Chapter 22
Edmund came down to the morning room at half past six. The household was not stirring. The tea was already cooling in the pot.
Sophia was at the breakfast table.
She had not heard him come in. She was sitting with her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she was not drinking, the morning light falling across her shoulders. There were faint shadows under her eyes. She did not appear to have slept any more than he had.
She turned her head when he entered. He sat down across from her.
They did not speak. The clock on the mantel marked the seconds. The previous night’s conversation sat between them on the white linen like a third object neither of them had yet decided how to handle.
He reached across the table, putting his hand, palm up, on the linen between them. He left it there. After a moment she reached out and laid her own hand in his.
He closed his fingers around hers.
They sat like that for some time. The tea cooled further. Edmund looked at his wife across the breakfast table with their hands resting joined on the linen, and he understood that he had not, on any sensible account, expected his life to contain a thing of this magnitude.
The morning post arrived at twenty past nine.
Catherine had joined them at five past eight in the composed silence she had been carrying since the previous afternoon and had taken her own tea without remarking on the joined hands she had walked in on.
Edmund had released Sophia’s hand when Catherine entered.
Sophia had not withdrawn it any sooner than was strictly polite.
The post was a small stack. Two bills. An invitation. A note from Catherine’s milliner. And, at the bottom, a folded paper sealed with the wax Edmund had learned to recognize.
He broke the seal in the breakfast room. He had decided, the night before, that he would no longer take Percival Cummings’s letters away to read alone.
Ashfield, it began. I have been reflecting on the conversation we have not yet had. It has occurred to me that there are certain pieces of information about your family’s recent difficulties that have not yet, reached a wider audience.
Your elder sister’s quiet conduct of her household, for instance, is a matter on which a great deal of speculation might be entertained were it not for the careful absence of remark. Your younger sister’s recent confidences are likewise a matter best left between those who possess them.
And the question of how your wife came to find herself in your house at all is, I am told, one of which several drawing rooms have been forming opinions which a friend of the family might find useful to redirect.
I do not, as you know, hold grievances. I do, however, prefer my accounts kept current. We should perhaps discuss the matter at your convenience. I remain, and he had not yet used the construction aloud.
He used it then, deliberately, at the breakfast table with Lord Graystone’s letter between them, and he watched Sophia register the correction.
Her face changed.
It was not the cold fury she had been wearing a moment before. The cold fury slid sideways, and what was beneath it was a quality of tenderness so unguarded that for one held second Edmund forgot to breathe.
She did not say anything. She did not need to.
He folded the letter.
“This afternoon. We speak to Arabella. Together.”
She nodded.
***
The conversation with Arabella was the hardest conversation he had ever had with his sister.
He had asked Catherine to bring her down to the drawing room at three. He had asked Sophia to sit beside him.
He told her about the debts, about the campaign Lord Graystone had been running against Sophia, about Ashworth at the club and the phrasing he had recognized in her own voice at the Marchmont gallery.
He told her, as gently as he was able, that the stories she had been receiving had not been confidences.
They had been instruments. They had been designed to drive a wedge between his wife and his sister, and the wedge had served Lord Graystone’s purpose for as long as Arabella had been carrying it.
He told her, finally, about Robert.
He did not, in the telling, watch her face. He delivered the facts in their proper order, looking at the carpet between them, and he did not look up until he had finished.
When he did, Arabella was crying.
It was not the bright theatrical weeping she had perfected at fourteen. She was crying between ragged and small breaths, her hands in her lap, her face wet, unable for seconds to speak. She was nineteen years old. She had just understood, in a quarter of an hour, that she had been used.
Sophia rose.
She did it without consulting him. She crossed the drawing room and knelt on the carpet in front of Arabella’s chair taking both of the girl’s hands in her own.
“Arabella. Look at me.”
Arabella did.
“The shame belongs to him. Not to you. He chose you because you are warm and honest and you trust the people who are kind to you, and those are qualities a wiser man would have wished to protect. He used them instead. The using of them is his shame. There is no shame in having trusted someone. The shame is in being the one who betrayed the trust. Do you hear me?”
Arabella made a small sound. It was not a word.
“Do you hear me, Arabella?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Sophia did not release her hands. She knelt on the carpet in front of her sister-in-law, who had been cold to her at every breakfast table for nearly three weeks. Sophia held the girl’s hands without flinching, and she said again, quietly, that the shame belonged to him.
Arabella broke.
She came forward off the chair into Sophia’s arms, collapsing the upright posture she had been holding for too long. Sophia caught her and held her.
Edmund sat in his own chair and watched his wife hold his sister while his sister wept, and he understood, with a clarity that was nearly painful, that he loved his wife.
He had loved her for some time. He had, perhaps been loving her since the morning Henry had hidden in the attic and she had come down the back stairs with the boy’s hand in hers.
He had not allowed himself to feel the word, because the word had not been in the marriage they had agreed to.
The terms of the agreement had stopped mattering.
What he was feeling was too large for a drawing room with his weeping sister in it, and he had every intention of saying it aloud at the proper time.
Sophia raised her head and looked at him over Arabella’s shoulder.
Her eyes were wet.
She had read his face. She held his gaze. He held hers in return.
***
Edmund went out to the garden in the evening.
Catherine had guided Arabella to bed. Henry was in the schoolroom. Sophia had been in the morning room when Edmund last saw her, with a book she was not reading, and he had assumed, correctly, that she would be in the garden when he came down.
She was on the stone bench. Her arms were wrapped around herself. The half-moon was clear and the air a little cold. The white roses along the south wall caught the moonlight in steady patches. Sophia did not turn at the sound of his step on the gravel.
He sat down beside her.
After a while he turned to her. She turned to him. What she saw in his face he could not have arranged or hidden. Her breath caught audibly. He raised his hand slowly, giving her every opportunity to step back, and cupped her cheek in his palm.
She closed her eyes and leaned into his hand. Her face turned by some small degree into his palm, and her breath went out, very quietly, against the inside of his wrist.
He could have kissed her then. He understood, with absolute clarity, that she would have permitted him to.
He did not.
He held her face in his hand. Then he opened his mouth.
“Sophia.”
Her eyes opened. They were very dark in the moonlight.
“Not here,” he said. His voice was rougher than he had meant it.
“Not on a garden bench at the end of a day when I have just told my sister our brother was murdered. Not while Lord Graystone is in the city. I will not have a stolen moment with you in a garden. I will have a proper one, on a day I have chosen, in a place I have chosen, when you are safe and the man who has been threatening you has been put where he belongs. I am asking you to give me that. I am asking you to give us that.”
She did not answer for a moment..
Then she nodded. Very slightly.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I will.”
He let his hand fall.
He did it slowly. His thumb traced the line of her jaw on the way down, and the small lingering contact of his fingertips along the side of her throat as his hand left her was the only thing about the moment that was not, in the strict mechanical accounting of it, restraint.
He stood and held out his hand. She took it. They walked across the garden to the morning room door with their hands joined.
At the door he stopped.
“When this is over. There is something I will need to say to you. I should like to say it now. I am not going to. I am going to say it when I can say it properly.”
“Yes.”
“Sophia.”
“Yes, Edmund.”
He raised her hand to his mouth. He pressed his lips to the back of her hand. It was also, by some considerable margin, the most they had so far permitted themselves to feel.
He opened the door for her and they went inside.
Jonathan was in the study.
He had arrived without being announced. He was pacing in front of the fire when they came in, in his evening clothes, his hat on the desk.
“Edmund. Sophia. Forgive me. I have not been able to sit down for the past two hours.”
“What?”
“Lord Graystone is being blackmailed.”
Edmund did not answer.
“Read the entries beginning on the third page.” Jonathan had the anonymous ledger packet open on the desk.
“He has been paying a steady sum every quarter for the past five years to a person whose name does not appear. That person knows the whole of Lord Graystone’s business. That person has been keeping originals of every document that has gone through his hands.”
“The anonymous source.”
“The same.”
Edmund crossed to the desk. He looked at the page. The regular precise quarterly sum.
“Jonathan.”
“Yes.”
“The blackmailer is the source. The blackmailer is who has been sending us the notes.”
“Yes.”
“And the blackmailer is?”
He stopped. Jonathan looked at him.
“Someone in our circle. Someone we know. Someone Percival Cummings has been paying every quarter for five years not to talk.”
The study was very quiet.
Edmund laid his hand flat on the open ledger.
He thought about the stranger in the bookseller’s, and the two anonymous notes locked in his own desk drawer, and Mrs. Holt, and Margaret, and Robert, and the careful five-year quarterly sum on the page in front of him; and he understood that the thing he had decided to handle was both larger and much closer to home than he had calculated.
He looked at Sophia.
“We move tonight.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
He could see she had reached the same conclusion he had; that it was someone close to them both.