Chapter 11 #2
Sophia studied the painting for a long moment.
She thought about a woman she had never met, who had stood in that room and sat for the portrait, and slept in the bed Sophia slept in.
She had been afraid of something. Sophia was sure of it.
The eyes belonged to a woman who knew something dangerous and was holding it in. The expression was unmistakable.
She reached up to check the painter’s mark on the lower frame. The signature was barely legible, the work of a competent provincial artist who had not been valued enough to be remembered.
She was tracing the letters with her fingertip when she noticed that the frame had pulled fractionally away from the wall at the upper corner. Not loose. Not damaged. Simply, not quite flush, as though it had been hung once and rehung at some later point by someone who had been in a hurry.
She put her hand flat against the wall behind the frame to straighten it.
Her fingers found something.
A small object wedged flat against the rear of the canvas, slipped from behind the frame and into her palm. It was a key. A small, ornate, brass key, the head shaped in a pattern of vine leaves. The type of key made for a writing box rather than a door.
Sophia stood very still in the upper sitting room with the key in her hand and her heart beating in her ears and she knew, in a way she could not justify, that she was about to do something she might not be able to undo.
She turned. The writing box sat on the bookshelf where it had always sat, between the Cowper and the devotionals, its brass fittings dulled with age and lock waiting. She crossed to it.
She took the box down. She sat on the edge of the small sofa with it in her lap and put the key into the lock, and the lock turned with the small precise click of a mechanism that had been waiting a long time to be opened.
The letters inside were written in a woman’s careful hand.
Some were dated four and a half years earlier, the autumn before Margaret’s final illness.
They were not love letters. They were not personal in the usual sense.
They were the private notes of a woman writing for herself, in the cramped, deliberate script of someone who was thinking on the page because she could not think aloud.
Sophia read the first one twice before she was certain she understood it.
I have heard him three times now, Margaret wrote.
Robert does not know I have been listening.
He would not believe me if I told him I had.
The voice carries from the library, particularly when the window is open, and I have made it a habit to sit in the small sewing room with the door ajar when G. calls in the afternoons.
I cannot yet make out the scheme entirely.
It involves goods of some kind, or money, or possibly both.
There is mention of a port in the North and of accounts that must not be examined.
Robert is alarmed. He is also, I believe, in too far to extract himself simply.
I have written to him about it but he has not yet replied, and I find I am not sleeping well.
Sophia stopped. She set the letter down on her lap. She was aware that her hands were not quite steady, and she pressed them flat against her thighs and breathed once, evenly, before she picked up the second letter.
It was dated three weeks later. The tone was darker. Margaret had spoken to Robert.
Robert had told her, with the half-defensive bravado Sophia recognized at once as the speech of a young man caught in something he did not yet understand the size of, that there was no cause for alarm; that he had only made an investment; that the man with whom he had made it was a friend of the family.
Margaret had asked which friend. Robert had not answered.
The third letter named no one. Margaret had been careful. She was writing entirely in initials, G. for the man she would not call by name, R. C. for Robert Cavendish, and the contents of the letters had shifted from observation to fear.
She wrote of a sense she could not shake, that G. was capable of more than charm and that he had been very calm about Robert’s reluctance. Calmer than the situation warranted; the calmness of someone who had already decided what he would do if his cooperation could not be secured.
Sophia closed the box.
She did not read the rest. She could not.
She looked up, slowly, across the room at the small oval portrait opposite the window, and the painted gray eyes met hers.
Sophia held the gaze of a woman who had been dead for three years and felt, with the small absolute certainty of a thing finally understood, that she was being answered.
Yes, the eyes said. That is what I knew. That is what I tried to put down. The house around her, was still. The afternoon light slid a degree along the wall.
Sophia sat on the sofa with the box in her lap and Margaret’s watchful eyes on her face, and she understood, with a cold and growing certainty, that Margaret Cavendish had been afraid of a particular man she had been careful never to name on the page, and that the fear in her face had not been the fear of illness.
Sophia did not know what she was going to do with that knowledge.
She knew only that she had carried, for the past five days, the privately surprising suspicion that she was falling in love with her husband, and she had, in the space of a quarter of an hour, acquired the dawning suspicion that the man who had courted her previously had been a great deal more dangerous than even a year of his correspondence had taught her to recognize.
The two pieces of knowledge sat in her chest side by side and refused to reconcile.
She was still sitting there when Edmund’s voice called up from the floor below.
“Sophia?”
He had come home. She had not heard the front door. He must have been searching for her; gone through the morning room and the drawing room and concluded she was upstairs. He was in the entrance hall calling up to ask if she would like to come down.
There was no alarm in his voice. There was only the casual inquiry of a man asking his wife whether she would join him and his nephew for a walk to the bookseller, because Henry had been promised the outing and was beginning to escalate.
Sophia’s hands shook. She placed them flat on the lid of the box for a count of three. Then she stood up, set the box back on the shelf, locked it, and tucked the key into the small reticule she had been carrying for her walk with Eleanor.
She would replace it behind the portrait later. She had to go downstairs, and she had to do so with a face that did not reveal what she had just read. Sophia had perhaps thirty seconds in which to compose it.
“I am coming,” she called back. Her voice was steady. She noted the steadiness with a distant pride one took in a tool one had not realized was so well made.
She caught her reflection in the small mirror beside the door. Her face was very pale. She pinched her cheeks once, sharply, to bring the color back. She straightened her hair and took a slow breath. Then she went down.
Edmund was in the hallway with Henry, who was wearing a hat that was slightly too large for him and the expression of a boy whose patience was being tested by adult delays. He looked up when she came down the stairs and his face brightened.
“You have come,” he said.
“I have come.”
“We have been waiting. I have been waiting for what feels like a very long time.”
“I do not believe it has been a very long time.”
“It has been four minutes,” Henry conceded. “But I have been counting them.”
Edmund was watching her. He had been ever since she had appeared on the stairs, and he was watching her with the careful, neutral attention that meant he had registered something he was not certain he ought to mention. She saw him look at her face and then look away.
She saw the brief flicker of concern, controlled before it could become a question. Sophia gave her husband a small smile that did not quite reach her eyes, and he accepted it without comment, holding the door, and they went out into the afternoon together.
Sophia walked beside Edmund. She carried the key in her reticule and the weight of three letters in her chest, and she hated, with a small, sharp clarity, that she could not yet share any of it. She did not know enough.
She had not read enough. She did not have proof of anything except a woman’s private fear set down on paper four years earlier, and she could not bring half a truth to a man who deserved a whole one.
She listened to Henry deliver his opinions on the bookseller’s window display and the relative merits of warships.
As they walked in the spring afternoon, she watched Edmund answer the boy with the slow, patient gravity he reserved for matters of state; and she understood, with the same cold clarity she had felt upstairs, that she had been wrong to think the worst part of the day would be reading the letters.
The worst part of the day was carrying them.
***
The bookseller on Hatchard’s, a few minutes’ walk from the house, was a long, low-ceilinged shop with the comfortable smell of paper and leather and the dim, scholarly light that bookshops cultivated as a form of advertisement.
Henry took possession of the children’s section with the air of a general inspecting a front. Edmund followed, indulgently, to adjudicate the question of a picture book about warships. Sophia drifted toward the table near the window where the new arrivals were laid out in a tempting array.
She was running her fingertip along the spine of a small volume on Italian landscapes, half attending to the conversation between Edmund and Henry at the back of the shop, when she became aware that she was being watched.
She did not look up. She had spent four years in London being watched by chaperones and matrons, and the kind of young men who considered watching to be a form of courtship, and she had developed a small, careful sense of the difference between idle attention and the deliberate kind.
This was the deliberate kind. It was coming from somewhere to her left, near the section devoted to maps, and it had the quality of someone who had been watching her for some time before she had registered it.
Sophia turned her head.
He was, perhaps twenty feet away, half hidden by a tall display of folios, and looked at her with the steady, unhurried attention of someone who had been expecting to see her.
He was middle-aged. Forty-five, perhaps.
He was nondescript in a way that suggested he had cultivated that quality; the kind of man one passed on the street without retaining any image of his face.
He wore the modest, slightly worn dress of a clerk, the cuffs of his coat darker than the rest of the fabric, and the brim of his hat dipped to obscure his eyes.
He was thin. His mouth was set in a flat, careful line.
When she met his gaze, he did not look away.
He did not smile, either. He looked at her as if he were confirming something.
As if her face matched a description he had been carrying in his head and he was satisfied that he had found the right person.
Then, with the same unhurried lack of urgency, he turned and walked toward the door of the shop and was gone before Sophia had registered that he was leaving.
She stood very still by the window with her finger still on the spine of the volume on Italian landscapes, and she felt the small cold weight of the writing box key in her reticule against her wrist. Sophia understood, with a precision that did nothing to comfort her, that she had just been recognized by a stranger in a public bookshop.
He had known who she was, and where she was, and that she would be there in the afternoon with her husband and his nephew. He had come to look at her, and he had gone away again.
She turned to find Edmund at her elbow, holding a small volume of Italian landscapes he had selected from a different table, his face untroubled, his attention entirely on her.
“This one,” he said, offering it. “For your studies.”
She took it as her fingers brushed his. He noticed. He registered the slight chill in her hand and the faint tension at her wrist, and he did not ask.
He only held her gaze for a moment longer than was necessary, with the steady, careful attention proper to a husband who had decided, some time ago, that he would not press her, and would simply be present in case the pressing turned out not to be required.
“Thank you,” Sophia said. Her voice was steady. She was almost beginning to be impressed with her own composure.
Henry returned bearing a book about warships and the conviction that he had earned it. They paid, and went out, and walked back along the spring street together. Sophia did not turn her head to look behind her even once.
Even though with every step of the way home, she could feel a stranger’s eyes watching her go.