Chapter 19
The note was on the small table outside Sophia’s door when she woke. She had not heard it being placed there. Edmund must have come up after she had gone to bed, and stood for a moment outside her room, laying the paper down without knocking.
She broke the seal sitting on the edge of her bed.
Ride with me in the morning. Before the fashionable hour. The park is quiet at that time. If you wish to. E.
It was casual in tone. Beneath that, it was an offering of a thing that was not quite the ride. She sat with the note in her lap for several minutes before she rang for her maid and asked for her green habit.
They rode out at half past seven.
The park belonged, at that hour, to grooms exercising horses, a handful of military men taking their morning exercise, and a nursemaid with a perambulator at the far end of one path.
The light was clear and pale, the indicator of early morning.
The gravel crunched beneath their horses’ hooves in the quiet air.
They walked for the first quarter mile without speaking.
“Robert would have been twenty-five next month.” Edmund said after a few minutes.
Sophia turned her head. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the path ahead, with his reins held loosely in his gloved hands.
“Tell me about him.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Whatever you would like to tell me.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“He was the charming one. I do not say it lightly. He could walk into a room and have the entire room arranged around him within a quarter of an hour. He did it without effort, and I do not think he understood that the rest of us could not do so.
He was always reaching for things just out of range.
The horse a little too much for him. The investment a little too clever.
The girl a little too dangerous. He thought a Cavendish who did not reach was wasting himself, and he thought his elder brother was wasting himself, and he told me so on more than one occasion. ”
“Did you agree?”
“No. I did not agree. I did, however, find his particular form of energy exhausting. He could charm anyone in a room and exhaust the people who loved him most. I loved him, and I was exhausted. We did not, as a rule, manage each other well.”
He paused.
“I should have been more patient with him. He was twenty-three. He was reaching, and he was not yet old enough to have learned which things to reach for and which to leave alone. I knew that. I did not always behave as though I knew it. I said things to him in the last year of his life that I would, if I could, retrieve.”
Sophia did not answer immediately. They rode for a few yards in silence. The path was curving toward the bend at the far end of the long ride, where the trees thickened.
“He sounds like he was loved very much.”
“He was.”
Without either of them quite directing it, the horses slowed to a walk as they reached the bend. The silence between them was not strained. It was different after the evening before, and they both knew it.
“I have not spoken about him like this since the funeral.”
She did not answer.
Sophia watched the path between her horse’s ears and thought about what it meant that he had not spoken of Robert like that for eighteen months and was speaking of him in that moment, in a quiet bend of Hyde Park at half past seven in the morning, to her.
Something in her understanding of their marriage adjusted, quietly, in her chest. He had given her Robert. He had given that to no one since the funeral. She gathered her reins and did not look at him.
“Thank you, Edmund.”
She did not say what for, and he did not ask. He turned his head. She kept her own face forward. She was not, that morning, prepared to meet his eye. He registered that without remarking on it, and they rode on.
The dog came out of the undergrowth without warning.
It was a small brown spaniel, off its lead, and it bolted across the path two yards in front of Sophia’s mare. The mare, who had been steady all morning, threw her head up, planted her forefeet, and shied violently sideways.
Sophia was not expecting it.
She was a competent rider. She had been riding since she was eight. But she had been thinking about Robert, Margaret, and the morning light, and her hands had been holding her seat by habit rather than by attention.
The violence of the mare’s shy lifted her out of the saddle three inches before her hands tightened on the reins and her thighs gripped the saddle, and she came back down with her balance broken.
She was close to falling. The mare had pivoted entirely, and Sophia was leaning at an angle that, in another second, would have put her on the gravel. Then Edmund’s gloved hand closed around the bridle of her horse.
She did not see him move. She registered, afterward, that he had brought his own horse alongside hers within a breath, and his left hand was holding the animal still by main force. His right hand was at her waist, supporting her weight while she got her feet back into her stirrups.
The mare blew. She stilled. The whole thing had taken perhaps five seconds.
Edmund did not let go of the bridle. He did not let go of her waist, either. His hand stayed there, gripping, not gentle. He was looking at her face, and his own face was perfectly white.
“Sophia.”
His voice was not steady.
“I am fine,” she said. Her voice was, she registered, steadier than his. “I am perfectly fine. The horse is calm now.”
“You were nearly off.”
“I was not nearly off. I was leaning.”
“Sophia.”
He did not let go.
His hand at her waist moved, slid, and found her hand on the rein. He gripped her hand through the silk of her glove. It was the grip of someone who had just watched the thing he had been most afraid of, and his hand was telling her so with a directness his voice was too disciplined to manage.
She looked at him.
The morning light fell across his face. His eyes were very dark. He was looking at her with a fear so complete and so unguarded that her own composure went sideways, and she did not look away.
After a moment, Edmund released the bridle. He did not release her hand. His thumb moved once, very slightly, across her knuckles through the silk of her glove. Then he let her go.
He sat back in his saddle, arranging his face. He did it with such practiced precision that, watching him, Sophia found herself wanting to put her own hand back on his rein and tell him to stop.
She did not.
“Shall we go on?”
“If you are willing.”
“I am willing.”
They returned to the house at the steady pace they had set, and Edmund handed her down from her mare at the mounting block. His hand under hers held an instant longer than the dismount strictly required.
She went upstairs to change.
***
That evening, after Catherine had retired, Henry had been put to bed, and Arabella had withdrawn to her own room with her novel, Sophia went up to Margaret’s sitting room and took the writing box down from the shelf.
She had a new purpose. She owed Margaret and Robert. She did not, that evening, intend to read selectively. She intended to read the rest.
She read steadily for nearly an hour.
The letters in the last quarter of the stack had grown shorter. Margaret’s health had been declining by the time she had written them, and the careful long sentences of the early letters had been replaced, by the end, with brief observational notes.
G. came yesterday. He stayed twenty minutes. He inquired after my health with the particular concern I have learned to distrust. The new nurse is called Mrs. Holt. She is kind and not very bright. I do not know if this is a comfort.
Sophia paused on the last entry.
Mrs. Holt. A nurse. Someone who had been in the household in Margaret’s final months.
Sophia made a small note of the name on a sheet of paper she had brought up with her.
She turned the page.
There was a postscript on the inside of the back cover of the small notebook Margaret had been using.
It was written sideways, in Margaret’s smallest hand; in a hand that had clearly been used to make it hard to find.
Sophia leaned closer. She read the line twice before she was sure she had read it correctly.
If I do not survive to tell this myself, the writing box is not the only thing I have hidden. Look in the garden folly, beneath the loose stone.
Sophia did not move for a moment.
The garden folly was at Ashfield. There was no folly at the London house.
The folly at Ashfield was the small octagonal stone structure on the rise behind the orchard.
She remembered the four stones in the floor that had been laid by some long-dead Cavendish ancestor in a pattern of brass-edged squares. One of them, evidently, was loose.
She closed the notebook and sat with it in her lap, very still. Margaret had hidden something else. That something was in the country.
She would have to go to Ashfield.
She did not know yet how she would arrange it.
She did not know yet what she would tell Edmund.
She did not know anything except that the line in Margaret’s smallest hand on the inside of the notebook’s back cover had been written by someone who had been afraid she was going to die, and who had been right.
Sophia closed the box and locked it. She returned the key to its place behind the portrait, and she went downstairs to her own room with the name Mrs. Holt folded into the small leather case where she kept her private notes.