Chapter 4 #2
She should refuse. She should offer a polite excuse and continue her walk and leave him here with his disordered hair and his unreadable expression.
That was what a prudent young lady would do.
But Sophia had never been prudent, and her mother was not here to frown, and the invitation to the Cavendish ball was sitting on the writing desk at home like a declaration of war wrapped in cream-coloured paper.
She stepped to the railing. Not close. A careful distance remained between them, the width of a waltz step, the space required for propriety. But she stayed.
“The view,” she said, looking out at the grey water, “is of the sea. I have seen the sea before.”
“Have you? Or have you seen the idea of it?”
She turned her head. “That is a very philosophical question for a man standing on a promenade.”
“I am a very philosophical man when the occasion demands.”
“And what occasion is this?”
He did not answer immediately. He was looking at the water, his profile sharp against the sky, and Sophia noticed for the first time that there were lines at the corners of his eyes.
Not the lines of dissipation, though those might be present too.
These were the lines of someone who squinted into distances, who looked at things hard and long.
“I find the sea useful,” he said at last. “It does not perform. It does not pretend. It simply is what it is, regardless of who is watching.”
Sophia felt something catch in her chest. She knew that feeling. She had written about it, in the privacy of her notebook, in words she had never intended anyone to read. The hunger for something real, something that did not require her to arrange her face in the appropriate expression.
“That is a rare quality,” she said quietly.
“Exceedingly rare.” He turned to face her. “Tell me, Miss Ainsworth. Do you ever tire of it?”
“Of what?”
“The performance. The endless round of calls and balls and conversations in which no one says what they mean. The smiles that are not smiles. The interest that is not interest.”
She held his gaze. “Every day.”
“And yet you continue.”
“As do you.”
He laughed. It was a short sound, surprised out of him, and it transformed his face in a way that made Sophia’s hand tighten on the railing. “A fair point,” he said. “I concede it.”
“You concede? I was not aware we were in contest.”
“Were we not? I thought that was the nature of our acquaintance.”
She turned back to the water. The waves were rising, white-capped now, the wind driving them against the shingle in a rhythm that was almost hypnotic. A fishing boat was making for shore, its sail bellied tight, its crew bent against the spray.
“I do not know what the nature of our acquaintance is,” she said. “We have met once. We danced. We argued. You looked at me across a room as if I were a puzzle you had not expected to find.”
“You noticed that.”
“I notice everything. It is my particular affliction.”
“I am beginning to understand that.” He leaned his forearms on the railing, his posture looser now, less guarded. “And what did you conclude? From your observations.”
Sophia considered the question. The honest answer was dangerous. The polite answer was useless. She chose something in between.
“I concluded that you are not entirely what you pretend to be.”
“Neither are you.”
She stiffened. The Brighton Observer. The essays. The words she had scattered across Brighton like lit matches, never quite believing they would catch. But he could not know. There was no way he could know.
“We are all pretending something,” she said, keeping her voice level. “That is the condition of society.”
“Is it? Or is it the condition of a society that has forgotten how to be anything else?”
“You sound like a reformer.”
“God forbid.” The amusement returned, but it was softer now, less a weapon than a shield. “I have no interest in reforming anyone. I merely observe.”
“Then we have something in common.”
“It would seem so.”
A silence opened between them. Not the awkward silence of strangers, but something more considered, a pause in which neither felt the need to fill the air with noise. The waves kept their steady percussion. The wind tugged at Sophia’s bonnet strings. A gull cried overhead, a raw and lonely sound.
“I received an interesting piece of correspondence this morning,” Alistair said.
Sophia’s pulse quickened. “Did you?”
“An anonymous essay. Satirical in nature. Quite sharply observed.” He was watching her now, his grey eyes steady. “It made the rounds of my mother’s drawing room before breakfast. She was not amused.”
“I imagine Lady Beatrice is not easily amused.”
“She is not. But this particular piece seemed to unsettle her more than most.” He paused. “It concerned the art of the social masquerade. The masks we wear, the performances we give. The author has a gift for metaphor.”
Sophia’s mouth was dry. She kept her eyes on the horizon. “I have heard of these essays. They seem to be causing quite a stir.”
“They are. Someone in Brighton has decided to hold up a mirror to the ton, and the ton is not enjoying the reflection.” He straightened, turning to face her fully. “I confess I find myself curious about the author.”
“Curious?”
“Whoever wrote those words is someone who sees clearly. That is a rare gift. And a dangerous one.”
Sophia made herself meet his eyes. “Dangerous to whom?”
“To the person holding the pen. The ton does not forgive those who expose its absurdities. It prefers its observers to remain silent, or at least discreet.”
“Perhaps the author does not care about forgiveness.”
“Then the author is either very brave or very foolish.”
“Or both.”
He smiled. It was a real smile, she realised, not the practised curve of the lips she had seen at the Assembly Rooms. It reached his eyes and lingered there, and Sophia felt something shift in her chest, a small tectonic movement she did not want to name.
“Both,” he repeated. “Yes. I think you may be right.”
She looked away first. The fishing boat had reached the shore, and the men were hauling it up the shingle, their voices carrying on the wind in fragments she could not quite assemble into words.
“You mentioned inherited burdens,” she said. “At the ball. You said something about the weight of family expectation.”
“I did.”
“What did you mean?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower, the amusement stripped away entirely. “I meant that some of us are born into scripts we did not write. Rivalries we did not choose. Expectations that have nothing to do with who we are and everything to do with who our ancestors were.”
“The feud.”
“The feud. Yes.” He turned back to the railing, his hands gripping the iron. “Do you know what it was about? The original dispute?”
“Land in Derbyshire. My father mentioned it once. A boundary disagreement that escalated.”
“A boundary disagreement.” He laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Decades of cold silence and public snubbing, and it began with a surveyor’s error and two proud men who refused to admit they might both be wrong.”
Sophia had not known that. She had never thought to ask. The feud had simply always been there, a fact of the landscape, like the Derbyshire hills themselves.
“That is absurd,” she said.
“It is entirely absurd. And yet here we are, you and I, standing on a promenade in Brighton, conducting a conversation that half the ton would consider an act of treason against our respective families.”
“Is that what this is? Treason?”
“I do not know.” He looked at her. “What do you think it is?”
The question hung between them, weighted with something neither of them was willing to name.
Sophia felt the wind on her cheeks, the salt on her lips, the steady thud of her heart against her ribs.
She thought of her mother’s worried face, the invitation on the writing desk, the essays circulating through Brighton like sparks from a fire she had started and could not control.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that it is a conversation. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more,” he echoed. “Of course.”
But his eyes said something different. His eyes said that he knew as well as she did that a conversation could be the most dangerous thing in the world.