Chapter 30
The room was quiet.
The sound of the constables on the staircase had faded by degrees. The magistrate’s voice, audible from the corridor for seconds after the door had closed, had thinned and become a man’s voice at a distance, and then nothing. The clock on the mantel ticked. The fire settled in the grate.
Edmund held his wife.
He had not, since she had stumbled into his arms, moved any part of him. His arms were locked around her, his face against her hair. She was shaking against the wool of his coat.
He was shaking again, with the kind of shaking that arrived in him at the cost of having understood, for three minutes, that he was going to watch his wife die six feet from where he was standing and not be able to prevent it.
He could not stop thinking about the thin red line on her neck.
He had not yet looked at it. He could not bear to. He did not need to look to know exactly where it was. His arms had not loosened around her, because if he loosened them he was going to be required to look at the line.
She pulled back first, slowly. Her fists had been holding the front of his coat. Her fingers uncurled. She lifted her face from his shoulder and tilted it up, three inches, and she looked at him. Her face was wet. The crying had not stopped yet, but the shuddering of it had.
The space between their faces was the width of a breath.
He looked at her.
He had been holding the thing he had not yet said to her since the night in the garden when he had promised her he would say it properly. He was no longer in any state to hold it.
He began.
“You are not a convenience.”
His voice was rougher than he had intended. He kept his arms around her. He kept his eyes on her face.
“You have never been a convenience. I want you to know that. I proposed to you in a morning room four months ago in the considered language of a friend offering a household to a woman in a difficult situation; and I told myself I had done it for that reason. I have been wrong about that reason for much longer than I have been willing to acknowledge.”
She did not answer. She had not let go of his coat.
“I have loved you,” he said. “There is no single moment I can give you for when it began, though I have tried to find one. It was the morning you came down the back stairs with Henry's hand in yours. It was the garden, the night I told you about Robert and you took my face in your hands.
It was a dozen ordinary mornings between the two that I would not let myself count. Somewhere among them I stopped being a man who had made a sensible arrangement, and I did not allow myself to notice until it was far too late to pretend otherwise.” He paused.
“I loved you fifteen minutes ago, when I stood three feet from you and could not reach you because there was a blade at your throat. I love you now, Sophia. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone in my life, and I am sorry it has taken me four months to say it to you plainly.”
She did not speak.
She lifted her hands from his coat. She laid them flat against his chest, palms open, in the precise place above his heart where he had pressed her hand that morning.
“I have loved you,” she said, “since you remembered.”
“Remembered?”
“The book about Dutch portraiture. I had mentioned it at a supper t years ago, one summer at Ashfield. You remembered. You sent me a copy. You wrote the note as if remembering the book was the smallest possible thing, and I had not been remembered like that, on any small thing, for a great many years. I had not understood until you remembered it that I had been waiting to be.”
He looked at her.
“I have loved you since you held my hand in a dark carriage and told me about the anonymous notes and made me believe, by the steadiness of your grip and not by any word you used, that you were going to keep me safe. I have loved you with everything I have been too careful and too frightened to offer anyone since I was sixteen years old, and I am not frightened anymore, Edmund. I love you.”
He could not, breathe for a moment.
Edmund looked at her face. He looked at the tears on her cheek and the small thin red line on the side of her throat, which he had still not looked at directly until that moment, and which had stopped being the worst thing he had ever seen on her body.
It had become, in that second, the proof that she was standing in the room and alive and breathing in front of him, saying she loved him.
He brought his hand up. He laid it along the side of her jaw, and he tilted her face by a degree, very gently, closing the final small distance between them.
He kissed her.
It was the first kiss of their marriage. He gave it that weight. He kept it gentle. She gave it back to him steadily and gladly and with a small fierce return he had not known her body to be capable of, and it lasted longer than he had intended it to.
When they came apart, he kept her face in his hand.
He did not say anything. Neither did she.
Edmund pressed his forehead briefly to hers. Then he took her hand. He laced his fingers through hers. He turned them both, gently, toward the door.
Jonathan was in the corridor. He turned when the door opened. He registered, by some quality on Edmund’s face, that the matter inside the room had concluded. He tilted his head.
“The carriage is below.”
“Thank you.”
“Take us home.”
***
The afternoon had gone quiet, and then it had not.
Edmund came down from the study at four to find the house holding a sound it had not held in some time. He heard laughter from the drawing room before he reached it.
He stopped in the doorway.
Jonathan was on the sofa. Arabella was on the sofa beside him, close enough that their shoulders were touching, with her hand in his. She was laughing in a small unguarded way. She had been told something she had been needing to hear.
Catherine was in the armchair opposite them, with her face arranged in the composed satisfaction she always wore when an outcome she had been quietly engineering had at last delivered itself.
Sophia was at the window. She turned when he came in.
"Edmund. Jonathan has something to tell you."
"I imagined he might."
Jonathan rose. He crossed the room and shook Edmund's hand firmly.
"I have been waiting to do this for approximately eight years. Your sister has done me the honor of accepting me. I had thought I should ask you afterward rather than before, on the principle that asking afterward is irrevocable."
"Jonathan."
"Yes."
Edmund laughed.
He had not, he realized, laughed in weeks. It came out of him without precaution and without arrangement. Arabella looked up at the sound of it. She had not heard her brother laugh like that in some time, and she had been missing it.
"You have my consent. You had it before you asked. You have had it for eight years."
"I had thought you might."
"Take care of her, Jonathan."
"I shall."
Edmund crossed to his sister. He bent and kissed her on the forehead. He held her hands for a moment, and she looked up at him with a face that was, for the first time in two months, entirely her own.
He straightened and turned.
Sophia was still at the window. She was looking at him across the drawing room. Her expression was the warmest he had ever seen on her face, and he held it, and let her hold his, and there was nothing left between them that needed deferring to a better evening. The better evening had already come.
***
The household had gathered in the drawing room by five.
Eleanor had come. Catherine was in the armchair, very pale, with a cup of tea she had not yet drunk and a handkerchief she had not yet used.
Arabella was on the sofa beside Jonathan, whom she had not let go of since the carriage had returned.
Henry, by the intervention of Mrs. Pratt and the petition of Catherine, had been permitted to come down for the afternoon.
He was on the rug by the fire, with the wooden horse and two of his tin soldiers, and he was very quiet.
Edmund had work to do.
He sat at the small desk in the corner with Jonathan beside him, and the two of them composed the necessary correspondence to the magistrate and to the magistrate’s clerk, and the careful letter that would be required for Graystone’s solicitor in the morning informing him that any settlement on his client’s part was no longer a matter for negotiation.
Jonathan supplied the legal phrasing. Edmund supplied the signatures. Sophia, in the armchair across the room with Henry perched in her lap, watched them work.
There was one further note.
It went to Mrs. Holt, by trusted footman.
It said that the matter of her statement had concluded as Sophia had promised her; that she would not be held to account for the role she had been forced to play, that the Cavendish household would arrange a private settlement for her and her sister, and that she was free, from that evening forward, to live in any place she chose to live, without fear.
Sophia signed it. Edmund cosigned it. Jonathan sealed it and handed it to the footman.
The footman went.
Henry, in Sophia’s lap, looked up.
“Aunt Sophia, will you tell me the story now?”
Sophia looked at him softly. Her face changed.
“Which story, Henry?”
“The story. The story with the brave knight and the clever lady. I want to hear the rest of it.”
Catherine lifted her head and set her cup down. Arabella looked up from Jonathan’s hand. Edmund stopped writing. The room had gone, in an absolute way, very attentive.
“Very well.”
Sophia settled Henry against her chest. She put her chin on the top of his head.