Chapter 21
Sophia had gone into the morning room because it was the only room in the house she felt able to occupy. Catherine had taken Arabella upstairs.
Henry had been put to bed long since. The ledgers were locked in Edmund’s study drawer. Edmund had gone to write correspondence. Sophia did not need to ask about what, and she had been left, briefly, with the entire weight of an evening she could not yet put down.
She stood at the window and looked at the garden in the dark trying to arrange the sentences she would use when she told him what she found.
She had been arranging them for weeks. Gentlest evidence first. The writing box. The key behind the portrait. Margaret’s letters in summary. Then the names. Then the deaths. Then the threat. Each piece placed where its predecessor had prepared the ground.
She heard the door open behind her.
“Sophia.”
She did not turn.
“Are you all right?”
The question arrived without preamble. He had not led into it.
He had walked into the morning room and asked, in the considered register he had been using with her for several weeks, and the directness was that of having decided that he would not permit her to be away from him for one minute longer than necessary.
She had been intending to say yes.
“No,” she said instead.
Her voice was steady. The steadiness lasted three seconds.
Then she turned, and she saw him standing in the doorway with the watchful attention he had been carrying since the gallery.
The order she had been preparing assembled itself in her chest and dissolved at the same moment.
She opened her mouth and the truth came out.
It came out badly. It came out without sequence.
The writing box came first, then the key behind Margaret’s portrait, then Margaret’s letters, the dates, G.
and R.C., and then she heard herself say Robert’s name aloud.
She watched Edmund’s face change, and she went on.
She told him about the stranger at the bookseller’s.
About the threatening letter she had received the week of Arabella’s silence.
About Eleanor. About Mrs. Holt and the careful entries in Margaret’s last letters and the postscript about the garden folly at Ashfield.
About the line I do not believe Robert’s accident was an accident, which she had not, until that moment, spoken aloud to anyone.
She was standing by the time she finished. She did not remember rising. Her voice was shaking. She was crying, and she was not crying the controlled silent way she had cried in public corridors at functions she could not afford to leave.
She was crying as she had not cried since she was perhaps eight years old; real and furious and frightened, with her hands open at her sides and her face entirely undefended.
The room went still.
Edmund had not moved while she spoke. He had stood in the doorway, and then, somewhere midway, he had stepped into the room, and then he had stopped. He was perhaps five feet from her. His face was perfectly white.
Edmund sat down.
He did so heavily, on the small chair near the door. He put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
He did not speak. He did not move.
Sophia stood five feet from him with her hands open at her sides and her face wet with tears, and she made herself sit with the silence, because the silence was what he required of her.
He was not going still and controlled and managerial in the way she had braced herself for. He had gone past that.
He was absorbing the knowledge that his brother had been murdered, and his first wife poisoned, and the person responsible had been smiling at him across London drawing rooms for half a decade. There were no instructions for what to do with that knowledge in the first minute of carrying it.
She did not go to him. She did not go to him because if she did the conversation would end. He would put his arms around her. She would let him. The remainder of what they needed to say would not be said that night.
She stood, and she breathed, and she waited.
After perhaps another minute, he lifted his head.
His eyes were wet. He did not attempt to hide it. The voice he used when he spoke was rougher than the voice he had used with her before, lower, and much less controlled.
“How long have you been carrying this alone?”
“A few weeks.”
“Sophia.”
“I have known the shape of it since the third or fourth letter. I have known the whole of it for perhaps ten days. The line about the garden folly, where Margaret hid the rest of it, I found only a few days ago.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed to be certain. Before I brought you something that would destroy you. I could not bring you fragments, Edmund. You needed proof, and I needed to gather it. He was your brother. She was your wife.”
“I am not destroyed.” His voice broke on the last word. “I am angry. Not at you. I am...”
He stopped.
Edmund did not finish the sentence. He looked at her instead.
The look he gave her was so direct and so unguarded that her own crying, which had begun to subside, started up again in a small involuntary way.
The look on his face was not anger. He had just understood, in the cold absolute clarity of the present minute, that his wife had been walking through the city for weeks while a man who arranged the murders of inconvenient witnesses was watching her. He had not known.
She did not go to him. He did not come to her.
The distance between them was charged and painful and necessary. Sophia understood that he had reached the edge of his composure and was holding it by an act of will; and that if either of them crossed the five feet between them the will would dissolve. She held the distance. He held it too.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“There is more.”
He did not visibly react. He had been braced.
“Arabella. What he has been doing to her. He has been feeding her stories about me.
He has been styling himself as a confidant; as a man who saw her clearly when others did not, and she has been carrying his phrasings into this house and to her friends in public rooms, and the coldness I have been enduring at her hands these last weeks has been the coldness of a girl who has been very systematically persuaded that I am not to be trusted.
I did not, at the time, know that the man feeding her the stories was the same man who killed her brother. I do now.”
The change in him was almost silent.
She watched it happen. The set of his shoulders adjusted.
The line of his mouth steadied. The color, absent from his face since he had sat down, returned in a small even way to the planes of his cheekbones.
His eyes, wet a moment before, were dry, and what had moved in behind the wetness was a thing she had not, in all the weeks of their marriage, seen on his face before.
It was a still, cold, attentive fury. He would not shout.
He had concluded, in the steady administrative voice he used for any difficult fact, that what was required of him would be done.
Sohia found it much more frightening than shouting would have been.
“I shall handle it,” Edmund said. His voice was very quiet.
“We shall handle it. Together.”
He looked at her.
Something shifted in his face. Not softening. A different motion. Some final wall, one last polite pretense that what was between them was the arrangement they had negotiated in a morning room weeks ago, set itself down and did not, in his face, get picked up again.
“Together,” he said.
She nodded. She had not turned to him when he came in. She did not look away from him then.
***
The house had quieted by eleven.
Edmund had been in his study since Sophia went up, sitting with everything she had told him and finding no edge of it he could yet take hold of. Catherine had gone up. Henry was asleep.
He passed the drawing room.
The lamp was out. The garden door at the far end stood open by perhaps a hand’s width, and the darkness beyond it was paler than the darkness of the room itself, with the half-moon laying a clean cold light along the path.
He saw her.
She was on the bench. She had not taken a shawl. The white muslin of her wrap caught the moonlight along her shoulders, and her hands were folded in her lap. She had not heard him at the door.
Edmund went back to the entrance hall.
He took his coat from the peg without speaking to the night footman. He carried it through the dark drawing room and out into the cool garden. She had heard him that time. She did not turn. She knew it was him.
He went around to the front of the bench. He shook out the coat and settled it across her shoulders without ceremony, and she lifted her hands by some small degree to let the cloth fall against her, and then she leaned against him.
She did it naturally. She did it as though they had been doing it for years rather than hours.
Edmund sat down beside her. He brought his arm around her shoulders. The bench was narrow, and she fit against the line of his side in the clean way she had always been going to fit there.
“You should not be out here in your wrap.”
“I needed air.”
“I know.”
They sat for some minutes without speaking.
The garden was very still. A small wind moved once through the laurels and stopped. The half-moon was pale above the south wall. Sophia’s head was against his shoulder. Her breathing was slow and even. She was not, that evening, the one carrying the most weight.
“Tell me,” she said after a time.
Edmund did not answer.
He had spent the past two hours with everything Sophia had given him; the writing box and the names and the deaths, and he had been intending, when he came to the garden, to begin deciding what would be done. He told her about Margaret instead.