Chapter 2
Edmund Cavendish, Earl of Ashfield, was at his desk in the study of the Cavendish townhouse on Grosvenor Street. He was working through the quarterly accounts for the northern estate with the methodical attention of a man who found columns of figures considerably less taxing than columns of people.
Tall and broad-shouldered, built like a man who had spent years on an estate rather than in drawing rooms, he had dark brown hair, angular features, and dark eyes that were attentive in a way that could feel disconcerting until one understood he was simply paying attention.
He did not particularly cultivate his appearance, which somehow made it more effective.
At twenty-six he looked most himself outdoors or on horseback, and least himself behind a desk, which was where Arabella found him when she came home from the dressmaker’s in considerably higher spirits than she had left.
He heard her before he saw her. The front door opened with more force than was strictly required, followed by the rapid percussion of her boots on the marble floor, and a brief exchange with the footman that suggested she had forgotten to return something or had acquired something she ought not have.
The study door swung open without the preliminary courtesy of a knock.
“You will never guess,” Arabella announced, sitting in the chair opposite his desk without invitation and arranging herself with the restless energy of someone who intended to stay.
Edmund set down his pen.
He had learned, in the three years since their father’s death had made him head of the family, that Arabella’s announcements came in three varieties: The trivial, which were delivered with enormous gravity; The significant, which were delivered as afterthoughts; And the genuinely alarming, which were delivered with precisely the degree of suppressed excitement she exhibited in that moment. He gave her his full attention.
“The new dress is a triumph,” she began, producing her intelligence in the order she considered most significant.
“The modiste is extraordinary. She understood exactly what I meant about the sleeves, which is more than Catherine managed, and she did not once suggest that I would look better in pastels, which I would not, because pastels make me look consumptive and I have told everyone this repeatedly.”
“Arabella.”
“Yes. The important part.” She leaned forward. “I saw Sophia Hartwell.”
Edmund was still for a moment. His hand remained where it was, resting on the edge of the ledger, and his expression did not change in any way that Arabella, who was watching him with the sharp attention she applied to anything she found interesting, could have identified as significant. But something happened, nonetheless.
A small, internal adjustment. The sensation of a name arriving that one had not heard in some time but had never quite stopped listening for.
Sophia Hartwell. His childhood companion. The girl who had argued with him about Roman civilization for an entire afternoon and won, not because her position was stronger but because her logic was relentless and her refusal to concede a weak point was, even at twelve years old, formidable.
The only person outside his family with whom he had ever been entirely at ease, in the way that required no effort and therefore cost nothing, which was the rarest thing Edmund knew how to value. She had sent him a note when Margaret died.
Three lines, precise and genuine and entirely without the suffocating piety that had characterized every other letter of condolence he received that winter. He still had it somewhere in the back of the middle drawer.
“She looks remarkably well,” Arabella continued, apparently satisfied with his silence, which she had correctly interpreted as interest.
“She is taller than I remembered, or perhaps having not seen her in some time has skewed my perception. And she has the most extraordinary composure, Edmund. Not the stiff kind. The kind where you can tell she is thinking something very sharp and choosing not to say it, which I find tremendously impressive because I have never once managed to think something sharp without saying it immediately.”
“I am aware,” Edmund said.
“She asked after you, you know. When I mentioned you were in London, she went rather quiet for a moment. The sort of quiet that means something, though I could not tell you what.”
“I expect she was being polite.”
“She was not being polite. I know what polite looks like, and that was not it.” Arabella regarded him with an expression that was uncomfortably perceptive for a girl of nineteen. “She is engaged, by the way. To Lord Graystone. Apparently it has been nearly a year.”
The words arrived without drama. Arabella delivered them as information rather than as commentary, which meant she had not yet formed an opinion about them, making them neutral territory.
Edmund turned back to the quarterly accounts.
The columns of figures were exactly where he had left them. They required his attention.
He found the accounts less absorbing than he usually did.
Lord Graystone. Edmund knew the name in the way that one knew the names of people who occupied the same social sphere without ever quite entering one’s personal regard. He had met the man twice, perhaps three times, at gatherings where the acquaintance had not progressed beyond pleasantries.
He had formed no strong impression beyond the observation that he smiled a great deal and that the smile arrived with a precision that suggested it had been timed.
Edmund did not, as a general principle, distrust men who smiled a great deal. But he had spent enough years managing his family’s estate to recognize the difference between warmth and performance, and he had not yet determined which category Lord Graystone’s smile belonged to.
He was glad Sophia was well. He told himself that with the firmness of a man establishing a fact. What he could not immediately account for was the faint, unreasonable discomfort that had settled somewhere behind his sternum at the mention of another man’s name in the same sentence as hers.
He examined the sensation with the detachment he brought to any problem that required diagnosis and confirmed that it was not jealousy.
Jealousy required a prior claim, and he had no claim on Sophia Hartwell beyond a childhood friendship that had ended when their lives turned in separate directions.
It was something else. He did not examine it. He noted it and set it aside.
He was, nonetheless, looking forward to seeing her.
Over tea that afternoon, the conversation turned to the social calendar. Catherine, Edmund’s elder sister, widowed the past four years and raising her son Henry alone, joined them in the drawing room.
She brought Henry, who positioned himself on the carpet with a wooden horse and a set of painted soldiers proceeding to conduct a military operation of considerable strategic complexity while the adults discussed matters he found unworthy of his attention.
“The first event of consequence,” Catherine said, consulting the card in her hand, “is Lord Graystone’s ball. We are expected to attend.”
“Graystone,” Edmund said. The name landed differently after Arabella’s news.
“It is the sort of occasion that establishes one’s presence for the weeks that follow,” Catherine continued, “and we have been absent from London for three years. We cannot afford to begin with an omission.”
“You seem unusually interested in this particular engagement,” Arabella observed, watching Edmund over the rim of her teacup.
“I am paying attention,” Edmund said. “It is not the same thing.”
“Is it not?”
“It is not.”
Catherine’s expression, from the far end of the settee, suggested that she was noting their exchange and filing it in the part of her mind where she kept observations she intended to revisit at a more opportune moment.
Catherine had always been the most perceptive member of the family. It was a quality Edmund valued in every context except those in which were directed at himself.
“Lord Graystone’s ball,” Catherine repeated, with the air of someone returning a conversation to its proper course.
“We shall need to present well. Arabella, you will wear your new dress. Edmund, you will endeavor to look as though you are enjoying yourself. Henry, you will remain at home with Mrs. Pratt and you will not stage a rebellion.”
“I make no promises,” Henry said, without looking up from his toys.
“Henry.”
“Very well. I shall stage only a small one.”
That evening, after the household had retired and the house had settled into the kind of silence that Edmund associated with the late hours when he did his clearest thinking, he went to his study and opened the old correspondence trunk that sat beneath the window.
It was a battered thing, leather-bound and brass-cornered, that had belonged to his father and served as the repository for letters Edmund considered worth keeping but did not wish to see every day.
Sophia’s note was near the bottom, beneath a stack of his father’s papers, the smaller bundle of their brother Robert’s tied in the black ribbon Catherine had used to bind them the week after the funeral, and a bundle of letters from Jonathan Weston that spanned the better part of a decade.
He found it by feel rather than by sight: A single folded sheet, the paper slightly heavier than the fashionable stationery most women used, the handwriting direct and without flourish.
I am sorry for your loss. Margaret was a good woman and she was fortunate to have been loved by a good man. I will not pretend to know what you are feeling, because I do not, but I hope you know that you are thought of.