Chapter 13 #2
Those were all true things. They were also pretexts. She had been afraid of what she would find, and the fear had been keeping her on the surface of a problem that she suspected she could not afford to keep skirting around.
Sophia went to the upper sitting room in the late afternoon. The house was quiet. Catherine had taken Arabella out to call on Lady Marbury. Edmund had gone to his club. Henry was with Mrs. Pratt in the schoolroom learning, for the fourth time, the difference between which and that.
Sophia closed the door of Margaret’s sitting room behind her. She crossed to the portrait, slipped her fingers behind the frame, and retrieved the key from the place she had returned it to following the afternoon at the bookseller’s.
She took the box from the shelf and unlocked it. Sophia sat on the small sofa and began, where she had left off, with the fourth letter. The letters grew darker and more careful as she read.
Margaret had stopped using initials for almost everyone, and the bulk of the correspondence had become a record of her own observations, set down in the cramped private hand of a woman who was thinking through a problem on paper because she could not yet think it through aloud.
The fourth letter was largely about household accounts, and it contained, in the middle of a passage about the linen, a sentence that made Sophia stop and reread.
The arrangement involves men in the North.
Smuggling, I believe. Possibly, worse. There is mention of money that does not come from goods, and the men involved are not those who permit the asking of inconvenient questions.
Sophia read on. The fifth letter was three pages, and the tone had shifted again.
Margaret had been compiling evidence by then, with the slow, terrified diligence of a woman who had decided that the only protection available to her was a record.
There were dates attached to conversations she had overheard from the small sewing room with the door ajar.
There were sums of money she had seen written on slips of paper she was not meant to see.
There were references to ports and bills of lading and accounts that the writer would not be specific about because the writer, by that point in her composition, had begun to understand that specificity might be used against her.
And there was, threaded through it all, Edmund’s brother.
Margaret had stopped writing even the initials R.
C. by the fifth letter. She wrote of Robert with the indirection of a woman who could not bring herself to put the name on the page, and the absence of the name was, by then, more eloquent than its presence would have been.
He was one of ours. He was the youngest of the family.
He was the boy who had once climbed the orchard wall and broken his wrist and not cried.
He was the one I cannot bring myself to write of plainly, because if I write of him plainly I shall have to admit what I am beginning to fear.
Margaret had loved him. Sophia could feel it in every careful evasion.
G. had brought him into something he had not understood.
G. was, by the fifth letter, the central preoccupation of a woman who had begun, in the small sewing room of her own house, to be afraid in a very specific way.
In the sixth letter, the fear had a shape.
It did not have a name. Margaret had still not put down the name of either man on the page.
But the fear was the shape of a woman who had realized, with the slow horror of someone discovering a pattern in the dark, that the men whose names she would not write were of the kind who removed inconveniences when inconveniences could not be otherwise resolved, and that her young brother-in-law had become the latter without yet understanding that he had also become the former.
I have begun, Margaret wrote, in the line that made Sophia stop breathing for a count of three, to fear for him in a way that prayer does not address.
Sophia set the letter down.
The room was very quiet. The afternoon light was falling across the rug in the way of a room facing east in the late hours of a spring day, and Sophia could hear, distantly, the sounds of the house going about its business.
A door closed. A footman’s voice asked something in the hall.
Mrs. Pratt’s firm tones corrected Henry’s grammar.
Robert Cavendish had died eighteen months ago, in a curricle accident on a country road, and Edmund had buried his brother and never, in Sophia’s hearing, suggested that there was anything to suspect about the manner of it.
Margaret had written the letters before Robert died. Margaret had written, in the sixth one, that she had begun to fear for him in a way that prayer did not address.
Sophia did not yet know what Margaret had concluded. She had not read the rest of the letters. She did not yet have it set down in Margaret’s hand that the accident had not been an accident at all.
But the shape of what Margaret had been afraid of, in the autumn of the year that ended with Robert found in a country lane, was a shape Sophia could trace with her finger, and the shape was a thing she had been refusing to recognize because recognizing it would mean understanding that the man who had courted her, the man whose letters of love to another woman had ended her engagement, was a man capable of considerably more than what he had so far been credited with.
She did not read the rest. She could not. Instead, Sophia closed the box and locked it.
She set it back on the shelf with hands that were almost steady, and she sat on the small sofa for some time, looking at the closed lid, making herself sit with the new and terrible knowledge that she had walked into a household whose dead might not have died of what they had been said to die of, and that she had no idea, yet, what she was going to do with it.
She was sitting there when the door opened.
Edmund stood in the doorway.
He had come upstairs to retrieve a book Catherine had asked him to retrieve, she realized afterward, because she heard him say so. He stopped when he saw her.
He registered the writing box on the shelf behind her, the slight color in her face, the way she was very still in the way people were very still when they had been caught doing something they had not yet decided how to explain.
He did not ask.
He simply waited. He had always waited. She had been registering it as a courtesy; she registered it as something quieter and more deliberate; the steadiness of a man who had decided, at an earlier moment she had not noticed, that he would let her come to him.
Sophia looked at Edmund across the small room.
At the steady line of his shoulder in the doorway, the angle of his head; the dark, attentive eyes that had not once, in all the weeks since their wedding, used her position in the household to make a demand of her.
She thought about the letters in the box behind her.
She thought about his younger brother dead in a country lane and a first wife dead in the same bed Sophia slept in.
She thought about the husband she had been married to for fifteen days, who was looking at her with the careful, controlled attention of someone who had given her his trust and was waiting to see whether she would extend the same courtesy.
Sophia felt the pull of it acutely.
She wanted to tell him. She wanted to cross the room and put her hands in his and tell him everything—the box, the key, the letters, the man in the bookseller’s, all of it—because she was tired of carrying it alone and because he was the one person in the world who would have the standing and the will to do something about it.
She wanted to give it to him. She wanted, with a force that almost frightened her, to lay the whole thing in his hands and watch him take it from her.
She did not.
She could not give him fragments. She would not bring him half a truth and watch it damage him. Edmund was a man who needed evidence and clarity.
His brother had died in a country lane while everyone had been told it was an accident, and his first wife had died of an illness that everyone had been told was natural.
Sophia would not put either ghost back in his path on the basis of six letters and a man in a bookshop.
She would need proof. She would bring him a complete account, and not before she got it.
“I was looking at the portrait again,” she said. Her voice was steady. “I got distracted. The light is fine in here at this hour.”
Edmund looked at his wife. He looked at the portrait on the wall and back at her face. Then, very quietly, without crossing into the room, he said, “Will you tell me, if there is something to tell?”
Sophia had not expected the question. It struck her with the full weight of a man who knew her well enough to know that she was lying, and who was not pressing, and who was holding open the door for her to walk through whenever she was ready. The kindness of it nearly undid her.
“Yes,” she said. And it was, in a manner of speaking, true. She would tell him. Soon. She would tell him the moment she could bring him the whole truth instead of a piece.
He held her gaze for a moment longer. Then he nodded, picked up the book Catherine had wanted, and turned to go.
He paused at the door and turned back.
“Sophia,” he said. His voice was low. “If there is ever something you need to tell me, anything at all, I would rather hear it from you than discover it some other way.”
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water. He was not accusing her. He was asking her to trust him. He was telling her, as plainly as he was capable, that he had already begun to trust her, and that he was hoping she would do him the courtesy of trusting him in return.
Sophia could not speak. She nodded instead. The nod was sufficient. He left.