Chapter 5 #2
“It tastes of chalk,” Arabella whispered, examining her glass. “I believe they have watered it with the Thames.”
“That would explain a great deal,” Sophia said, and felt something settle in her chest at the sound of her own voice sounding ordinary.
Edmund arrived twenty minutes after Sophia did. She saw him before he saw her, and the relief of it was immediate and physical, like stepping out of a cold wind into a warm room.
He crossed the floor with his usual unhurried certainty, and when he reached her he did not offer elaborate greetings or concerned inquiries.
He simply said, “Good afternoon,” in the low, even tone she was beginning to associate with safety, and took up a position beside her as if he had always been standing there and had merely stepped away for a moment.
“You came,” she said, and heard the gratitude in her own voice before she could flatten it.
“I was invited,” he said. “And the lemonade here is rumored to be appalling, which I find I cannot resist.”
She almost smiled. Almost.
He spent the remainder of the visit within easy proximity. Not hovering. Simply present, making it apparent that he intended to keep being present.
When other guests approached Sophia with the transparent curiosity of people who wished to observe her condition at close range, Edmund engaged them in conversation with a courtesy so thorough and so unhurried that they found themselves discussing estate management and Parliamentary reform before they could redirect to the subject they had come to examine.
It was, Sophia realized, a masterful performance of ordinariness, and she was fairly certain he was doing it on purpose.
She felt him beside her with a sharpness that the occasion did not quite account for.
The weight of his attention when someone spoke to her.
The way he angled his body slightly toward hers when the room shifted.
The low, deliberate register of his voice when he addressed someone who was looking at her too long, which was not threatening but was unmistakably final.
She had been observed and protected and managed by a man before, and she knew the difference between that and what Edmund was doing. Percival had displayed her. Edmund was simply standing beside her, and somehow the distinction was the most intimate thing she had felt in months.
***
There was a moment, late in the afternoon, when the crowd shifted and Sophia found herself alone near the window.
Lord Graystone appeared. He was there before she could move away, close, his voice low, his expression one of wounded concern that would have fooled anyone watching from across the room.
He was impeccably dressed. He smelled of sandalwood and something sharper beneath it, and his proximity made her stomach turn.
“Sophia,” he said, softly, in the manner of someone addressing a child. “I am devastated by what has happened between us. I only want to understand. If I have caused you any distress—”
“You know precisely what you have caused.”
“I had hoped we might speak privately. There has been a dreadful misunderstanding, and I—”
“There has been no misunderstanding.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried the force of someone who had spent the entire night deciding exactly what she would say. “I found the letters, My Lord. You should not speak to me again.”
His hand reached for hers. She pulled away as though burned.
Lord Graystone’s pleasant mask slipped for exactly one second.
What Sophia saw beneath it was not hurt, but calculation; cold and rapid, the swift reassessment of someone whose strategy had failed and who was already constructing the next one.
Then the mask reassembled itself perfectly, as though it had never moved.
“I do hope you will reconsider,” he murmured. He bowed and withdrew.
Sophia stood at the window with her heart hammering, her hands shaking, and her composure held together by nothing but will. The room continued around her. No one had heard. No one had seen. The encounter had lasted perhaps ninety seconds.
Edmund appeared at her side within moments.
He had seen the exchange from across the room, could not have heard it, but must have read every line of her body and arrived as quickly as propriety allowed.
He did not ask what Lord Graystone had said.
He looked at her hands, which were trembling, and said, “Shall we go?”
She nodded. He offered his arm. She took it, and for the first time since the previous night, the ground felt solid beneath her feet.
They walked through the room together, unhurried, his arm steady beneath her hand. At the door he paused to collect Eleanor, who took one look at Sophia’s face and required no explanation.
“We are leaving,” Eleanor said brightly to no one in particular. “The lemonade was unforgivable.”
***
In the carriage, Eleanor kept up a stream of cheerful conversation that required no response, and Sophia was grateful for it, because she did not trust her voice. Edmund sat opposite them, his gaze on the window, giving Sophia the privacy of not being watched.
But when the carriage turned a corner and the movement shifted her forward, his hand came up instinctively to steady her, his fingers closing briefly around her wrist before releasing. The contact lasted perhaps two seconds. The warmth of it lasted considerably longer.
She was aware, with a clarity she could not entirely suppress, that her hand on his arm had felt like the most natural thing in the world, and that the brief touch of his fingers at her wrist had made her pulse do something she could not attribute to the motion of the carriage.
Those facts were considerably more dangerous than anything Lord Graystone had said to her at the event, and she filed them away in the part of her mind where she kept things she was not yet prepared to examine.