Chapter 13 #3
She sat on the small sofa in the sitting room upstairs for some time after the door closed, with the box on the shelf above her and her hands folded in her lap, and she made herself sit with the small, unbearable certainty that she had just lied to her husband, and that she would do it again.
The doing of it was costing her more than she had thought a thing of that size could cost.
***
The letter arrived in the afternoon post on Monday.
It was addressed to Sophia in a hand she did not recognize. The paper was good. The handwriting was careful, the kind of careful that suggested it had been disguised; the letters made deliberately upright when the writer’s natural hand was likely slanted. The seal was made of plain wax, unmarked.
The footman set it on the silver salver in the hall with the rest of the day’s correspondence and went to fetch the second post. Sophia, passing through on her way to find Catherine, paused, picked it up, and took it upstairs to her own sitting room before she opened it.
She closed her door, sat at her writing desk, and broke the seal.
Inside was a single line.
Margaret tried to tell someone. Consider how that ended.
Sophia’s breath hitched. She read the line a second time, then a third. She looked at the paper, which had the absence of any signature or direction. She sat at her writing desk with the letter flat in front of her, her hands flat on the desk on either side of it, and she breathed in slowly.
The way Eleanor had once taught her to breathe in a corner of a ballroom when she had felt the walls closing in.
The writer knew that Margaret had tried to tell someone and that the telling had been the thing that ended badly for her. The writer knew, further, that Sophia had begun to read Margaret’s letters.
The writer was warning her, in language that was unmistakable to anyone who had been reading the letters in the writing box, that the same fate was available to her if she continued.
The writer must have been Percival Cummings. Or someone working for him. The latter, she thought. Lord Graystone himself would have signed the letter, or pressed his ring into the wax in some way that would have made his authorship clear.
It was the work of someone else, someone whose handwriting Lord Graystone did not wish her to recognize; someone whose existence she had not yet placed.
Sophia thought of the man in the bookseller shop.
She put her hands over her face for a moment. Just one. Then she straightened, folded the letter, locked it in the bottom drawer of her writing case, sat very still, and considered what to do.
She decided the first thing to do was to write to Eleanor. The second thing was to make a copy of the threatening letter and the writing box contents, in case the originals were taken from her.
The third thing was to determine, with as much delicacy as she could muster, who in London had been close enough to Lord Graystone over the past several years to do such work on his behalf.
The fourth thing was harder.
She could no longer, in any honest accounting of her own conscience, refuse to tell Edmund.
The man whose first wife had been afraid for his brother in the weeks before that brother died was now married to a woman who had been threatened for putting together the same letters. Edmund had a right to know.
Not when Sophia had assembled the complete dossier, not when she had located every name and dated every transaction, not on the timeline she had been telling herself she required.
He had a right to know that his wife had received a letter that referenced his first wife by way of a threat, and he had a right to know it immediately.
She would tell him that evening.
She rehearsed the words in her head. She stood at the window in her sitting room and looked out at the small spring garden below, where the late roses were just beginning to come into bud, and she rehearsed what she would say, in what order, with what evidence.
She would not bring him the writing box. She would bring him the threat. The letters would come when she had read them entirely.
She did not get to say any of it however. Edmund did not come home for supper. A note arrived from Jonathan saying that they had been delayed at the club on a matter of some importance and would not be back before midnight.
Catherine read the note aloud and remarked, with the dry mildness she reserved for her brother’s correspondence, that Edmund was being mysterious, which he did approximately once a year, and that she had learned to find it more interesting than alarming.
Sophia sat through supper with Catherine and Arabella, the latter still very polite and very distant, and ate food she did not taste.
She tried once, halfway through the meal, to ask Catherine a question about a charitable subscription, and Catherine, who had been watching her carefully across the table, answered the question and then, very quietly, in the low register of an elder sister who had decided to extend her loyalty in a new direction, said, “We shall speak in the morning, Sophia, if you would like. I have not been blind to what has been happening this week.”
Sophia did not trust herself to answer. She nodded. Catherine nodded back. Across the table, Arabella, who had registered the exchange without appearing to, set her fork down with the small abrupt motion of a girl who was no longer enjoying her supper.
Sophia went to bed at her usual hour. She did not sleep until very late.
When she finally did, she dreamed of a country lane and a curricle and a woman in a painted portrait whose gray eyes had been begging Sophia, in all the time she’d been at Ashfield, to listen.