Chapter 7 #2
Sophia considered the question with the honesty she owed her mother and, more importantly, herself. “I am,” she said. “More than I expected to be.”
Her mother studied her for a moment with the perceptiveness that mothers deployed at precisely the moments their daughters least wished to be perceived. Then she smiled, a small, knowing smile that Sophia pretended not to notice, and withdrew from the room.
***
Before Eleanor arrived, two deliveries reached the Hartwell house in quick succession.
The first was a note from Mrs. Fielding, who had been one of Sophia’s mother’s closest friends for twenty years, regretting that she would be unable to attend the card party the following week due to an unforeseen obligation.
The note was polite. The obligation was fictitious. The message was clear: Graystone’s version had reached the Fielding household, and the Fielding’s had chosen their side.
Sophia read the note once and set it down with hands that were perfectly steady and a jaw that was not.
That was what happened when a woman made an inconvenient decision and a man with charm and social reach decided to punish her for it.
Not with violence, not with confrontation, but with the slow, systematic withdrawal of the world she had always inhabited, one polite note at a time.
The second arrived an hour later: A small parcel with no card. Inside was a book—a volume on Dutch portraiture that Sophia had mentioned wanting years ago, during a summer at Ashfield, in a conversation she had entirely forgotten. Edmund had remembered.
She held the book for a long time, turning it over in her hands. The leather binding was soft with use, the pages gilt-edged, the kind of book one found by searching rather than by chance. He had looked for it.
He had remembered a passing remark from a conversation held in a walled garden when she was fourteen, and he had found it, and he had sent it without a card because a card would have required words and the gesture was, in its wordless specificity, more eloquent than any words he could have written.
Sophia sat in the chair by the window with the book in her lap and did not trust herself to examine what she felt. She told herself it was gratitude. She told herself it was the relief of being known.
She told herself it was not the beginning of something she had spent her entire engagement to Percival Cummings failing to feel, arriving with a quiet, undeniable force in the form of a book about Dutch portraiture sent without a card.
She was glad, in that moment, that she had said yes to Edmund that morning. Not because she needed rescue but because she was tired of standing alone in a room that was emptying around her and pretending she did not notice.
Eleanor called in the afternoon and Sophia told her everything, including, with a self-consciousness she could not quite suppress, about the book.
’’’Eleanor was silent for approximately four seconds, which was, in Eleanor’s case, an extraordinary exercise of restraint. Then she said, “You are either the most practical woman in England or the most hopeless romantic disguised as one, and I suspect the latter.”
“It is a marriage of convenience,” Sophia said.
“Of course it is. A marriage of convenience to a man you have known since childhood, who makes you laugh, who carried you piggyback when you scraped your palms, who stood beside you at the worst social occasion of your life, and who remembered a book you mentioned wanting years ago during a summer at Ashfield.” Eleanor raised one brow.
“Entirely convenient. No romantic element whatsoever.”
“Eleanor.”
“Sophia.” Eleanor leaned forward. “I am not saying you are in love with him. I am saying that if you were designing the conditions under which a sensible woman might accidentally fall in love with someone, you could not improve upon the present arrangement.”
“That is not helpful.”
“It is not meant to be helpful. It is meant to be accurate.” Eleanor settled into the chair with the air of a woman who was only just warming to her subject. “Tell me about the proposal. Was it romantic?”
“It was efficient.”
“How appalling. Did he kneel?”
“He sat in a chair and discussed household management.”
“Good heavens. And you accepted this?”
“I accepted a sensible arrangement with a man I trust.”
“You accepted a proposal from a man who makes you blush when you talk about him, which you are doing right now, incidentally.”
Sophia pressed her hands to her face, which was, to her considerable annoyance, warm. “I am not blushing. It is the tea.”
“It is not the tea. The tea is lukewarm. You are pink because you are talking about Edmund Cavendish, and you have been pink every time you have mentioned his name for the past week. I am choosing to find this delightful rather than exasperating.”
They argued about it warmly and at length, covering subjects ranging from the nature of practical arrangements to the definition of romance to the question of whether a man who remembered a book she mentioned wanting ten years ago could reasonably be described as merely sensible.
By the end Sophia was laughing, which was something she had not expected to do. Eleanor stayed a while longer and left with the parting observation that she expected to be proved right within the month.
“I shall deny everything,” Sophia said, from the doorway.
“You always do, darling. It makes being right considerably more satisfying.”
That night, Sophia placed the book on her bedside table and laid in the dark thinking about a man who remembered everything and said very little and whose attention, she was beginning to understand, was the most generous thing she had ever been given.