Chapter 15
Lady Fenwick’s card party fell on the Thursday after the Davenport ball, and Catherine had announced over breakfast that they would attend for forty minutes precisely, no longer, on the grounds that one’s obligation to be seen at large events could be discharged efficiently if one only knew how to manage the timing.
Sophia had been grateful for the structure.
The mornings since the Davenport ball had been distracted ones.
She had attended to the post, Henry’s grammar, and Arabella’s continuing chill with the kind of provisional steadiness that was beginning to feel like a costume she was wearing over a body that had recently learned new and inconvenient facts about itself.
She had still not found the right moment to tell Edmund about the note, or about the letters that had prompted it.
Edmund had been called to his solicitor’s at the last hour and had sent word that he would join them when he could. So, Sophia rode to the Fenwick house with Catherine and moved into the principal rooms on her sister-in-law’s arm. They had agreed without saying so that they would stay together.
The Fenwick house was bright, crowded, and warm. The card tables had been set up in three of the larger rooms, the company moving between them in the slow ceremonial pattern of an evening that was nominally about cards, and actually about being seen choosing not to play them.
Sophia exchanged greetings with three acquaintances of her mother’s, accepted a cup of negus she did not particularly want, and was crossing the second drawing room when she heard her name spoken behind her.
“Lady Ashfield.”
She turned.
Percival Cummings stood three paces away, dressed with careful effortlessness as always. The pleasant expression on his face was arranged exactly as it always was, the smile arriving on cue in the warm easy register he kept ready for any room that contained her.
He had not approached her in public since their broken engagement. He had chosen that room. He had chosen that evening. He had been waiting for the precise moment when Edmund was not at her side to approach her.
“Lord Graystone,” she said. Her voice was level. She was rather impressed with that.
“It is so good to see you looking so well.” He tipped his head a fraction, and then a fraction more, until they stood close enough that the conversation could not be overheard. “I have wished, for some weeks, to convey my congratulations on your happy news. I am delighted for you. Truly.”
“That is generous of you.”
“I am, I hope, capable of generosity.” His voice dropped lower. “I want you to know that I bear you no ill will. I understand you must have your reasons. I only wish, in retrospect, that you had felt able to confide in me.”
Each sentence was perfectly constructed.
Not one of them could be objected to in company.
He was speaking in the warm considerate register of an old acquaintance offering a benediction, and the words beneath the warmth, were a series of small precise weights laid one after the other across her chest. I bear you no ill will.
He was telling her he had not forgotten. I only wish you had felt able to confide in me. He was telling her he had every intention of approaching her again, in that room or in any other.
She felt the familiar response gather in her body.
The instinct to compose her face, to absorb the blow without flinching, to give him exactly the equanimity the room expected.
She had done it for him a hundred times.
She had perfected it in his drawing room and on his arm in two dozen public corridors, and she had not, at any point in their year of engagement, known what to do with what lay underneath.
What lay underneath that evening, was rage. It surprised her with its force. It rose from somewhere she had not known was there and settled hot and steadily behind her sternum.
Sophia stood in the second drawing room of Lady Fenwick’s house with her composure intact on the surface, her hands shaking inside her gloves, and her heart beating with a slow deliberate fury at the man who had murdered her husband’s brother and poisoned his first wife and was, in that room, smiling at her as though none of it had happened.
She did not let the rage show. But she did not smile, either. The absence of her smile was, for once, deliberate.
“How kind of you to say.”
The smile on his face held. But something behind it shifted, ever so slightly, and he understood, she could see, that she had not given him what he had come for.
“Your husband is well, I trust?”
“Quite well, thank you.”
“Lady Ashfield, I—”
“Lord Graystone.”
Edmund’s voice arrived behind her. He had come up so quietly she had not heard him. He must have arrived at the estate, found Catherine, learned where Sophia was standing, and crossed the rooms with the unhurried speed of someone doing calculations.
He was at her elbow, and the touch of his sleeve against her arm was the lightest possible contact and entirely unmistakable.
“Lord Ashfield.” Lord Graystone bowed. “I was paying my respects to Lady Ashfield.”
“How thoughtful.” Edmund’s tone was indistinguishable from warmth, and practically its opposite. His hand found the small of Sophia’s back.
It rested there without pressure, and it communicated to anyone in the room capable of reading communications of that kind that she was no longer a person Lord Graystone might address. “If you will excuse us. My wife has been promised to Lady Marbury.”
“Of course.”
Edmund turned, guiding Sophia away, and they moved without hurrying into the adjoining room. He did not lift his hand from her back until they were clear of the doorway. Sophia, who had been holding her breath, released it carefully and hoped no one had heard.
Edmund did not ask what had been said.
He looked at her once, in the way he did when he was reading something he intended to read accurately, and she said quietly that it had been nothing. He did not press her. He took her arm.
They walked the rooms together, slowly, as married couples did at card parties, and he stayed at her side for the remainder of the evening. He had not, since the encounter with Lord Graystone, let her out of his sight for longer than a quarter of a minute.
Catherine joined them shortly. She had heard about the encounter with Lord Graystone from across the room and did not refer to it.
She settled into the chair beside Sophia making conversation about a charitable subscription, and Sophia listened to her sister-in-law with a gratitude she did not trust herself to express.
The three of them stayed at Lady Fenwick’s for precisely the forty minutes Catherine had earlier prescribed.
***
In the carriage, Edmund did not speak for the first several minutes.
The streets were quiet. The lamps slid past the carriage windows at their familiar intervals, lighting Edmund’s face for a moment and then leaving it in shadow. He was looking at her steadily. She could feel the attention on her, and she found that she did not want to break it with speech.
“I should not have left you alone,” he said, finally.
“You did not leave me alone. You were detained.”
“I should not have been detained.”
“Edmund.” She turned slightly toward him. “It was forty minutes. The matter with the solicitor was important.”
“Not more important than this.”
She watched him. Edmund’s gloved hand rested on his knee, opening and closing once with a small involuntary motion he did not appear to be aware of.
“He frightens me,” she said.
It came out without her quite intending it to. She had been planning, all week, not to say it. But the carriage was dark and Edmund was looking at her, and she found, in that moment, that saying it offered a relief she had not understood she required.
“It is not the charm. It is not the social maneuvering. It is the thing behind his eyes when the mask slips. I saw it tonight. I have seen it before, when we were engaged, in moments he did not realize I was watching. I told myself, then, that I had imagined it. I have not been imagining it. I have not been imagining it for some time.”
Edmund went very still. Then he reached across the small dark space between them and took her hand. His grip was firm and warm through the silk of her glove, and there was no question in it. He held her hand like a man who had decided, at some point that evening, that he would not be letting go.
“He will not touch you,” Edmund said. His voice was quiet and entirely sure. “Not in any room I can reach. Not in any room I cannot. I give you my word.”
She watched his face in the moving lamplight.
She believed him. She also believed that what was happening between their clasped hands in the darkness of the carriage was not part of any convenient arrangement.
They both knew it, and neither of them, that evening, was going to do anything to alter that fact.
Edmund did not release her hand until the carriage stopped.
***
Arabella was waiting for them in the hall.
It was the first thing Sophia registered when the door opened, and it was not what she had expected. Arabella did not, as a rule, wait in halls. But she was standing at the foot of the staircase that night, in her wrap, with her hair loose and her color very high, with a folded note in her hand.
Arabella held the note out without meeting Edmund’s eye.
“This came for you. An hour ago. The boy said it was particular.”
Edmund took it. He did not open it. He looked at Arabella, and Arabella looked at the carpet. The small painful tension between them, which had been growing for over a week, occupied the hall like a third presence neither of them was prepared to address.
“Thank you,” Edmund said, gently.
“I am going up.”
“Good night, Arabella.”
“Good night.”
She turned and retired to her room. Sophia watched her go. Arabella had not, in the entire exchange, looked at her once.
When Arabella was out of sight, Edmund broke the seal of the envelope. He turned slightly so the light from the wall sconce fell onto the paper, read it once, and then he read it again. His expression changed in a way Sophia could not entirely interpret.
The slight controlled rigidity of his shoulders communicated, with no ambiguity, that whatever the note contained, he was not going to share it.
He folded it carefully along its original creases.
“We shall speak in the morning,” he said gently. “Not tonight. I promise you, in the morning. There is something I need to think about first.”
She nodded.
He looked at her for a long moment. The controlled care in his face was not the care of a husband managing a situation.
It was something else. He had been carrying her hand in his all the way home and he was suddenly obliged to release it, finding the release difficult. She could see all of it in him.
“Good night, Sophia.”
“Good night, Edmund.”
She went up the stairs. She did not look back. She heard him cross the hall behind her and let himself into his study. The door closed quietly, and a key turned in a drawer she did not need to see to recognize.
In her room, she sat down at her writing desk, lifted her hands to her face, and discovered that she was shaking again.
She had walked away from Percival Cummings that night. She had stood in a public room holding his gaze and had not given him the fear he had been working to provoke.
She had told her husband, finally, that she was afraid. She had carried his hand in hers through a dark carriage ride and felt that something between them had shifted past any pretense that their marriage was one of convenience.
Whatever was in the note Edmund had read and not shared was something he intended to think about alone. Sophia knew he was not going to come and find her.
She sat for a long time before she rose to undress. Somewhere in the house, very quietly, the clock struck one.
She did not sleep until very late.