Chapter 14 #2
The dance changed. The orchestra moved into the slower passage. He turned her, and she came back into his arms, and for one long deliberate count of three seconds he held her at the closest distance the figure permitted, and she did not look away.
“Edmund,” she said. Very quietly.
“Yes.”
She did not finish the sentence. He did not press. The dance moved them apart again, and the slow seconds of the closer hold ended. The orchestra carried them through the rest of the waltz with the impersonal indifference of an orchestra that did not know what it had just witnessed.
When the music ended, he bowed. She curtsied. They walked off the floor with the formal courtesy of two people who had been doing that their whole lives, and neither of them quite met the other’s eye. They did not speak about the waltz for the rest of the evening.
But every time Edmund looked at Sophia after that, she was already looking at him, and every time she looked at him, he was already looking at her, and the careful averted glances of the rest of the evening were, Edmund suspected, more visible to the watching room than the waltz itself had been.
***
They left at one in the morning. Catherine had elected to remain another hour with Lady Davenport, and Arabella, on the strength of having danced four times with a young man Edmund did not yet know how to feel about, had elected to remain with Catherine.
So, Edmund and Sophia rode home alone, in the dark, with the soft jolt of the carriage and the muffled clop of the horses and the slow, regular rhythm of the lamplighter’s posts sliding past the window.
Sophia sat opposite him. She was looking out the window. The lamplight slipped across her face at intervals, lighting and then dimming her, and Edmund watched her in the patterned darkness and did not speak because he could not yet trust himself with whatever sentence he might begin.
The carriage drew up to their house. The footman handed them down.
The house was quiet. They walked together into the drawing room because neither of them was, evidently, ready to part on the landing.
Edmund crossed to the small writing table where his correspondence had been laid out earlier in the evening; the small backlog of estate letters he had been intending to work through, and he carried them to the chair by the fire sitting down with them in his lap.
Sophia drew a book from the small table at her elbow and settled into the chair across from him with her feet drawn up beneath her in the unguarded way of a woman who had reached a room where she did not need to perform.
The fire was low. The room was warm. There was a single lamp on the side table that the footman had left burning, and beyond that the long quiet shadows of a drawing room in the small hours.
He read a letter from his steward about the spring planting. She turned a page. Neither of them spoke. The fire between them was sufficient warmth for both, and the silence between them was a thing of their own making; a third presence in the room that he had stopped trying to define.
He read the letter twice and retained none of it. He set it aside, picking up the next.
He read perhaps half of the next letter before he became aware that he had not, in fact, been reading at all.
He had, instead, been watching Sophia, and he had been doing so for some time; perhaps for the better part of the past quarter of an hour, and the way he had been looking at her could not honestly be called a glance.
She was turning a page. He observed the line of her shoulder. The curve of her neck. The strand of dark hair that had slipped loose from its arrangement during the waltz and had been falling across her temple for the entire drive home.
He thought, with the small, exhausted clarity of a man who had been disciplined for a great many days, and who had reached the end of the discipline, that he wanted to brush that strand of hair back from her face with a tenderness he had not permitted in any room of his life.
She looked up, catching his gaze.
He did not look away in time. He did not look away at all.
She held his gaze across the small warm room, and after a moment she raised one eyebrow, asking the smallest possible question.
The lightest possible inquiry from a woman who had registered the look and was offering him the chance to account for it.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked, finally. Her voice very soft.
“Something else,” he said.
She knew it was a lie. She did not press.
She held his gaze for a moment longer, and the flush in her cheek told him that she had decided not to insist on a more honest answer, and that the not-insisting was, in a way he could not have articulated, more intimate than any answer would have been.
Then she lowered her eyes to her book, and he returned, with some difficulty, to his work.
He found, as the quarter hour wore on, that he was unexpectedly reluctant to leave.
When he finally set the letters aside and rose from the chair, his hand brushed the back of hers on the wide arm of the chair where her arm rested. It was accidental, or nearly so.
The contact lasted perhaps a count of two seconds.
Neither of them acknowledged it. Neither of them moved for a full breath.
Then Edmund straightened, she lifted her eyes to his, and the moment dissolved with the slow, careful inevitability of any moment that two people did not yet know how to keep.
“Good night,” he said. His voice was steady.
“Good night,” she said. Hers voice wavering.
Sophia rose. The couple went out into the hall and up the stairs in silence, and at the landing she turned to her room and he turned to his, closing the door of his bedroom behind him and stood in the darkness for a moment with his eyes closed and his heart conducting business he had not authorized.
He went to his desk in the corner of the room and opened the drawer.
The sketch remained where he had left it. Henry’s hands holding a wooden horse the small careful lines of his fingers, the patient attention of an artist who had loved what she was drawing.
He took the sketch out. He placed it under the lamp and studied it the way he had been, in private and at intervals, for the past two weeks.
He thought about what it would be like to be seen that clearly by a woman who drew like that.
He thought he had begun to find out. He thought that finding out was the most important thing that had happened to him in years.
He put the sketch back and went to bed.
He lay in the dark with his eyes open for a long time, and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the word convenience and how thoroughly inadequate it had become, and how he was going to have to do something about that.
The prospect of doing something about it terrified him in a way that nothing else in his well-ordered life had managed to do.