Chapter 27
Sophia did not sleep.
She sat at the writing desk in her room with two candles lit and the household’s notepaper in front of her, and she wrote three notes before two in the morning.
The first went to Mrs. Holt by trusted footman, asking her to leave her lodgings before daylight for the address Sophia named in the envelope.
The second went to Eleanor at her house on Brook Street, saying only that Sophia required her at their estate at first light.
The third went to the magistrate Jonathan had been working with, confirming, in Edmund’s name and over Sophia’s signature, that they would have Lord Graystone within twelve hours.
She sealed the third with her own ring.
Sophia slept perhaps an hour before dawn. She did not dream.
***
Eleanor arrived at six.
She came in a walking dress with a small valise, which she handed to the footman before she had quite crossed the threshold.
The valise contained, Sophia learned over the course of the morning, the contents of a household-running kit Eleanor had been assembling in her own mind for some years and had not, until that day, found occasion to deploy.
Paper. Inks. A small leather book ruled into columns. A packet of biscuits, on the principle that someone in the house was going to forget to eat and Eleanor was not going to be the person who permitted it.
She took Sophia’s hands at the foot of the stairs.
“Tell me what you require.”
Sophia told her. Catherine was to be informed of the situation so long as Catherine had not already worked it out for herself. Arabella was meant to be kept downstairs and occupied.
Henry was to be told as much as a seven-year-old was required to be told, which was that his uncle and aunt were attending to the business of catching the bad man, and that he was not to leave the house.
Mrs. Pratt would be instructed to keep to the upper floors with Henry, staying clear of the front of the house. The night footman supplemented by the day footman and the under-coachman, on the grounds that no one was going to enter or leave that morning without Eleanor’s permission.
The kitchen should be kept supplied with tea, since waiting was, by Eleanor’s reckoning, the most difficult work of the day.
Eleanor listened. She did not interrupt. When Sophia had finished, Eleanor nodded once, very precisely, and went to find Catherine.
By half past six the house was in her hands.
It was the first morning in two months Sophia had not, upon rising, been responsible for the running of every immediate matter in the house. Eleanor had taken the household at its threshold. Sophia had been set free.
She went to dress.
Edmund came to her room at seven.
She had not been expecting him before breakfast. She had not been expecting him at all in her own room, which he had not entered, in the four months of their marriage. He knocked once. He came in. He closed the door.
Sophia was at the dressing table.
She had finished pinning her hair. She had been turning to ring for tea, and she rose instead when she heard the door, and they stood looking at each other across the small carpeted space between the dressing table and the door.
Neither of them spoke at first.
She had registered the previous evening, that they had been circling something between them since, approximately, the moment she had walked back into Margaret’s sitting room with the dust on her shoes from the ladder she had climbed to retrieve the box.
The circling compounded into the charged silence between them. He had not arranged his face. She had not arranged hers.
He crossed the room and took her hands.
His hands, she registered, were trembling.
She had seen them do that only once before, in the carriage the afternoon he had pulled her out of Percival’s grip. Before that she had known Edmund Cavendish's hands to be steady through three years of estate management, the death of his first wife, and the death of his brother.
She had known them to be steady on the bridle of a startled horse. Twice, and only twice, she had known them otherwise, and both times it had been about her. They were not steady in that moment.
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“Before we go today.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to know that you matter to me. That is the word I have been trying to find for the past several weeks and have not, until this morning, located. You matter to me. You are not, by my reckoning, a convenience. You are not an arrangement. You are not the practical solution I proposed to myself in a morning room weeks ago. I require you to understand that. I require you to understand that before we leave this house.”
He paused.
She watched him stop.
She watched the rest of the sentence assemble itself behind his teeth and stay there. The proper sentence was a different one and a longer one. It was the sentence he had been holding for a fortnight. He was not going to say it.
He was not going to say it because saying it in her bedroom at seven in the morning, with the carriages assembled below and the two of them about to ride out after a man who had run, would not sound like the beginning he intended it to be. It would sound like a farewell.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“I know.”
She said it very quietly. The two words were not an acknowledgment of what he had said aloud. He understood that. He understood it within a quarter of a second. His grip on her hands tightened.
“You know.”
“Yes. I know what you are not saying. I have known what you were not saying for some time. I am not asking you to say it now. I am asking you to say it when you have come back to me, and the rest of this is finished, and the saying of it can be the beginning you intend it to be. I will wait. I will wait however long you require. But I want you to know that I know.”
She did not breathe. Neither did he.
The room was quiet. The gray morning light slanted through the window and across the dressing table and onto the floor between them. His hands held hers with a grip she would, over the rest of her life, remember as an absolute promise when he had nothing else available to give her.
He lifted her hand and pressed it to his chest.
He did it with care, and without speech, holding her open palm flat against the wool of his coat, in the precise place over his heart, and he kept it there.
She felt his heartbeat through the cloth.
It was faster than she would have expected of him, and it was steady, and it was the only declaration he was permitting himself before the door at the bottom of the stairs.
She did not pull her hand away.
She lifted her other hand. She laid it against his cheek. He closed his eyes.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“Be careful today.”
“I shall be careful.”
“I require us both to come back to this house.”
“I intend to. I intend to come home, Sophia.”
The word landed like a stone.
It was the same word he had used three weeks before at the door of the Marchmont gallery, and it had meant the same thing then. It had also meant a smaller thing than it meant in that moment. He had said it deliberately. She had heard it.
He took her hand from his cheek and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist, very briefly, and lowered it.
He stepped back and let go.
“I shall see you in the study in ten minutes.” His voice was very level.
“Yes.”
Edmund turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Sophia stood for a moment with her hand against her own chest, where his hand had pressed it. She waited until her breathing had steadied. She had a great deal to do, and she intended to do it.
***
Jonathan arrived at half past seven. with news .
“He has not left London.”
“Where is he?”
“Bryant Wallace’s chambers at Lincoln’s Inn.
My clerk has been outside since six. Lord Graystone came in at five, by the back stairs, with three boxes and a portmanteau.
He has not come out. He is burning correspondence.
The clerk says the smoke from the back chimney is not the smoke of an ordinary fire. ”
Edmund did not answer.
“Then the meeting happens there.”
“Yes.”
“This morning.”
“This morning. We have until perhaps eleven before he has burned what he means to burn and is in a hackney for Dover. We must be at the chambers by ten.”
They moved to the study.
By half past nine the plan had taken its final shape.
The plan was simple. It was also, unsafe.
Sophia would be the one in the room, alone, in a place Lord Graystone believed held nothing but her and no purpose but the one he wanted.
Everything after that depended on what he chose to say once the door had closed behind him, and on his never knowing, until it was too late, who else was in the room to hear it.
“I do not like it.”
Edmund had been the one to draft the plan. He still did not like it.
“I know.”
“You are the one who is on the floor.”
“Yes.”
“He has put his hand on you once. He will not, I expect, put it on you twice. He will be more cautious, or he will be less cautious, and I cannot calculate from this side of it which it will be.”
She looked at him across the desk.
“Edmund.”
“Yes.”
“He underestimates me. It is his weakness. We are going to use it.”
He did not answer.
He looked at her steadily, without smiling. Edmund had heard the thing he had been needing to be told.
He nodded.
It was a small nod. It was a complete one. The nod meant, yes; you are right; I have known you are right for some time; I am proceeding on your terms. It was the most direct thing he had said to her all morning, and he had not used a word.
They worked through the remaining details, wrote the note, and sealed it. They gave it to the clerk who had been waiting downstairs in the entrance hall, with instructions to deliver it to Bryant Wallace’s chambers at exactly half past ten and to wait, at the inn, for Lord Graystone to arrive.
They went down to the entrance hall together.
The house had been emptied of everyone who did not need to be in it. Eleanor was in the morning room with Catherine, Arabella, and Henry. The footmen were at their stations. The carriage was at the door.
Sophia stopped on the threshold. She did not know why. She turned and looked back into the entrance hall of the house she had walked into as a stranger four months earlier.
The morning light through the high windows fell across the polished floor in two long pale rectangles.
The hall clock, which had been three minutes fast for as long as Sophia had been living in that house, was three minutes fast still.
There was a vase of yellow tulips on the side table. The hall was quiet.
It was hers.
She had not, until that morning, registered that it was hers. She had been living in it as a guest. She set the morning light, the polished floor, the yellow tulips, and the steady tick of the fast clock into the careful place in her chest where she kept the things she did not intend to forget.
Then she turned back.
Edmund was waiting on the step. He held out his arm. She took it.
They went down the steps together, and the carriage moved off down Grosvenor Street toward Lincoln’s Inn. Sophia did not look back.
What Margaret had started, they were going to finish.