Chapter 9 #2
The question was who.
He sat down. He pulled a sheet of foolscap from the drawer and uncapped the inkwell. The pen felt heavy in his hand, the nib scratching against the paper as he began to write.
To the Editor of The Brighton Observer—
He stopped. What was he going to say? I admire your work. I would like to meet you. I believe you may be the only person in Brighton who sees the world as I do.
He had already written that letter, in his head, a dozen times since the first essay appeared.
He had never sent it. He had told himself it was caution.
The Observer was anonymous for a reason.
To pursue the writer’s identity would be to violate the terms of the enterprise.
And yet he had pursued it anyway, in his fashion.
He had inquired at the printer’s. He had studied the paper stock, the typeface, the distribution patterns.
He had asked Arthur Finch, obliquely, whether he knew anyone who might be capable of such prose.
Arthur had said, Be careful of finding what you’re looking for.
Alistair set the pen down.
The thought of Sophia Ainsworth would not leave him alone.
It was not merely the essay. It was everything.
The way she had spoken at the Hargraves’ ball, her words sharp and precise and utterly devoid of the simpering deference that characterised most debutante conversation.
The way she had looked at him across the card room, as though she were measuring him against some internal standard and had not yet decided whether he met it.
The way she had laughed at the seaside, her guard dropping for a single unguarded moment, and he had seen, beneath the polished surface, something quick and restless and hungry for a conversation that mattered.
He had recognised it because he was hungry for the same thing.
And now this essay. This description of a man standing at the edge of his own life, waiting for someone to notice that he was not what he appeared to be.
If Sophia were the Observer, then she had noticed. She had noticed, and she had written about it, and she had published it in a newspaper that was circulating through every drawing room in Brighton.
If Sophia were the Observer, then she knew him better than anyone in his own household.
If Sophia were the Observer, then the woman he was forbidden to pursue—the woman whose family name was poison in his mother’s mouth, was also the woman whose mind he had been pursuing for weeks through the pages of a satirical broadsheet.
The irony was not lost on him.
He folded the foolscap and set it aside. The letter could wait. The letter had been waiting for weeks. What could not wait was the need to know.
He would watch her. At the next social engagement, and the one after that.
He would listen to the way she spoke, the observations she made, the turns of phrase she favoured.
He would compare them to the essays. He would look for the fingerprints of her mind on the prose that had been appearing, week after week, under the Observer’s masthead.
And if he found them,
He did not know what he would do. Confront her? Congratulate her? Warn her that his mother was also hunting the Observer’s identity, and that Lady Beatrice’s motives were considerably less admiring than his own?
The clock struck ten. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed. Footsteps in the corridor. His mother’s voice, raised in inquiry about the morning post.
Alistair picked up the newspaper and folded it carefully, creasing the spine, and slipped it into the drawer beside the foolscap. He closed the drawer. He turned the key in the lock.
The essay’s final paragraph lingered in his mind like the afterimage of a bright light. He is permitted only to stand at the edge of the room and wait for the evening to end.
He had been waiting. He had been waiting for years, and he had not known it until a stranger with a pen had named the condition for him.
And now he had a name to attach to the stranger. A possibility. A suspicion that felt, in the quiet of the study, more like a certainty.
Sophia Ainsworth.
He said the name aloud, under his breath, testing the weight of it.
The syllables were familiar. They had been familiar for weeks, since the first moment he had seen her across a crowded room and felt the ground shift beneath his feet.
But they meant something different now. They meant danger.
They meant possibility. They meant that the woman he was increasingly unable to stop thinking about might also be the woman whose words had been rearranging his understanding of himself, one essay at a time.
He stood. He straightened his cuffs. He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the latch.
Somewhere across Brighton, in a sitting room facing the Channel, Sophia Ainsworth was going about her morning.
Drinking tea. Writing letters. Perhaps working on the next essay, her pen moving across the page in that distinctive hand he had begun to imagine he would recognise.
She did not know that he was thinking of her.
She did not know that her latest piece had landed in his study like a stone through a window, shattering the careful distance he had maintained between his public self and his private hunger.
She did not know that he was beginning to see her clearly.
He opened the door. The corridor beyond was empty, the footsteps receding toward the breakfast room. He stepped out of the study and closed the door behind him, and the latch clicked into place with a sound that felt, in the hush of the morning, like the closing of a trap.