Chapter 30 #2
“There was a brave knight, who was kind, and quiet, and clever in ways nobody had noticed because he did not choose to be noticed. And there was a clever lady, who had been told for some time that she was clever, but who had not been told, by any person who mattered, that she was also brave. And the knight and the lady met at a moment when they were both a little bit hurt, and a little bit alone, and they entered into an arrangement. It was meant to be small. But it turned out, by the end, to be much larger than either of them had agreed to.”
She paused.
“They worked together to catch a bad man. They did it carefully, and patiently, and with a great deal of help from their friends; and a great deal of courage from a small number of people who had been very afraid for a long time. And they caught him, in the end. They caught him today. And the kingdom is safer this evening because of it.”
“Is the knight Uncle Edmund?”
The question came from the small face against her chest. Henry’s voice was very serious.
Sophia did not answer.
She looked across the room at Edmund. He had set down his pen and was looking at her. He had been holding the pen for perhaps, the last forty seconds without making any further mark, and he had not, in those forty seconds, taken his eyes off his wife. She tilted her head, very slightly.
“Yes, Henry. The knight is your Uncle Edmund.”
Edmund’s throat closed.
He set the pen carefully into its tray. He looked at his wife across the room with their nephew in her lap, and he did not look away.
After a moment, Jonathan raised his glass.
He did it without ceremony. He did it without saying anything, and Edmund returned the gesture.
Catherine, after a pause, lifted her own teacup, and Arabella, beside Jonathan, who had no glass to raise, only pressed the hand that wore his ring against the back of his and left it there.
She had been turning the ring quietly on her finger for the past hour.
Henry, against Sophia’s chest, breathed once and went to sleep.
***
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when Edmund found her.
The household had retired by eleven, staggered. Catherine had retired first, with Henry. Jonathan and Arabella had remained in the drawing room until Jonathan had taken his leave. Sophia had gone up at half past ten.
Edmund had remained at the desk to finish three further pieces of correspondence, and by midnight he had gone up himself, and he had not, when he reached the landing, gone to his own room.
He had gone to look for her.
The upper sitting room had been Margaret’s.
It had been kept exactly as Margaret had left it, by Edmund’s request, for nearly three years.
He had not entered it more than four or five times since her death.
Sophia had been the one who had taken charge of the room since shortly after the wedding, and Sophia was in it at that moment.
She was standing in front of Margaret’s portrait.
Sophia had her hands clasped in front of her. She was in her wrap, with her hair down. She was simply standing in front of the portrait, looking at it, steadily and without hurry.
She heard him at the door and turned.
Her face, in the lamplight, was the most unguarded face he had ever seen on her. She was smiling. It was a small luminous smile.
He crossed the room to her.
He did not say anything. He came up behind her, set his hands at her waist, and he drew her gently back against him. Edmund closed his arms around her, laying his cheek against the top of her head. She rested against him easily.
They stood like that, looking at Margaret in the quiet of the sitting room for some time.
The portrait had been painted the year before Margaret’s death.
She was thirty-one in it. Margaret was wearing the dark green velvet she had favored in the autumn.
Her hands were folded in her lap, around a small leather notebook the painter had included on Edmund’s request. The painter had captured the set of her mouth that had been Margaret’s usual expression, the steady close attention of her gray eyes, and the private smile she had used only with the people she had known well.
“She would have liked you, Sophia.”
His voice was very low.
Sophia turned her head, by a small motion, to lay her cheek against the crook of his shoulder.
“I hope so.”
“She would have. I know she would have.”
He looked at Margaret’s portrait again. The painter had caught something in her eyes that Edmund had spent three years refusing to see, the same watchful, asking quality Sophia had found in them not long after she came to live in the house. He saw it then. It no longer looked to him like fear.
Margaret had set down what she had needed to set down, and it had been read, and it had been carried, and it had brought the man who killed her into a room with constables.
The question her eyes had held for three years had, at last, been answered. Edmund stood in the firelight with his wife in his arms looking at his first wife on the wall, and there was no part of him in that moment that was not at peace.
Sophia turned in his arms.
She lifted her face. He bent his. They did not kiss, that time. They stood with their foreheads pressed against one another and their arms around one another. The clock ticked, and the fire settled in the grate, and the household was quiet on all the floors below them.
There was nothing further required to be said.
They had said the only thing that mattered. The rest, they had the rest of their lives to attend to.