Chapter 18
Jonathan came for supper on the Thursday after Lady Fenwick’s card party, and he came, by mutual arrangement, an hour before the meal was served. There were certain conversations Edmund had been postponing, and Jonathan was not inclined to permit further delay.
They sat in the study with the door closed and a decanter on the table between them. They did not, for the first quarter of an hour, say anything of consequence. They discussed the drainage at Ashfield and a mare Jonathan had been considering at Tattersall’s and had decided not to buy.
Then Jonathan set down his glass.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“I am in love with your sister.”
Edmund had been swirling the brandy in his own glass absently. He stopped doing so.
“I know.”
“You know.”
“I have known for some time. I have been waiting for you to tell me.”
Jonathan absorbed that. He poured himself another finger of brandy.
“I have been in love with her since she was thirteen, Edmund. Since we were all at Ashfield, the summer her hair was still in plaits and she informed me, at supper, that she had read all of Tom Jones and had opinions about it. I went abroad partly to avoid her.”
“I had wondered.”
Jonathan looked at him curiously. “You had wondered. And you let me go, and you did not write to me about it once in eighteen months.”
“It was not my secret. And I was not certain. I am certain now.”
Jonathan turned the glass between his fingers. Edmund thought that his oldest friend had been carrying that for so long it had become a piece of his frame. It was not a wound. It was a structural element.
“Arabella,” Edmund said carefully, “is trusting. She is also, at present, considerably less protected than I would like her to be. She has been gently and methodically managed by Lord Graystone for some weeks. She is in no condition to receive a declaration of any sort, however overdue.”
“I am aware.”
“I will not have you approach her until the Graystone matter has been resolved. After. Not before.”
“Edmund. I have waited for her since she was thirteen. I shall manage a few more weeks.”
“Thank you.”
Jonathan refilled both their glasses.
“And now, since we are having this conversation.”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware, Edmund, that you are in love with your wife?”
Edmund did not answer immediately..
“The situation is more complicated than that.”
“It really isn’t.”
“It is.”
“It really, truly isn’t.”
“Jonathan.”
“I have known you for thirteen years. I have seen you look at one woman in the entirety of that time the way you are presently looking at Sophia. Margaret. You looked at Margaret like that for the better part of your engagement and the first year of your marriage. Then, gradually, you stopped. You have been telling yourself, very steadily, that what you had with Margaret was the shape of your capacity for affection. You have been wrong about that.”
“You are not the only person telling me so.”
“Oh.”
“I have been telling myself so for a fortnight. You are the second.”
Jonathan grinned. It was unexpected, and Edmund found himself, despite everything, returning it.
“In that case, I shall add only this. A man who has carried his own feelings silently for as long as I have is hardly in a position to lecture you on the prompt expression of yours. I shall observe only that I have, on more than one occasion, seen Sophia looking at you in much the same way you have been looking at her, and that her composure on the matter is no more reliable than yours.”
“I notice, you are nonetheless instructing me.”
“I am. I concede the point.”
***
Supper was a small affair. Catherine had taken Henry to visit a friend in Grosvenor Square. Arabella was upstairs with a headache she had not described in any detail, which Edmund suspected was less an indisposition than an unwillingness to sit across a table from Sophia.
Jonathan had stayed half an hour later than the dishes had been cleared, and taken his leave with the same tact he had been deploying all evening.
Edmund and Sophia sat alone at the table.
The candles had been lit. The cloth was the good linen. The footman moved between them quietly, and the quiet of the room between courses was the quiet of two people comfortable in each other’s company.
Three months prior he would not have predicted it.
He had proposed to her in a morning room, offering a friend’s protection.
He had not anticipated that he would sit across his own supper table from his own wife on an ordinary Thursday and find that the most interesting thing in the room was the flickering of candlelight along the line of her throat above the dark green silk.
“Edmund.”
He realized he had been watching her. He set down his fork.
“Yes.”
She set her own fork down carefully. “May I ask you about Robert?”
It arrived without warning. He had not been expecting to hear Robert’s name at the table, on that evening, in the candlelight. He took the question as it had been offered: gently, and he held it for a moment before he answered.
“Yes.”
“Only if you wish to. I do not ask to disturb you.”
“I know you do not. Robert was four years younger than I was. He was restless in ways I was not. He was charming in ways I was not, and he found my steadier qualities trying. I found his less steady ones difficult to manage. We were not always easy with each other.”
He stopped.
He had said the thing he had practiced saying when people asked. He had said it accurately. He had not, on that occasion, said any of the rest of it. There was a great deal of the rest of it.
He looked up. Sophia was studying him. She had registered that he had stopped and did not press.
After a moment, she said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For telling me what you were able to tell me.”
He looked at her. The candle nearest her plate threw a small line of warm light along her cheek.
He understood that he had not spoken Robert’s name aloud at his own supper table since the funeral, and that he had done so because Sophia had given him room to do so and would have even given him room to be silent instead.
Sophia picked up her fork and took a small bite. He took one of his own. The footman came in with the next course and they did not speak for a few minutes.
Then she said, quietly, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“I have not told anyone this. I have not even said it aloud to myself.” She paused. She was looking down at her plate, not at him.
“The worst part of the broken engagement was not the discovery. It was not the letters. It was not the realization that he had been managing me. The worst part was that I had spent a year performing contentment so convincingly that I had almost fooled myself into believing it.
And when the engagement broke, what I felt, most acutely, was not the betrayal. It was the panic of a person who had just woken up and discovered that the room she had been living in was not the room she had been told it was.”
Sophia paused again. Edmund had set his glass down with care.
“I am tired of performing, Edmund.” She lifted her eyes to his.
“I do not want to perform with you. I do not want to spend the next forty years doing it, and I do not want to spend the next forty days doing it. I have been doing some version of it since we were married because I did not know if you wanted anything else. I want you to know that I do not require it. From either of us. That is the thing I wanted to say, and now I have said it, and you may treat it however you wish.”
The room was very quiet.
He sat looking at her across the table. The small held space between them was charged with the most direct thing she had ever said to him, and he sat with it for a count of three seconds before he said the two words that had assembled themselves in his chest before he had thought about them.
“Then don’t.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Do not perform with me. I had not, until just now, understood how much I had been waiting for you to stop.”
She breathed out, seemingly relieved.
It was a small audible exhalation. Her face changed in the way her face had been changing all evening, the controlled set of it loosening by degrees into something quieter and more present.
And he saw, with a clarity that struck him in the chest, that he had not been the only one holding their breath.
Then she looked, briefly, as though she had overstepped. The look passed across her face like a small cloud. She lowered her eyes to her plate.
He could not, for a reason he could not name, bear it.
“Sophia.”
She looked up.
“I am glad you asked.”
Her face softened again.
“Thank you.” Her voice was very low.
The footman came in with the next course shortly after and they returned to their plates. The conversation resumed, on smaller matters, quietly, by mutual consent. But the moment did not leave Edmund.
He looked across the table at his wife at one point, and she looked back, and when their gaze broke he understood that the moment was an object that had come into being between them, and that neither of them had any clear idea what to do with it but neither of them wished to put it down.
Sophia went upstairs after supper.
Edmund retired to his study. He sat for some time at his desk, then picked up a sheet of paper and wrote out, in his clearest hand, a brief note suggesting they ride together in the park in the morning.
Before the fashionable hour, when the paths were quiet.
He left it on the small table outside her door on his way to bed.
***
He was undressing when he heard the music.
It came from the drawing room, two flights below. Sophia was at the pianoforte. She did not play often. She had played twice in his presence since the wedding, both times briefly, both times something light.
What she played that night was not light. It was something slow, in a minor key. The notes carried up to him through the floors with the particular intimate clarity music acquired in a quiet house at a late hour.
He stood on the landing in his shirtsleeves, listening.
It went on for several minutes. There was an ache in the rendering of it he could not account for as a matter of technique alone. She was playing something she felt.
He did not go downstairs.
He did not go down because if he went down he would say something he was not yet ready to say. He stood on the landing, his hand on the newel post, and he listened to his wife play the pianoforte at the end of a Thursday evening on which they had agreed that they would not perform with each other.
He listened until the music ended.
Then he listened to the silence.
He heard her close the instrument, rise from the bench, and come up the stairs. He had retreated into his own room before she reached the upper landing. He stood with his back against the door and his eyes closed and did not, for some time, move at all.
He stood in the dark with two things he had been keeping carefully apart: The distance he had held from Sophia, and the reckoning he meant to bring to Lord Graystone. He was no longer sure how much longer either would keep.