Chapter 6 #2
“Henry,” Catherine said, with the mild tone she used when she was about to make a point she considered unanswerable, “is frequently the most perceptive person in this house.” She moved away before he could respond, which was, he reflected, a tactical choice.
When Sophia finally stood to leave, Edmund walked her to the door. In the hallway, out of earshot of the others, she paused and turned to him.
“Thank you,” she said. “Not for the offer of help. For listening.”
The directness of it disarmed him. He had been prepared for gratitude or reserve or the careful formality she deployed when she wished to maintain distance.
He had not been prepared for honesty, and the directness of it made him aware, with uncomfortable precision, of how close they were standing in the narrow hallway, and how the afternoon light from the fanlight above the door was falling across her face in a way that he was decidedly not going to think about.
“You do not need to thank me for that,” he said.
She held his gaze a moment too long. In the quiet of the hallway, with the faint scent of her perfume—something floral and clean and entirely her own—reaching him from the small distance between them, he was aware of her with a specificity that friendship did not account for.
The precise shade of grey in her eyes. The way her mouth curved when she was deciding whether to say something honest. The strand of dark hair that had come loose near her temple and that he wanted, with a sudden and entirely inappropriate intensity, to brush back.
He did not brush it back. He stood where he was, his hands at his sides, and said nothing, and she turned and went through the door, and the house felt measurably emptier for her absence.
Edmund stood in the hallway for several seconds after the door closed. That was not, he told himself, the behavior of a man arranging a practical solution to a practical problem.
He took his coat from the stand, called for his horse, and rode hard through the park for the better part of an hour, pushing the animal until it protested, because the alternative was standing in his own hallway replaying every moment of the last hour.
The catch in her throat, the heat in his own voice, the charged second before Henry burst in.
When he returned, windblown and no closer to equilibrium, Catherine was in the hallway with an expression that suggested she had already deduced the salient facts.
She said nothing. She did not need to.
“Do not,” Edmund said, passing her on the stairs.
“I have not said a word.”
“Your silence is eloquent.”
“I shall take that as a compliment.”
He changed, came back downstairs, and shut himself in the morning room.
The evening light was fading through the windows and the house had settled into its after-supper quiet, and Edmund sat for some time, turning over the situation with the same methodical clarity he applied to anything that needed solving.
He set aside, with considerable effort, the matter of Sophia’s eyes, the sound of her voice in the hallway, and the way Henry’s hand had fit inside hers.
Sophia faced a ruined Season, a hostile former fiancé with considerable social reach, and a family too invested in appearances to provide practical shelter.
His own household, meanwhile, had genuine gaps. Arabella was new to London and dangerously trusting; Catherine managed everything alone, and the Cavendish name was only beginning to reestablish itself after years of quiet withdrawal.
A marriage of convenience between two people who trusted each other and had always got along filled every gap on both sides without costing either of them anything they could not easily give.
He told himself it was a practical solution to a practical problem. He repeated it three times, which was, he suspected, two times more than a man who actually believed it, would require.
Jonathan’s voice arrived in his memory, uninvited and unwelcome. The only person in London who does not perceive it is you.
Edmund set down his pen. He picked it up again. He wrote a short, honest letter to Sophia’s parents requesting permission to call the following morning on a matter of some importance.
The letter was measured and correct and entirely free of anything resembling the disorder that had characterized his thoughts for the past forty-eight hours. He signed it, sealed it, and gave it to the footman for immediate delivery.
Then he sat in the empty morning room with the evening light fading through the windows and allowed himself, briefly, to consider the possibility that Jonathan was right, and that the practical solution he was proposing was also the thing he wanted most in the world, and that these two facts were not, as he had been telling himself, a fortunate coincidence but rather the same fact dressed in different clothes.
He considered that for approximately thirty seconds. Then he filed it in the part of his mind where he kept things that required further examination and went to bed.
He lay awake longer than he would have liked.