Chapter 2 #2
That was all. No pious observations about God’s plan.
No assurances that time would heal. Just three sentences that said exactly what they meant and nothing more, written by a woman who understood that the most respectful thing one could do for another person’s grief was to acknowledge it without attempting to improve upon it.
It was the most honest piece of writing he had received that year.
He replaced the note, closed the trunk, and lingered for a moment with his hand resting on the lid.
He had not opened Robert’s bundle in eighteen months.
He did not open it then. He had been managing the fact of his brother’s death in the only way he knew how to manage anything, which was to keep it where he could reach it without having to look at it, and he was not yet prepared to revise the arrangement.
He knew only that Sophia Hartwell was in London and engaged to a man whose name produced a sensation Edmund had decided not to examine. The note in the trunk was the closest thing to her voice he had encountered in three years, and it was not close enough.
He locked the trunk and turned to his correspondence.
A letter from Jonathan Weston had arrived with the afternoon post, forwarded from Ashfield.
Jonathan was abroad, as Jonathan frequently was, moving through Europe with the restless energy of a man who had not yet found the thing he was looking for and suspected it was not in Europe.
The letter was long, cheerful, and full of opinions about Italian architecture and French wine and the deplorable state of the roads in both countries.
Near the end, almost as an afterthought, Jonathan mentioned that he would be returning to London within the fortnight.
He missed England. He missed decent tea.
He missed Edmund, though he would deny it if pressed.
Edmund wrote back immediately. The reply was measured and informative, as his letters to Jonathan always were, because Jonathan’s letters were expansive and discursive and full of tangential observations, and Edmund had long ago concluded that one of them needed to maintain a sense of structure or the entire enterprise would dissolve into a pleasant but aimless exchange of enthusiasm.
He reported the household’s move to London, Arabella’s first Season and the attendant logistics of managing a nineteen-year-old who regarded composure as an optional accessory, and Catherine’s quiet, immovable competence.
In a postscript that was more casual than it felt, he added that Sophia Hartwell was in town.
He stared at the postscript for longer than its brevity warranted, decided it was perfectly natural to mention an old friend, and sealed the letter before he could reconsider the weight that a single sentence, placed at the end of a letter as though it were an afterthought, might carry to a man as perceptive as Jonathan Weston.
He was carrying the sealed letter to the hall table for the morning post when Arabella appeared in the study doorway. She was in her dressing gown, her hair loose, and she had the brightness of someone delivering intelligence she considered delicious.
“I forgot to tell you,” she began, leaning against the doorframe with studied nonchalance. “I have heard that Lord Graystone is in terrible debt. Everyone says so. His estate has been losing money for years, apparently, and there are whispers about unpaid tradesmen and gambling debts besides.”
She tilted her head. “Is it not interesting that he chose to become engaged to a woman with a fortune just when he needed one most?”
Edmund looked at her sharply. “Where did you hear this?”
“One hears things.”
“Arabella.”
“Very well. Lady Portsmith’s daughter mentioned it at the fitting.
She was not discreet. I was merely observant.
” She shrugged, as though the observation were merely idle curiosity and not a piece of social analysis that demonstrated considerably more perceptiveness than her nineteen years ought to have permitted. “Good night, Edmund.”
She disappeared into the corridor with the unhurried pace of someone who knew she had landed a blow and did not need to wait for confirmation.
Edmund stood in the study with the sealed letter in one hand and a new, unpleasant thought taking shape in the other.
He set the letter on the hall table and went back to his desk.
He sat in the dark for some time, turning the thought over with the care of a man examining a thing he did not wish to find sharp.
Lord Graystone’s debts. Sophia’s fortune.
A year-long engagement that had produced, as far as Edmund could determine from Arabella’s report, precisely the kind of warm, devoted, faultless courtship that looked excellent from the outside and revealed nothing whatsoever about what was happening within.
He did not like the shape of it. He did not like it at all.
The house was silent around him. The fire had burned low.
He sat at his desk and thought about Sophia Hartwell, alone in her room in her father’s house, engaged to a man who might be everything he appeared to be and might not, and the distance between his study and her writing desk felt, for the first time, like something that mattered.
He would see her at the ball. He would see her, and he would pay attention, which was the thing he did best and the thing most people did worst, and he would decide for himself whether the baron’s charm was genuine or the most dangerous kind of imitation.