Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
For three days, Sophia and Benedict conducted their marriage with exquisite civility.
They said good morning. They inquired whether the other had slept well.
They discussed the weather, the post, the condition of the south road, and whether the drawing-room chimney continued to smoke when the wind came from the east. They did not discuss the pond.
They did not discuss Benedict’s words. Most particularly, they did not discuss whether their marriage had been a mistake.
At breakfast, Sophia sat beside Amelia while Benedict occupied his usual place at the head of the table.
Silver covers gleamed beneath the pale morning light.
The coffee smelled dark and bitter, the toast warm and faintly scorched.
Every small domestic sound seemed unnaturally distinct, from the clink of a spoon against china and the rustle of a newspaper, to Marjorie’s knife scraping too loudly across a plate.
Sophia felt Benedict’s gaze upon her twice. The first time, she looked up too late and found him studying his correspondence with great severity. The second, their eyes met. His expression altered. So did hers.
Then Marjorie asked whether jam might properly be considered a fruit, and the moment was lost in a prolonged argument about preserves.
At dinner, Benedict held Sophia’s chair as he always did.
His fingers came close to the bare skin above her glove, and her breath caught before she could prevent it.
He heard. She knew because his hand tightened upon the carved wood.
Neither spoke. Their silence filled Rivermere more completely than any quarrel could have done.
Sophia told herself she was angry. She repeated it while reading letters in the morning room and while walking the long gallery with Amelia. Anger was strong. Anger possessed dignity. Anger did not wake in the night with the memory of Benedict’s stricken face after he had spoken.
But beneath it lay hurt, and beneath the hurt something more humiliating still.
She missed him. She missed his dry replies and his grave attention.
She missed looking up from her book to find him seated opposite her, with one ankle resting upon the other knee, and his expression stern even in repose.
She missed the way the room changed when he entered it.
Apparently, a husband could become a habit in less than a month.
Fortunately, the girls gave her little opportunity to indulge in misery.
Amelia required assistance arranging her books according to a system she revised twice before luncheon.
Marjorie discovered that the gallery’s polished floor was excellent for sliding in stockings, a fact which Sophia was forced to acknowledge before forbidding further experiments near the staircase.
They walked in the gardens, read in Sophia’s sitting room, and spent one rainy morning constructing a fortress from cushions and shawls. It was, Marjorie declared, a fortress under siege.
“By whom?” Sophia asked.
Marjorie looked surprised by the question. “Enemies, of course.”
“What sort of enemies?”
“The worst sort.”
Amelia, seated inside the fortress with a book across her knees, glanced up. “She has not decided yet.”
“I have decided,” Marjorie protested. “They are French pirates.”
“French pirates generally arrive by sea,” Sophia observed.
“They came up the river.”
“There is no river at Rivermere.”
Marjorie frowned. “Then they carried their ship.”
Amelia lowered her book. “All the way from the coast?”
“They are very determined pirates.”
Sophia pressed her lips together, but laughter escaped her.
By the fourth afternoon, the rain had passed, leaving the estate washed and shining. Water clung to the leaves in bright drops, and the air smelled of damp earth, roses, and the clean green sweetness that followed a summer storm.
Sophia sat beneath the old cedar near the west garden with the twins. Amelia was attempting to sketch a bird she had seen upon the lawn. Marjorie was attempting to improve the picture by adding a sword.
“It is a robin,” Amelia pointed out patiently.
“It may still require defending itself.”
“Robins do not carry swords.”
“That is why cats catch them.”
Sophia looked over Amelia’s shoulder. The little bird had a round body, a solemn eye, and, thanks to Marjorie, a weapon nearly twice its length.
“I fear the sword may make flying difficult,” Sophia said.
Marjorie considered this. “He may leave it upon the ground until needed.”
“That seems sensible,” Amelia replied, though her mouth trembled.
Marjorie leaned back against the cedar trunk, satisfied. “Uncle Benedict would not approve.”
The words fell lightly, but Sophia’s fingers stilled upon the sewing in her lap. Amelia’s pencil paused, too.
“Of the sword?” Sophia asked.
“Of the robin fighting,” Marjorie clarified. “He would tell it to remain in its nest.”
Amelia looked down at her drawing. “Only if he thought something might happen to it.”
“Something always happens,” Marjorie replied. “That is what makes a story.”
The breeze stirred the branches above them. A drop of rain fell from a needle and darkened the paper near the robin’s foot. Sophia dabbed it gently with her handkerchief.
“That is why Uncle Benedict always worries,” Marjorie added.
Amelia nodded. “Mhm, because he loves us very much. But he worries all the time.”
Marjorie pulled a cedar cone apart with restless fingers. “He even worries when nothing is happening.”
“That is often when he worries most,” Amelia said.
Sophia looked at her. Amelia inherited the peculiar gravity of children who learned too early that happiness might alter without warning. She bent her head over the drawing, with her dark lashes lowered.
“He comes to the nursery at night,” she revealed. “He thinks we are asleep.”
Marjorie glanced up. “I am usually awake.”
“You are usually pretending to be asleep because you do not wish him to ask why you are awake.” Amelia traced the edge of the paper. “He stands beside the beds and looks at us. Sometimes he touches the curtains or checks the fire, though Nurse has already done it.”
Something tightened in Sophia’s chest. She could see Benedict doing it: silent in the dim nursery, moving through the shadows with the same stern concentration he brought to matters of estate and Parliament, as though vigilance might bargain with fate, as though the world could not take anyone he loved if he stayed awake long enough to prevent it.
“He did not worry so much before,” Marjorie sighed.
“Before what?” Sophia asked softly, though she already knew.
“Before Papa died,” Amelia whispered.
Marjorie’s fingers closed around the broken cedar cone.
“And Mama,” she added.
The girls rarely spoke of their parents. Sophia never pressed them. Their grief lived within Rivermere like a room whose door remained closed, not forbidden, but approached with care.
Amelia’s gaze remained upon the sword-bearing robin. “Papa used to let us climb the pear tree near our old house.”
“The branches were very high,” Marjorie said, her eyes beginning to brighten. “Higher than the oak at Keswick.”
“They were not.”
“They were nearly as high.”
“You were smaller. Everything appeared higher.”
Marjorie ignored this. “Papa would stand beneath us and pretend he could not see where we had gone. He would call our names and say, ‘What a dreadful mystery. I have lost both my daughters and found two very noisy birds.’”
Amelia smiled. It was a small smile at first, trembling and uncertain. Then memory warmed it.
“You always answered him,” she said.
“Because he appeared worried.”
“He was pretending.”
“I did not know that the first time.”
Sophia’s throat tightened, but she smiled with them.
“And your mother?” she asked.
“Mama said we would ruin our stockings,” Amelia replied.
“She said it every time,” Marjorie added, “but she never made us come down.”
“She brought a blanket and sat beneath the tree with her sewing.”
“And lemonade,” Marjorie remembered. “With far too little sugar.”
“It had plenty of sugar.”
“It had a respectable amount. Lemonade should not be respectable.”
Both girls laughed. The sound was different from their usual laughter. Softer, perhaps, but brighter too. Their faces seemed to open beneath the remembered sunlight of another home.
They told Sophia about their father teaching them to whistle with blades of grass and their mother pretending not to notice when they returned from the stream with wet hems. They described a summer afternoon when Marjorie climbed onto the stable roof to rescue a kitten that did not need rescuing, and another when Amelia became lost in the orchard after sitting beneath a tree to finish a chapter.
“Papa found her,” Marjorie said.
“He knew where I was.”
“He searched everywhere.”
“He searched everywhere loudly so I would hear him and answer.”
“You did not.”
“I had reached an important part.”
Sophia laughed, and Amelia’s eyes shone with pleased remembrance.
For several minutes, their parents were no longer a tragedy spoken of in softened voices.
They were alive in details: their father’s poor singing, their mother’s blue shawl, the smell of apples in the orchard, the muddy dog who slept beneath the nursery table despite being forbidden upstairs.
Sophia listened until she could almost see them. Then the stories slowly quieted. Amelia touched one finger to the robin’s wing.
“I miss them,” she whispered. The admission was barely louder than the leaves. Sophia set aside her sewing and opened her arm. Amelia moved into it without hesitation. She rested her head against Sophia’s shoulder, small and warm and no longer trying to appear older than eight.
“I know,” Sophia whispered.
Marjorie came closer, too, though she did so under the pretense of retrieving the pencil. A moment later, she pressed against Sophia’s other side.
“I miss them when I have adventures,” she confessed. “Because Papa always wanted to hear everything, even the parts Amelia said I ought not to tell him.”
“He usually knew those parts already,” Amelia murmured.
Sophia held them both. Somehow, she understood Benedict better then.
His rules were not walls built from coldness.
They were barricades raised by a man who had watched death enter a family twice and believed it his duty never to permit it through the door again.
Every forbidden tree, every locked gate, every warning at the edge of a pond came from love sharpened by helplessness.
The knowledge softened something in her.
It did not change what she believed. The girls had lost their parents.
They should not also lose every joyful thing their parents had given them.
Adventure had once been part of love. Trees, streams, muddy hems, and implausible stories were not merely dangers. They were memories of happiness.
Benedict wished to preserve the girls. Sophia wished to restore them. Perhaps neither desire was wrong. Perhaps the wrong lay only in believing one had to destroy the other.
Marjorie lifted her head. “Do you think Uncle Benedict would ever allow us to climb the pear tree?”
Sophia looked toward the house. Through the distant drawing-room windows, she saw the dark shape of a man standing motionless behind the glass. Even at that distance, she knew him.
For one breath, neither moved. Then Benedict turned away.
Sophia looked down at the girls.
“I think,” she spoke slowly, “your uncle may require some persuasion.”
Marjorie’s eyes brightened. “I am excellent at persuasion.”
“No,” Amelia and Sophia said together.
Marjorie sighed. Sophia drew them closer, feeling their laughter stir against her.
She understood Benedict’s fear now, but she understood something else as well. These children had already spent too much of their young life learning how suddenly happiness could disappear.
Sophia would not allow fear to take the rest of it.