Chapter 16
The Argyll was the kind of club Edmund preferred when he was obliged to use a club at all. He and Jonathan had been members since Jonathan’s father had put them both up at twenty-one, and they kept a corner table the steward did not assign to anyone else if either of them was likely to be in town.
They had been there for nearly an hour when Edmund became aware of the conversation at the adjacent table.
It was Ashworth. Edmund identified him without turning his head. Ashworth was a colleague of Lord Graystone’s in a loose sense. He was perhaps, thirty-eight, broad in the shoulder, and possessed of the conviction that authority and volume were the same property.
He was holding forth.
“It is the way of certain women,” he was saying, and the word certain sat in the sentence in a manner that signaled the entire audience had been alerted to identify a particular woman.
“A man pays them his attention in the proper form, behaves himself with absolute correctness through the entire courtship, and then the moment something more interesting catches her eye she is off, the engagement is dissolved on a pretext, and the gentleman is left to bear the embarrassment without recourse. There is a kind of woman, gentlemen, who plays with a man’s affections during his courtship, and who will, if you watch her closely, do the same thing again with whoever she has next persuaded to take her on. ”
Jonathan had gone very still. His glass was halfway to his mouth.
Edmund set his own glass down on the table, turning his head slightly toward the adjacent table, and he spoke at a volume calibrated to be audible there and not the table beyond it.
“I find such generalizations tiresome, Ashworth.”
The other table went quiet.
“In my experience,” Edmund continued, “the gentlemen who have the most to say about the conduct of women they are not married to are generally, the gentlemen whose own conduct will not bear close examination. I expect you have observed it too. You are an attentive man.”
Ashworth’s color rose.
He turned his head to look at Edmund. Edmund returned the look calmly, without hurry, and the silence extended into the uncomfortable interval that was always longer than the people sitting through it expected it to be. Ashworth’s mouth opened and then closed again.
“I had not meant,” he began.
“You had not meant to mention any lady in particular. Of course. I did not suppose you had.”
Ashworth’s companions, who could feel the table being lost without quite knowing how, were already turning toward the wine. Ashworth followed them. He addressed a remark to the man on his left about a horse. He used the gesture to avoid any further ridicule from the earl.
Edmund picked up his glass again.
“As I was saying,” he said to Jonathan, “the steward at the northern estate has been managing the drainage question with more initiative than I have seen from him in three years.”
Jonathan, who had been holding his glass for nearly a minute without drinking, set it down.
“The drainage question.”
“The drainage question.”
“Very well. Tell me about the drainage question.”
Edmund told him about it, steadily, and his hands, which he had placed on either side of his glass on the white linen, were not entirely steady.
Jonathan did not mention it. The kindness of that omission was, Edmund would later think, one of the smaller and finer kindnesses Jonathan had extended to him across thirteen years of friendship.
***
They left the club at half past ten and walked home.
It had become their habit, over the years, to walk between the Argyll and the houses they were each returning to. The night was cool. The streets were quiet.
They had been walking for several blocks before Edmund spoke.
“I am angry, Jonathan.”
Jonathan did not break stride.
“I gathered.”
“I do not, on the whole, know how to manage it. I am not in the habit of having anger to manage.”
“No.”
“It is not only Ashworth. Ashworth is a small man and a parrot. He was repeating something he had been given. It is Lord Graystone’s campaign. It is Arabella’s susceptibility to that campaign.
It is the entirely insupportable fact that my wife is moving through this Season with such complete composure that not one person in any room we enter has noticed she is drowning. I have noticed.
I notice it every morning when she comes down to breakfast and arranges her face for the day.
I notice it every evening when she sits across the hearth from me and reads as though she is not carrying anything she cannot put down.
I have been noticing it for weeks, and I do not know what to do with it. ”
Jonathan walked beside him in silence for a few paces.
“Perhaps,” he said, quietly, “it is enough that you notice.”
“I do not think it is.”
“I did not think you would think it was.”
“I have stood beside her in three rooms this week, Jonathan, and watched her absorb things that I should have absorbed for her. She went into the Fenwick’s two nights ago without me.
Lord Graystone approached her in the second drawing room before I had reached the house, and she stood in front of him and held her composure with no one at her side, and I should have been there. ”
“You were detained on a matter of business.”
“I should have been there, Jonathan.”
Jonathan stopped walking.
They stopped under one of the lamps. Jonathan turned and put one hand briefly on Edmund’s sleeve.
They were not men who used physical contact to make their points.
But Jonathan and Edmund were childhood friends, and the pressure of his hand on Edmund’s coat said what he did not have to say in words.
After a moment he removed his hand. They walked on.
“Sophia did not deserve any of this,” Edmund said, finally.
“No. She did not.”
“She certainly did not deserve a husband who proposed to her in a morning room and then took seven weeks to recognize that the proposal had been less of an arrangement than he had been pretending.”
Jonathan did not answer him. He looked at Edmund once, out of the corner of his eye, and Edmund saw him swallow the thing he wanted to say. There was a kindness in the gesture.
They walked a ways further and parted at the corner.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever it is you have decided to do about Lord Graystone, tell me when you are ready.”
“I shall.”
***
He turned over Ashworth’s phrasing as he walked.
A kind of woman who plays with a man’s affections during his courtship.
The construction was awkward. It had not originated with Ashworth, whose natural speech was rougher, plainer, more confident in its own vulgarity.
The phrasing he had used that night had been mannered. Someone had supplied it to him.
Edmund had heard the phrasing before.
He stopped walking, realizing where it had been. Last Tuesday. The drawing room. Arabella had been at the window, telling Sophia that she had heard something said about the broken engagement that Sophia ought to know.
A woman who plays with a man’s affections during his courtship. Edmund, listening from the doorway, had registered at the time only that Arabella was repeating something, and he had not put it together with the rest.
He put it together at that moment.
The phrase had come from Lord Graystone. He had supplied it to Arabella, in a letter or private exchange, and Arabella had brought it home and repeated it in the drawing room. That night Ashworth had been repeating the same phrase in a club.
The phrase had been seeded. Lord Graystone was running a campaign of slander against Sophia through precise channels, and one of those channels was Edmund’s own sister.
Edmund stood on the pavement and breathed, once, evenly, before he resumed walking.
He did not increase his pace. He arrived at his own door at the same steady gait. He let himself in, gave his hat, gloves, and coat to the night footman. He turned to ascend the stairs.
Sophia was in the hallway.
She was standing at the bookshelf to the left of the staircase, in a wrap, with her hair loose. She was returning a small leather volume to its place on the second shelf.
She turned when he walked in and saw him.
“Edmund.” She closed the book. Her face changed. “Are you all right?”
He had been arranging his face for the climb up the stairs, since approximately the moment Ashworth had risen from his chair. The arrangement disassembled.
He stood at the foot of the stairs with no prepared answer.
She had asked the question without ornament or performance, and he was, he discovered, unable to produce the steady polite reply he had intended to give if anyone in the house asked him whether his evening had been pleasant.
He had armored himself against a polite question. He had no armor against that one.
“I am,” he said. “Thank you, Sophia. I am all right.” He paused. “It was a difficult evening at the club. I do not wish to discuss it at present. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
“Thank you.”
She watched him for another minute, and he watched her watch him. The steady warmth of being looked at without being required to perform did something to his chest he was going to have to be careful with.
She nodded, turning and began to ascend the stairs. At the landing she paused, without turning back around.
“I am glad you are home,” she said. Her voice was low.
Then she continued up, and he stood at the foot of the stairs listening to her tread along the upper corridor, and he heard her door open and close softly.
***
The locked drawer was on the right side of his desk, two down from the top.
He sat down in his study at last and unlocked it, taking out the two anonymous notes, and he laid them on the blotter side by side.
Beside them he placed a third piece of paper—the folded note Arabella had handed him in the hall the night of Lady Fenwick’s card party.
He had read it twice that night. He had not, since, allowed himself to look at it again.
My dear Miss Cavendish, it began. Not Arabella.
Not my dear Miss A. My dear Miss Cavendish, in the same careful gentlemanly register Lord Graystone had used in his letter to Edmund three weeks earlier, in the same easy hand.
I trust you are well. I trust the difficulties I know you have been bearing in your household have not borne too heavily upon you.
I write only to say that I have not forgotten, and that the truth in this matter will come to light soon. When it does, I hope you will remember the kindness of a man who saw you clearly when others did not. Yours in confidence and admiration, G.
It was a love letter that was not quite a love letter. It was recruitment. The bond would mature when Sophia’s name had been sufficiently destroyed, placing him in a position to offer Arabella the rescuing arm.
Edmund read it again.
The phrasing was unmistakable. The truth in this matter will come to light soon.
Percival Cummings was committing to it in writing.
He had a campaign in motion. He had Arabella as one of his channels.
He had Ashworth as one of his carriers. He had presumably, three or four others Edmund had not yet identified.
Edmund looked at each letter in order of arrival.
They were a pattern. They had been a pattern since the morning after the wedding, when the first anonymous note had arrived inside Lord Graystone’s congratulatory letter, and it had been drawing in material from various directions ever since. He had been treating them as separate matters.
They were not separate matters. They were a single piece of work being conducted against him and the people in his house, and the conductor was a man Edmund had been giving the courtesy of social acknowledgment in public rooms for the better part of a decade.
He folded the letter to Arabella and locked all three pieces of paper in the drawer.
He sat for a long time.
Edmund understood, with the cold slow certainty that arrived in him at very late hours, that the thread led somewhere he did not wish to follow. He also understood that he was going to follow it.
He was going to follow it because Margaret had been afraid, in the autumn of the year that ended with Robert in a country lane, in a way he had seen at the time and told himself meant nothing, and because the note in his drawer had told him her fear had not been imagined.
He was going to follow it because Sophia had stood in front of that man two evenings prior and walked away from him without smiling. He was going to follow it because he had spent three years recovering from a loss he had not yet agreed to examine the cause of.
He decided it was time to examine it.
He put out the lamp, climbed the stairs in the dark, passed Sophia’s door on the landing without pausing, and went to his own room. He stood for a while at the window before he undressed.
The garden below was very still in the moonlight. Edmund made himself sit with the thing he had decided in the study, and he did not look away from it.
He had promised Sophia they would speak in the morning, and they would. But not about that. Not yet, not until he understood what he was asking her to carry, and how much of it she might already be carrying alone.