
It was a Saturday morning, the household assembled later than usual because of a late evening the night before, and Sophia, looking for a neutral common subject that might draw Arabella into ordinary conversation, asked whether she would care to accompany her and Eleanor to the milliner’s.
Arabella did not look up from her plate.
“No, thank you,” she said.
The words were perfectly polite. The temperature of them was below freezing.
Catherine, at the head of the table, paused with her teacup halfway to her mouth and looked, very briefly, from Arabella to Sophia and back.
Edmund, behind his newspaper, went unnaturally still in the way that men went still when they had heard something they did not yet trust themselves to address.
There was a small silence that followed. The clock in the hall struck nine, with the soft, indifferent precision of a clock that did not care about matters of the household, and the silence stretched a minute longer than was comfortable before Sophia found her voice.
“Of course,” she said. “Another time, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Arabella said. The word was a closed door.
Sophia set down her napkin with the careful steadiness of a woman who had spent her entire adult life learning how to leave a room without appearing to flee one.
She rose from the table, excusing herself with a small smile that fooled no one and made it as far as the landing of the stairs before her hands began to shake.
She gripped the banister and breathed. She would not cry over Arabella’s hostility in a hallway where any servant could come upon her.
She had spent a year being managed by Lord Graystone without crying in public, and she was not about to break that record, certainly not over a nineteen-year-old girl who had decided, for reasons Sophia could not yet identify, that the woman her brother had married was not to be trusted.
Her eyes stung. She blinked the tears away and straightened her spine. She continued up the stairs to her own sitting room and closed the door behind her, and she stood with her back against the wood and her hands pressed flat against it, and she did not cry.
She made tea, eventually, with the small spirit lamp on the side table.
She drank it standing at the window. Sophia watched the morning traffic in the street below and made herself sit with the small ugly certainty that the worst part of the morning was not Arabella’s coldness but the fact that Sophia had nowhere within the house to put it.
Catherine was kind, but Catherine was Arabella’s sister, and the loyalty in that direction was older and deeper than any she yet had with Sophia. Edmund could not be brought into it.
Edmund had only just begun to look at her in the particular way someone would look at a person they found endearing, and she would not be the woman who arrived in his life requiring him, within a fortnight, to manage a quarrel between his wife and his sister.
The walls of the house, which had been comfortingfor the past two weeks, were beginning to feel close. She wrote, with the careful efficiency of a woman who had only one steady ally in London, a brief note to Eleanor, and rang for the footman to take it.
The reply came back within the hour, in handwriting Sophia could read at a hundred yards. It contained the address of a small tea room on Conduit Street, the time three o’clock, and the line Bring composure. I shall bring outrage. We can pool them.
Sophia put on her hat and went.
The tea room was the kind of establishment Eleanor liked because it served small cakes and permitted privacy, two qualities Eleanor considered essential to the conduct of female friendship.
Eleanor was already there, in the corner table beneath the window, and she had ordered the tea strong and dark and had also, Sophia suspected, ordered Sophia’s tea exactly the way Sophia preferred it without having been asked.
The cup was in front of Sophia’s place before she had sat down. Beside it was a small plate of seed cake. Eleanor took one look at her face and pushed the cake firmly toward her.
“Begin,” Eleanor said. “And do not, on this occasion, edit.”
Sophia, who had been intending to edit, did not.
She told Eleanor about the cold breakfast and the closed door and the banister and the way her hands would not stop shaking, and somewhere in the middle of it the composure she had been carrying all morning gave way and she pressed her fingertips hard against her eyes and let the tears come, briefly and furiously, in the corner of a tea room on Conduit Street where no one but Eleanor could see her.
Eleanor said nothing. She poured a fresh cup of tea and waited. She did not, with the steady wisdom of a woman who understood the difference between presence and management, attempt to fix any of it.
When Sophia had stopped crying, Eleanor reached across the table and took her hand. Her grip was warm and firm and entirely without ceremony.
“Now then,” Eleanor said. “Listen to me. You shall walk back into that house this evening, and you shall not walk back into it alone. I know you. Your habit, when something hurts, is to retreat behind your own composure and wait for the world to come to its senses without you.
That is a strategy that has served you for many things, and it will not serve you for this. You have a sister-in-law who has changed toward you in the space of a week, and the most economical explanation for that in this town is usually that someone has been talking to her.
You have an elder sister-in-law who is perceptive and shrewd and your ally if you will let her be, and you have a husband who is, by any fair reckoning, very nearly besotted with you.
You have allies in that house, Sophia, and you must let yourself have them.
Do not be the woman who carries it alone because she has always carried things alone.
That woman is a person I love, but she is not the person this situation requires. ”
Sophia did not speak for a moment. She picked up her tea, holding it with both hands. She looked at Eleanor across the small marble table with the small plates and the candied flowers and the corner light through the window.
“I came in here,” she said, “in order to drop my composure for one quarter of an hour. I did not expect to be marshalled.”
“The marshalling is the cake,” Eleanor said. “The composure is something we shall manage with the tea. Eat your seed cake. You look as though you have not eaten anything since yesterday.”
Sophia did as she was told. They talked, after that, about other things.
The woman in the green carriage, a play Eleanor wished to see, and a small purchase Eleanor had been considering at the milliner’s the next street over, and Sophia, who had come in feeling that the walls of the Cavendish townhouse had been closing around her by degrees, walked out into the afternoon light with the small steady knowledge that there was a city beyond those walls, and that she had a friend in it, and that she did not have to carry anything without help.
She walked back from Conduit Street with her composure intact, her shoulders low, and the small hard resolve of a woman who had decided what she was going to do next.
She was going to say something. She did not yet know how she would find her way back to Arabella, but she could begin with Catherine, who had been watching her across the breakfast table that morning with the particular alert stillness of a woman who had noticed everything and was waiting to be asked.
Sophia would ask. That evening, perhaps.
The next day, if the evening did not provide the moment.
Before that, however, there was something else she could no longer postpone.
’She had been delaying. She had been telling herself, for several days, that she was waiting for the right moment, that the letters were a thing she needed to approach with care, that one did not read a dead woman’s private correspondence in a hurry.