Chapter 6 #3
They walked together toward the entrance hall. The marble floor gleamed under the chandeliers, and their footsteps echoed in the emptying space. As they passed the entrance to the card room, Sophia heard a voice that made her slow her pace.
“—cannot continue like this, Benedict. You must see that.”
It was her mother’s voice, but not directed at her. Through the half-open door, Sophia could see Lady Eleanor standing with Benedict in the alcove beside the card room. Her brother’s face was drawn, his usual charm stripped away to reveal something harder and more anxious beneath.
“I know, Mother.”
“The interest on the loans is due in September. If your father cannot make the payment—” Lady Eleanor stopped.
Her voice dropped. “Greenly Hall is not entailed. It can be sold. And if it is sold, there will be nothing left. Nothing for you, nothing for Sophia, nothing but the clothes on our backs and the charity of relatives who will not want us.”
Sophia’s stomach went cold.
“Sophia must marry well,” Lady Eleanor continued. “There is no other way. I have tried to give her room, I have tried not to press, but we are running out of time. If she does not secure an advantageous match this Season—”
“She will,” Benedict said. “She is clever and she is beautiful, and any man with sense would—”
“Any man with sense would run from the Ainsworth name as if it were plague-ridden. You saw how Lord Darlington reacted tonight. The Cavendish feud has poisoned the well. And your sister’s sharp tongue does not help matters.
” Lady Eleanor’s voice cracked. “I do not blame her. She is who she is. But I am afraid, Benedict. I am so very afraid.”
Sophia stepped back from the door. Her heart was beating too fast, and her hands had gone cold inside her gloves.
She had known, in an abstract way, that the family’s finances were strained.
She had heard the whispered conversations, the accounts that were never quite settled, the economies that her mother practised without comment.
But she had not known it was this bad. She had not known that Greenly Hall, the house where she had been born, where her grandmother’s portrait still hung in the upstairs gallery, where the shepherdess fan had been passed from hand to hand across three generations, might be lost.
She turned and walked toward the entrance hall. Her mother’s voice faded behind her, swallowed by the distance and the closing of a door.
The carriage ride home was silent. Lady Eleanor leaned against the squabs with her eyes closed.
Benedict stared out the window at the dark streets of Brighton, his jaw tight.
Sophia sat with her hands folded in her lap and the fan pressed between her palms, and she thought about Lord Alistair Cavendish and the handkerchief he had pressed into a stranger’s hand.
She thought about the lie he had told. The kindness beneath it. The way his voice had gentled when he spoke to the frightened girl, as if he knew exactly what it felt like to stand at the centre of a circle of staring eyes and wish the floor would open.
She thought about the look he had given her across the ballroom, that wordless, questioning glance that had seemed to say, You saw. You understand. You know this game as well as I do.
And she thought about Greenly Hall, and her mother’s fear, and the weight of expectation that had been pressing down on her since the moment she arrived in Brighton.
The Season was not a game. It was a marketplace, and she was the commodity, and her value was dropping with every day the Cavendish feud persisted and every essay she wrote in secret and every sharp remark she could not keep behind her teeth.
The carriage turned onto Marine Parade. The Channel lay beyond the windows, invisible in the darkness, but Sophia could smell it, the salt and the cold and the vast, indifferent distance.
She had come to Brighton determined to write her way out of the cage.
But the cage had bars she had not seen before tonight.
Bars made of money and land and the choices of men who had died before she was born.
And somewhere in the darkness, Lord Alistair Cavendish was searching for the author of the Brighton Observer, and Lady Beatrice Cavendish was watching her family like a hawk watching a wounded rabbit, and her mother was counting the days until September.
Sophia closed her eyes. The carriage swayed.
The fan pressed against her palms, and she could feel the ridges of the ivory guard sticks, the smoothness of the painted silk, the weight of her grandmother’s hands on the same object, in the same gesture, in some other ballroom, some other Season, some other year when the Ainsworth name had meant something.
She did not know what she was going to do.
But she knew, with a certainty that settled into her bones like cold, that the choices ahead of her were narrowing, and that the man she had spent the evening trying not to watch might be the only person in Brighton who understood exactly how the narrowing felt.
And that, perhaps, was the most dangerous thought of all.