Chapter 11
Sophia met Eleanor for a morning walk in the park because it was Tuesday, and Tuesday was Eleanor’s day, and not even marriage to an earl could disrupt it.
The arrangement was old. They had been walking on Tuesday mornings since the second Season Sophia had been out, an hour of brisk pacing along the Serpentine that Eleanor maintained was the best exercise available to women who declined to ride and the only one that permitted uninterrupted conversation.
Sophia had once protested that she did, in fact, ride.
Eleanor had pointed out, with the irrefutable logic she deployed only when she did not feel like arguing, that riding required attention to the horse, which interfered with the conversation, and that the entire point of their Tuesday walk was to talk for an hour without anyone asking either of them to do anything else.
The morning was cool and clear, the sky pale blue of early Season London, and Eleanor arrived wearing a pelisse Sophia had not previously seen and bearing news she had clearly been saving up for the occasion.
“He is finished,” she said, by way of greeting, falling into step beside Sophia and turning her smartly toward the path that ran along the water. “I have it on three independent authorities, which in my experience is sufficient to constitute fact.”
“Good morning, Eleanor.”
“Good morning, darling, do not change the subject.
Lord Graystone is finished. His debts are not what he told everyone they were.
They are worse. He has been seen at the back door of two different moneylenders in the past fortnight, which I have on excellent authority from a girl whose father owns one of the moneylenders.
The Ashworth’s butler told the Caldwell’s housekeeper that the linen-draper on Conduit Street has stopped sending up his orders, and the bootmaker on Jermyn Street has been heard, in his own shop, calling him a great many words I should not repeat in a public park.
Tradesmen are the last to be paid, and the first to talk, and they are talking.
And on top of all of it, he is now courting a wealthy widow named Mrs. Lawley, who is sixty-three and not, by any account, a fool.
She has not yet committed herself, but he is paying her every attention, and the entire campaign reeks of desperation in a way I would find satisfying if I were not so afraid of what he might do next. ”
Sophia listened. They had reached the place where the path curved beneath the elms; the same stretch she had passed in her mother’s carriage on the afternoon she had first felt the ground shift beneath her feet, and she walked past it without remarking on it.
The trees had leafed fully. The view was different.
What she felt, listening to Eleanor catalog the slow collapse of a man who had spent a year managing her, was not, she discovered, satisfaction. It was something adjacent to it.
The shape of an emotion she did not have a clean name for, like the smell of a fire one had walked past but failed to dissipate. There was relief in it, and a private grim acknowledgment that she had not, after all, imagined her own betrayal.
That the man she had ended an engagement with was demonstrating, in public, the caliber of the man he had always been. But there was no warmth in it, and no triumph. It sat in her chest with the quiet weight of an arithmetic problem solved correctly.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“By what?”
“What he might do next.”
Eleanor was quiet for a moment, which was rare enough to draw Sophia’s attention.
“I mean,” Eleanor said, finally, “that a man like Lord Graystone is at his most dangerous when he has run out of options.
He has been managing his life by charm and strategy for so long that he does not know how to do anything else, and the strategy serves him no longer.
He cannot charm Mrs. Lawley fast enough to outrun his creditors.
The widow is canny. And he must know that until he has settled his accounts, his social position shall continue to erode.
I do not know what he will do. I only know that I would rather you were in a household with walls and an earl in it than alone in your father’s house, and I am, for once, in favor of your husband. ”
“For once?”
“I was withholding judgment until I had observed him in his natural setting. I have now done so. I approve.”
“On what evidence?”
“He looked at you at the Lawford supper last week as though he had been carrying a question in his head for a fortnight and had only just been permitted to ask it. I noticed. So did Lady Lawford. So did everyone seated within sight of him. The only person in the room who failed to notice was you, and I am not going to ask why, because you are stubborn and I am tired.”
Sophia did not answer. She found that she did not have a satisfactory answer to give.
They walked the rest of the path in companionable silence, broken only by Eleanor’s commentary on three passing acquaintances and her observation that the woman in the green carriage was wearing a hat that ought not be permitted in a public park.
When they reached the bench at the far end of their usual circuit, Eleanor stopped.
“Tell me about the household,” she said, more gently. “The proper version. Not the version you have been giving your mother.”
Sophia told her about Henry and the campaign in the attic; about Catherine’s wry competence and Arabella’s coloratura; about the writing box she had not yet opened and the morning routine she had reorganized without telling anyone.
Eleanor listened with the focused attention she reserved for things that interested her.
Sophia did not, however, tell her about the way Edmund had looked at her across the supper table the previous evening, with Jonathan watching and his hand stilled around the stem of his wine glass, nor how his face arranged in an expression Sophia had not seen on it before and had not been able to think about properly since.
That, she found, was a thing she was not yet prepared to share, even with Eleanor.
Eleanor sat for a long moment looking at the water. “And Edmund?” she asked.
“He is well.”
“Sophia.”
“He is.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“I know what you asked.”
There was a small silence. Sophia waited for Eleanor to press her. Eleanor, instead, with the rare discipline of a friend who had learned which silences were doors and which were walls, did not.
She turned her head and watched a pair of ducks negotiate the bank, and after a moment she said, lightly, “Very well. I shall ask again in a fortnight. When you have decided what you wish to say. Until then, you may rely on my discretion, which is, as you know, almost total.”
“Eleanor.”
“I am only saying that I have come prepared.” Eleanor reached into her reticule and produced, with the air of a magician concluding a trick, a small, enameled flask. “For instance. In case of emergency.”
Sophia laughed, despite herself. It was a small laugh and a startled one, and Eleanor took it with the satisfaction of a woman who had been working on producing it for the better part of an hour.
They sat on the bench in the pale morning light and watched the ducks for a while longer.
Eleanor, true to her promise, did not ask again.
She had gotten what she had come for. She had confirmed, by Sophia’s refusal to answer, that there was something to refuse to answer about, and that, Sophia knew, would have to satisfy her for a time.
***
She returned home in the late morning and went directly to the upper sitting room.
Sophia had always found her way into rooms through the art in them. It was the habit of a woman who had learned early on that a painting gave one something to stand in front of when one needed a moment to think, and that other people, observing a woman looking at a painting, did not intrude.
She had spent her first ball at sixteen standing in front of a Dutch winter scene in the Boscombe’s entrance hall for nearly half an hour, drawing breath. She had ended her engagement to Lord Graystone in front of a Reynolds in the Alderton’s drawing room.
Rooms came to her, when they came to her at all, through the paintings hung in them, and the upper sitting room had little to recommend except for one small portrait hung opposite the eastern window.
She had registered it the first time she had entered the room, the afternoon she had found the writing box. The small oval frame opposite the window. The painted face contained and watchful. She had not stood in front of it then; she had only noted it and gone away.
She crossed to it in that moment. ’The portrait was of Lady Margaret Cavendish, painted perhaps a year before her death.
The composition was conventional: Head and shoulders against a dark green background, the face arranged in the slight three-quarter angle that was the standard for women’s portraits of the previous decade.
The painter had been competent. Not gifted, but competent. The brushwork was steady, the proportions correct, the lace at the throat rendered with the patient industry of a craftsman paid by the hour. It was a portrait one commissioned to record an event rather than to discover a character.
Except for the eyes.
Sophia stepped closer. The eyes had been painted with unusual care.
They were a pale, clear gray, faintly hazel near the iris.
They were not the eyes of a contented woman.
There was a watchfulness in them that the rest of the portrait did not account for; an alertness that the composed mouth and the careful hair did not match.
It was the face of a woman who was sitting still for a painter and thinking about something she did not intend to say.
Perhaps the painter had not noticed what he was painting.
Or had noticed and put it down anyway, with the small private courage of an artist who recorded what he saw rather than what was intended.