Chapter 14
The Davenport ball was the most anticipated event of the Season, and it was attended every spring by the proportion of London society that considered itself essential; by a smaller proportion that wished to be considered essential; and by a smaller proportion still that knew the difference.
Catherine had been informing the household for a fortnight that they would attend, in the tone of a woman delivering a verdict.
Edmund had not protested. He had stopped protesting Catherine’s pronouncements at sixteen, when he had concluded that the energy required to maintain a position against his elder sister was disproportionate to the rewards.
He had instead spent the afternoon of the ball in his study, attending to a piece of correspondence from his steward, and waiting, with a patience he had not previously associated with social occasions, for the moment Sophia would come down.
He was waiting in the hall with Catherine when she did.
He heard her step on the landing above before he saw her. The soft tread he had been cataloging for weeks, slightly hurried, the rustle of silk against banister. He looked up.
Sophia was on the upper landing, half in shadow, half in the warm pool of the hall lamp. She was wearing a gown of deep midnight blue, the color of the sky just before it turned black, with small white flowers worked into the arrangement of her dark hair.
The cut of the gown was simple in the way that good gowns were always simple, which meant it had been the work of a modiste who understood her client.
The shade of blue made her gray eyes look almost silver in the lamplight, and her composure, which she wore as a matter of habit, had been replaced that evening by something quieter and brighter. The kind of quiet that meant she had chosen, against her usual practice, to be seen.
He watched as she descended the stairs.
The sentence he had been in the middle of speaking to Catherine left his head somewhere around the third stair from the top. He had been telling his sister something about the carriage. He could not remember what.
Catherine, mercifully, finished the sentence for him.
“You were observing that the carriage will need to be brought ‘round at half past nine,” Catherine said, dryly, without turning her head.
“Yes,” Edmund said. “That was the substance of it.”
“I thought it might be.”
Sophia looked at her husband when she reached the bottom of the stairs. He met her gaze, and for one held, unhurried moment, something passed between them in the warm hall lamplight that Edmund did not have a name for, but he knew they both felt it. He did not arrange his face against it.
She did not arrange hers. The look held a moment longer, and then she lowered her eyes, a faint blush rising in her cheeks, and she held out her gloved hand for the cloak the footman was bringing forward and let it be settled across her shoulders with the small composed motion proper to a woman who had recovered her bearings and was choosing to be polite about it.
“Is the carriage ready?” she asked Catherine.
“It is,” Catherine said, and the way she said it left a small, eloquent silence in the hall that Edmund declined to acknowledge.
Edmund offered Sophia his arm. She took it, the silk of her glove was very thin. He could feel the warmth of her hand through it, the small steady pulse at her wrist, and he had to look firmly at the front door for some seconds before he was capable of walking like a normal man.
***
The Davenport house in Cavendish Square was the brightest house in London. Every window blazed in candlelight. The marble pillars at the front had been adorned in candles set in glass globes against the spring wind, and the broad steps were lined with footmen in white gloves and dark livery.
The music of an orchestra floated out into the street with the promise of a ballroom that had been arranged with intention.
Inside, the ballroom was vast and golden, the chandeliers lit, the floor waxed to the dangerous sheen of a polished lake, and the assembled company moved across it in the slow ceremonial pattern that constituted a London ball at the height of the Season.
They were announced upon arrival.
“The Earl of Ashfield and Lady Ashfield.”
The room turned to look at them. Edmund, who had spent more than two decades of his adult life carefully calibrating his response to being looked at by rooms, discovered that he had stopped caring.
He could see Sophia from the corner of his eye, her hand light on his arm, the line of her throat above the midnight blue silk, the small unhurried lift of her chin as she met the watching room with the easy composure of a woman who had decided that whatever the room thought, it was not going to change the way she walked across it.
They moved into the ballroom together, and they were, Edmund understood with a clarity that startled him, magnificent.
They were magnificent because they were not performing. Other couples in the room were performing, in a hundred small, calibrated ways; the steady work of being seen as they wished to be seen. He and Sophia were not.
They were simply walking across a polished floor together, his hand under hers, her step matching his without conscious effort, and the room read it, the way rooms always read those things, and adjusted its attention accordingly. He felt the adjustment happen.
He felt the company decide, in the way companies decided such matters in the first few moments of a couple’s arrival, that the Cavendish’s were not, after all, the object of speculation the room had been preparing to make of them, but the kind of couple one watched for less calculating reasons.
He noted the adjustment with the part of his mind that did that kind of accounting. The rest of his mind was, by then, no longer attending to the room.
Edmund attended to his wife with a steadiness that was nothing like discretion.
He spoke when spoken to. He performed the necessary acknowledgments.
He had a brief conversation with Lord Davenport about a horse, and a slightly longer one with Lady Stanhope about her eldest daughter, who had been favorably noticed by a viscount and was, in Lady Stanhope’s phrase, on the cusp.
He smiled at the right moments and was civil to people he did not care for.
And the entire time, he was aware of Sophia at his elbow, of her hand on his arm, of the small, private smile she gave him once when Lady Stanhope was looking the other way, and of the manner in which she greeted the room with an unhurried grace that did not appear to be a performance because it was not.
He cared about her smile and her hand and the manner in which she carried herself. He did not care about anything else.
It was, perhaps, half an hour into the evening when the orchestra finished a country dance and a slight pause settled over the floor the particular pause that preceded the announcement of a waltz. Edmund turned to Sophia.
She had been listening to something Lady Davenport was saying, her head tilted attentively, her closed fan against her gloved palm. She must have felt him turn and looked up.
The look she gave him held a single, careful question that already contained its own answer.
It was the look of a woman who had heard the orchestra pause and the announcement begin, and who had asked him, in the small inquiry of her eyes, if he might dance with her.
He had not yet spoken. He did not need to. He offered his hand. She gave him hers.
They moved out onto the floor together with the formal slow steps of the opening figure, and the music began.
Edmund put his right hand at her waist and his left around her hand, , and there was perhaps a hand’s breadth of air between them.
It was the distance the waltz required. It was the distance society was watching for.
Sophia’s hand on his shoulder was warm. He could feel the small pulse in her wrist beneath his thumb.
She smelled, faintly, of jasmine and something cleaner beneath it, the particular scent he had been registering in the corridors of his house for two weeks and had not, until that moment, allowed himself to name. He led.
She followed. They moved through the steps with the quiet, automatic competence of two people who had, in childhood, been taught to dance by the same instructor at Ashfield and had not, until that moment, registered that the muscle memory of it was still in their bodies.
“You waltz like a man who does not waltz often,” Sophia observed, quietly. Her voice was very low. The orchestra was loud enough that no one a yard away would hear her.
“I do not waltz often.”
“You waltz well, nonetheless.”
“Thank you. I was instructed by Mr. Hadleigh in the summer of my sixteenth year. He insisted on form over enjoyment, and I have never quite forgiven him.”
“I had Mr. Hadleigh too.”
“I know. He told me, with some asperity, that you had been the only pupil who had ever corrected his footwork.”
“He had it wrong.”
“He did. I confirmed it later. I did not tell him.”
She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth moved, the way it did when she was deciding whether to give him a real one, and her gray eyes lifted to his face for a moment that was longer than required.
The candlelight caught the silver in her irises and Edmund had to concentrate, with some force, on his footwork, because his body wanted to close the distance between them and his mind was reminding him, with decreasing authority, that theirs was a marriage of convenience.
Sophia looked up at him and did not look away. The waltz turned them through the corner of the room, and her hand on his shoulder shifted slightly.
His hand at her waist felt the small movement of her breathing, and Edmund understood, with a clarity that was almost unbearable, that he had been falling in love with his wife for weeks and that the falling had arrived somewhere it could no longer be called by any other name.