Chapter 16 #3
“A week. To consider your offer.”
“You understand that my offer is contingent upon certain practical considerations. The debts will not wait indefinitely. The roof will not repair itself.”
“I understand.”
He studied her for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and withdrew a small velvet box, which he placed on the table beside her teacup. The gesture was precise, deliberate, the final move in a game he had already won.
“A token,” he said, “of my intentions. You may give me your answer when you are ready. But I would not advise you to wait too long, Miss Ainsworth. Opportunities of this nature do not present themselves twice.”
He rose. He bowed to Lady Eleanor. He did not touch Sophia again, not her hand, not her shoulder, not even the air near her skin. He simply walked out of the room with the same measured stride he had entered it, a man who had made his terms and was confident they would be accepted.
The front door closed. The carriage wheels rattled away down Marine Parade. The clock on the mantel ticked, and ticked, and ticked.
Lady Eleanor crossed the room in three swift steps and knelt beside Sophia’s chair. Her hands were shaking again, but her face was alight with something that looked terrifyingly like hope.
“Oh, my dear girl. My dear, dear girl. Do you see? It is going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right.”
Sophia looked at her mother’s face, the relief blooming across it like a bruise, the tears finally spilling over, the desperate, exhausted joy of a woman who had been drowning and had just been thrown a rope.
She wanted to say something. She wanted to explain that the rope was also a noose.
She wanted to tell her mother about the essays, about the Observer, about the person she was trying to become in the small hours of the night when the house was quiet and her pen was moving across the page and she felt, for the first time in her life, like someone who existed for reasons other than being married.
She said none of it.
“I need to lie down,” she said.
“Of course. Of course you do. It has been a very trying morning. But Sophia —” Lady Eleanor caught her hand and pressed it between both of her own. “You have done the right thing. You will see. In time, you will see.”
Sophia withdrew her hand. She picked up the velvet box from the table and carried it out of the drawing room, up the stairs, along the narrow corridor to her bedroom. The box was heavier than it looked. The velvet was the colour of old blood.
She closed the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed. The curtains were half-drawn, and the light that filtered through them was grey and thin, the light of a morning that had already decided what kind of day it was going to be.
She opened the box.
The diamond was larger than she had expected.
It sat in a setting of yellow gold, surrounded by smaller stones that caught the grey light and threw it back in fragments.
It was a beautiful thing. It was a cage rendered in carbon and precious metal.
It was the price of Greenly Hall, the price of her mother’s peace, the price of Benedict’s future, and she was supposed to wear it on her finger and call herself fortunate.
She closed the box and set it on the nightstand. Then she reached beneath her mattress and withdrew the plain brown leather journal that contained everything she was not supposed to be.
The next essay was half-finished. It was sharper than the others, less satire, more blade.
She had been writing about the marriage market, about the way women were priced and purchased and displayed, about the particular cruelty of a system that dressed economic necessity in the language of romance and called it civilisation.
She had not known, when she began it, that she was writing her own eulogy.
She opened the journal to the last filled page and read the final line she had written, three nights ago, before the Cavendish ball, before the kiss, before Mr. Denbigh and his velvet box and his practical solution to her family’s practical problems.
We are taught to call our cages home, and to decorate them with gratitude.
She picked up her pen.
For a long moment, she did not write anything. She simply sat there, the nib hovering above the paper, the diamond glittering on the nightstand in its nest of velvet, the sea wind rattling the windowpane like a fist against glass.
Then she began to write, and she did not stop until the light had shifted from grey to gold and the shadows had lengthened across the floor and her hand ached and her eyes burned and the words had run out, finally, leaving nothing behind but silence and the small velvet box and the question she still did not know how to answer.
Downstairs, Lady Eleanor was humming. The sound drifted up through the floorboards, thin and tremulous and hopeful, the sound of a woman who believed her family had been saved.
Sophia set down her pen.
“Mama,” she whispered to the empty room, “you have no idea what you have asked of me.”