Chapter 8
The wedding took place in a small church near the Cavendish townhouse, with only the family in attendance. Edmund had expected to find it unremarkable, a legal formality dressed in Sunday clothes and was mildly surprised to discover that it was not quite that.
He felt Sophia beside him with a precision that the occasion did not quite account for. The steadiness of her hands. The slight lift of her chin. The way she said her vows clearly and without hesitation, with the certainty of someone who had meant every word.
She was wearing a simple gown of ivory silk, and her hair was arranged differently than usual, softer, with a few strands escaping near her temples.
Edmund had to redirect his attention to the clergyman twice because he kept losing the thread of the service.
Theirs was not, he reminded himself firmly, a love match.
His pulse did not appear to have received that information.
When the clergyman asked him to speak his vows, Edmund said the words in his usual measured tone and was startled to find that they felt heavier than he had anticipated.
Not burdensome. Heavy in the way that true things were heavy: solid, consequential, occupying space that could not be given to anything else.
He had said similar words once before, in a larger church, with more people watching, and they had felt correct and appropriate and entirely within his control.
The words he spoke in that moment beside Sophia did not feel within his control.
They felt as if they were saying something he had not yet said to himself.
“With this ring,” he said, his voice steady, and her hand in his was warm and smaller than he had expected.
When she looked up at him there was something in her gray eyes that was not quite composure and not quite vulnerability but something in-between, something new, and he had to look away because the clergyman was waiting and Edmund could not quite account for the tightness in his throat.
Afterward, outside the church in the pale morning light, Sophia stood on the pavement in her ivory silk. “Well. That is done,” she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact but her eyes were bright, and he found himself looking at her for longer than was necessary.
“It is done,” he agreed.
“I believe we are meant to look happy about it.”
“Are we not?”
She considered the question. A smile started at the corner of her mouth, small and private and directed at him rather than at the occasion; and it was, he thought, the most honest expression he had seen on anyone’s face in a very long time. “I believe we are,” she said.
***
The wedding breakfast was small and warm and far more pleasant than Edmund had expected any occasion involving both Arabella’s enthusiasm and Henry’s opinions to be.
Catherine had arranged it with her usual quiet competence, and the table was set with flowers from the garden, the good china, and the atmosphere of a household that was tentatively, carefully happy.
Henry announced his pleasure at Sophia’s arrival with the directness of a child who saw no reason to temper his feelings.
“I am glad you are staying,” he informed her, from across the table. “You are the only person who takes my opinions on horses seriously. Uncle Edmund pretends to listen, but I can tell when he is thinking about something else, because his eyebrows do this.”
He demonstrated, pulling his small brows together in a creditable imitation of Edmund’s expression of distracted concentration.
Sophia laughed. Edmund caught her eye across the table, and their shared, private amusement—warm, conspiratorial, entirely unplanned—made the wedding feel real for the first time.
Jonathan caught his eye from the far end of the table and raised his glass with an expression that managed to be both genuinely warm and deeply knowing. Edmund ignored the knowing part and accepted the warmth.
Catherine squeezed his hand under the table and said, quietly, “Margaret would have liked her.”
Edmund was startled by the sting behind his eyes and covered it by reaching for the wine. He took a long drink and set the glass down. “Yes. She would have.”
He did not add that Robert would have liked her too, that his younger brother would have made a great noise of approval and embarrassed Sophia thoroughly in the doing of it, and that the absence of that noise at his own wedding table was a quiet he had been trying not to notice all morning.
Catherine, who could read him better than most, squeezed his hand once more and let it go.
Jonathan leaned toward Edmund across the table. “You know,” he said, in a voice too low for the others to hear, “for a marriage of convenience, you appear to be staring at your wife a great deal.”
“I am not staring. I am observing.”
“You are staring. I have known you for thirteen years and I have never seen you observe anyone the way you are currently observing the woman sitting across from you eating a bread roll.”
“Jonathan.”
“Edmund.”
“If you do not stop, I shall seat you next to Arabella for the remainder of the afternoon, and you will have no one to blame but yourself.”
Jonathan went slightly red, which was, Edmund noted with grim satisfaction, the first time he had ever seen Jonathan Weston at a loss for words.
Arabella, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for most of the breakfast, raised her own glass and said, with a formality that was clearly rehearsed and touchingly sincere, “To Sophia. Welcome to this family. We are rather a lot, but we mean well.”
“To Sophia,” the table echoed, and Sophia, who had been the epitome of composure all morning, had to look down at her plate for a moment before she could respond.
“Thank you,” she said. “All of you. I shall do my best to deserve it.”
“You already do,” Henry said, with the absolute conviction of someone who considered the matter settled.
“I concur,” Jonathan said, having recovered his composure. He caught Arabella’s eye and looked away again rather quickly, and Edmund filed that in the part of his mind where he kept observations that would eventually require a conversation he was not looking forward to having.
***
After the breakfast ended and the others dispersed, Edmund found himself alone with Sophia in the morning room.
She was standing near the window, still wearing her wedding dress, and the afternoon light was doing something to her hair that he had decided, firmly and repeatedly, he was not going to think about.
He crossed the room and stood beside her.
They looked out at the small walled garden below, where the late roses were still holding on and the gravel paths needed weeding.
The garden looked, in the soft autumn light, like a place where two people might stand together for a very long time and not run out of things to say.
“I hope you will be happy here,” he said, quietly.
Sophia was quiet for a moment. “I already am.”
The words were simple and she said them without looking at him, her gaze still on the garden, but the quality of them, the honesty in them, the absence of performance or qualification, made him go very still.
He was aware that the back of his hand was nearly touching hers on the windowsill. The distance between them was perhaps half an inch of old wood. Neither of them moved.
He could feel the warmth of her skin across the gap.
The afternoon light was falling through the glass and catching the loose strands of hair at her temple, the ones that had come free during the ceremony, and he noticed her breathing, the slow, even rhythm of someone who was at rest, and he thought that he could stand there for a very long time, in the quiet room with a quiet woman, and not want to be anywhere else.
The thought was so clear and so complete that it startled him.
She turned her head slightly, as though she had felt the weight of his attention, and for a moment they were looking at each other from a distance of inches; close enough that he could see the faint freckle beneath her left eye that he had never noticed before and that he was going to notice every time he looked at her for the rest of his life.
The door opened. Catherine stuck her head in with a question about the evening’s arrangements, and the moment dissolved into an ordinary afternoon, as moments do when they are interrupted before they can become anything more.
Edmund stepped back. Sophia turned from the window. Catherine, whose timing was either terrible or exquisite depending on one’s perspective, asked about supper.
***
That evening, after the household had retired, Edmund sat alone in his study with a glass of brandy and Margaret’s miniature portrait on the desk beside him. The painting was small, oval, the brushwork competent but without distinction.
It captured her features accurately; the contained expression in her face, the careful arrangement of her hair, the watchful quality of her eyes. It did not capture what she had been like. Portraits rarely did.
He told her, silently, that he had married again and that it was not the same and that he hoped she would understand.
The portrait said nothing back, because portraits never did, and the silence in the room was not so different from the conversations he had been having with himself for the past three years.
He gently put the portrait in the drawer and went to bed.
He paused on the landing past Sophia’s door. There was light beneath it. The warm, steady glow of a lamp, suggesting she was still awake, perhaps reading, perhaps lying in the unfamiliar bed of an unfamiliar room in a house that was technically hers.
He lifted his hand to knock. He held it there for several seconds, his knuckles an inch from the wood, and then he lowered it and went on to his own room.
He did not know what he would have said. He suspected that was the problem. He suspected, further, that whatever he would have said would not have been about the household or the arrangement or the practical terms they had agreed upon.
It would have been, instead, about the way she looked standing at the window in the afternoon light, the way her voice sounded when she said she was happy, and the way his own name sounded when she said it, which was different from the way anyone else said it; softer and more direct, as though she were speaking to the person behind the title rather than the title itself.
Edmund went to his room and lay in the dark thinking about a woman sleeping thirty feet away in a room that was theirs to share, and the thirty feet felt like both the most sensible and the most unbearable distance in London.
***
The following afternoon, a note arrived from Lord Graystone. It was brief and formally worded, offering congratulations on the marriage in a tone that wore the word like a costume, every letter of it calibrated to convey the precise opposite of its stated sentiment.
Edmund read it once and set it aside.
Tucked inside Lord Graystone’s note was a second piece of paper; smaller, folded separately, written in a different hand. The handwriting was cramped and unfamiliar, the ink cheap, the paper the kind one bought from a stationer’s in a hurry. It contained two sentences:
You do not know what you have married into. Ask your wife about certain letters.
Edmund read it three times. The message was unsigned.
The handwriting belonged to no one he recognized.
The intent was clear: Someone wished him to doubt Sophia, and wished it urgently enough to insert the suggestion into Lord Graystone’s correspondence, which meant either Percival Cummings was behind it or someone close to him was acting independently.
He locked both notes in his desk drawer and sat for a long time in the quiet study, turning the anonymous message over in his mind. He could ask Sophia. He could simply walk to her sitting room and put the question to her directly. He trusted her. He had told her so. He had meant it.
But trusting her and not understanding why someone wanted him to doubt her were two different things, and the second was the one that would keep him awake that night.