Chapter 10
Edmund began noticing small things.
He could not identify the morning in which the noticing had become a habit.
It had happened by accumulation, the way most things in Edmund’s life had happened, through the slow accretion of small observations that, when he finally stopped to count them, added up to a quantity he had not been keeping track of.
He noticed the way Sophia had reorganized the morning routine without appearing to rearrange anything.
He had not been asked. He had not been consulted.
’The household simply ran differently, with a kind of quiet competence that did not announce itself, and the absence of announcement was, he was beginning to understand, the entire point of it.
He noticed that Henry had begun to gravitate toward her during the evening hour.
The boy had always been an unsentimental creature, in the matter-of-fact way of children who had been loved consistently and had concluded, on the strength of the evidence, that affection was something he could spend at the rate of his own choosing. He did not attach himself to people.
But he had taken to coming down from the nursery in his dressing gown around the time Sophia settled into the drawing room with her book, and he would arrange himself on the rug at her feet with a small construction of soldiers or a slate of figures.
He would conduct his evening business there, in her orbit, with the casual gravity of a small statesman who had identified a useful ally and was establishing diplomatic relations on a permanent footing. Sophia did not, as far as Edmund could see, encourage him.
She did not have to. She simply did not turn him away, and Henry, who had developed an unerring instinct for the difference between being tolerated and being welcome, had registered the welcome and acted accordingly.
He noticed, too, the quality of the quiet she brought to a room. The Cavendish townhouse had never been noisy, but it had been, for the three years since Margaret’s death, a house with a particular sort of silence in it; the silence of rooms in which something had ended and not been replaced.
Sophia had not banished the silence. She had simply settled into it the way good furniture settled into a room, and the silence around her was different—an occupied silence rather than an empty one—and Edmund had not realized how badly his house had needed to be occupied.
He told himself it was the novelty of having a sensible companion in the house and pressed on with his correspondence.
But the noticing was becoming harder to dismiss.
He caught himself listening for her footsteps on the stairs.
He found himself lingering over breakfast because she was telling Catherine something amusing about Lady Eleanor’s opinion of the new linen prices.
And her laugh, quiet, genuine, slightly lower than expected, was doing something to the atmosphere of the room that he was reluctant to leave.
He discovered one of her sketches left forgotten on the morning room table; a quick study of Henry’s hands holding a wooden horse, the fingers small and curled with the particular grip of a child holding something he loved, the shading deft and economical, and he studied it for so long that Catherine had to clear her throat twice to get his attention.
The sketch was beautiful. He had not known she could do that.
He had a vague memory of her sketching as a girl, but the casual seriousness with which the lines were laid down on the paper, the assurance of someone who had been doing it for years and not mentioning it, suggested that the girl who had sketched at twelve years old had become a woman who sketched at twenty-four, and that he had been married to her for a week without knowing she did.
He wanted to know what else he did not know about her.
The thought arrived with a force that made him set the sketch down rather quickly, and a quarter of an hour later, when he had recovered enough composure to retrieve it, he took it to his study and put it in the upper drawer of his desk, beneath a stack of correspondence he intended never to file.
He decided, sitting at his desk in the late morning light, that he would have to do something about the way he had begun to think about Sophia Hartwell, who was no longer Sophia Hartwell and was instead, by law and by his own deliberate choice, his wife.
He did not yet know what he was going to do. He suspected it would not involve a strategy he had any practice in deploying.
The second letter from Lord Graystone arrived in the afternoon post a week later, and put a temporary end to his ability to think about anything else.
He recognized the hand at once. The first had been brief congratulations; the next one was substantial, several pages folded with the careful weight of a document Lord Graystone had taken time over. He carried it into his study, closed the door behind him, and broke the seal.
The letter was a marvel of construction.
It congratulated him again, in the warmly worded fashion proper to an old acquaintance who had attended Edmund’s wedding in absentia, on the surprising rapidity of his nuptials.
It expressed admiration for Lady Ashfield’s many virtues, which Lord Graystone enumerated with the smooth fluency of a man cataloging the assets of an estate he had been deprived of.
The inheritance, in particular, receiving the careful regard owed to a property he had once expected to have charge of. It noted, with mild surprise, that Lord Ashfield had moved with admirable promptness in a matter that had so recently been settled in another direction.
And it conveyed, in the closing line, in the warm, restrained tone of one gentleman speaking to another who would understand the sentiment, that the writer had never been in the habit of leaving accounts unbalanced, and that he was confident Lord Ashfield, as the head of a great family, would appreciate the principle.
The threat was not in the words. The words were perfectly civil. The threat was in the spacing, in the precise placement of inheritance and accounts, in the gentlemanly assumption that two men of property could speak frankly about debts settled and debts owed.
Percival Cummings was reminding him, in the dialect of old acquaintance, that he had been denied a fortune when Sophia walked away, that he considered the denial a debt he had not yet collected, and that he was a man who settled accounts.
Edmund read it twice. He set the letter on the corner of the desk. He filed it, eventually, behind the quarterly accounts in the lower drawer, in the part of the desk reserved for correspondence he would need to revisit. The lower drawer was beginning to accumulate a small archive.
He noted the detail without satisfaction, and went to find Jonathan, because Jonathan was joining them for supper that evening, and Edmund wished to think about something other than Lord Graystone for as long as the day would permit.
***
Jonathan arrived supperin considerably better humor than the rest of the household had any right to.
The eighteen months abroad had not, as far as Edmund could tell, dulled his oldest friend’s habit of paying extremely close attention to everything around him, and he came in with the slightly heightened energy of a man who had been storing up observations and was looking forward to deploying them.
He arrived in the drawing room before the bell rang, as he always did, with the air of someone who had been intending to come earlier and had only been prevented by the regrettable timing of the clock.
He crossed the room and embraced Edmund with the brief, hard pressure of a friend who did not see the necessity of pretending he had not missed his friend, turning to Sophia and bowing with elaborate formality.
“Lady Ashfield. The wedding was an unconscionably brief opportunity to make your acquaintance, and I have come tonight prepared to repair the deficiency at length.”
“Mr. Weston. Edmund speaks of you with the kind of patience that suggests considerable provocation.”
“He is a very patient man,” Jonathan agreed. “I have been counting on it for thirteen years.”
It was a brief exchange. Catherine drew the conversation onward before the two of them could settle in for a longer one and the small party went in to supper, where the talk was general, the company correct, and Edmund could observe his oldest friend without his oldest friend observing him too closely back.
Jonathan had been seated beside Sophia, who answered his courteous, exploratory inquiries with the precise civility she reserved for new acquaintances she had not yet decided how to feel about.
Edmund watched her conduct the meal in the steady, observant register of a woman who was forming her own opinion and would not be hurried into delivering it. He found that admirable.
He found himself, by the end of the second course, finding a great many things about her admirable that he had not consciously intended to enumerate, and he made himself attend to his mutton with the discipline of a man who had at least twenty more years of marriage ahead of him and intended to be useful.
When Catherine rose at the end of the meal and the women withdrew, the gentlemen sat for the customary half hour with a glass of port, and Jonathan, with the unceremonious frankness that had always been his preferred mode in private, leaned across the table and said, “Edmund. She is wonderful. I am extremely pleased for you.”
“Thank you.”
“I had been preparing to be pleased on principle and find privately that I disliked her. I should have known better. You have never made a sentimental decision in your life.”
“I have not made a sentimental decision now.”
“Of course not.” Jonathan poured himself a second glass. “Practical arrangement. Sensible match. I shall not say another word.”