The Perceptive Heart (The Lockwood Sisters #3)

Chapter 1

The goose had been on the spit since before first light, and by four o’clock its fat was running down into the dripping pan with a steady, domestic hiss that had found its way into every room of Lockwood Estate.

Sophia could smell it from the upper landing, that rich, slightly charred sweetness mixed with the woodsmoke from the great hall fire, the beeswax the maids had been working into the bannisters since morning, and underneath it all the cold-stone smell of a house that no amount of festivity could warm through.

She stood at the top of the stairs and listened.

Below, the Hall was loud again, as it had not been since before her sisters’ marriages, before the lean years, before everything.

Juliana’s voice carried up clearly. She laughed at something Sebastian had said, the sound escaping her before she could stop it, warm and sudden and unconcerned with who heard.

Beneath it, Rose was crying in that fretful pre-sleep fashion that meant she had been awake too long and was furious about it.

William’s boots struck the flagstones in the entry hall at intervals, a determined, rhythmic sound.

He had discovered that morning that the flagstones made a very satisfactory noise under boots and had spent much of the afternoon conducting experiments in this regard.

Sophia descended.

The drawing room had been overtaken. Juliana, she suspected, with Beatrice providing enthusiastic counsel, had arranged pine boughs along the mantelpiece, and they were shedding their needles slowly onto the blue damask cloth below.

The smell of pine was sharp and resinous over the fire-heat.

Three of Beatrice’s watercolour sketches had been propped against the candlesticks for want of a better home: sprigs of holly, a rather ambitious attempt at the church in snow, a small study of Mary’s hands.

Mary herself was asleep on the settee, tucked under a wool shawl, dark curls damp against her forehead.

Two years old and apparently immune to the chaos around her.

Captain Sterling sat at the other end of the same settee reading the county paper attentively, having slept through things considerably worse than Christmas, one hand at his daughter’s feet, resting there from long habit.

“She will go straight through till morning if you let her sleep now,” Sophia observed.

Sterling glanced up. “I know,” he said. He did not move his hand.

Beatrice came through from the hall with an armful of ivy, her cheeks pink from cold and exertion.

“Sophia, you are down at last. I thought you had gone to sleep in your book.” She deposited the ivy on the table and looked at it critically.

“Do you think this wants some ribbon? I cannot decide. Henry, what is your opinion on ribbon?”

“I have no opinion on ribbon,” Sterling said.

“That is not true. You told me last Christmas the red was too much.”

“I said it was too much for a man of my disposition. I have no general theory.”

Beatrice considered this. “Then I shall use the green,” she announced, and began hunting through her basket.

Sophia crossed to the fireplace and held her hands out to it.

The flames were well-banked and generous, the wood good dry oak that smelled slightly sweet and gave off a steady, considerable heat.

Outside the windows, the sky had been dark since half-past three, and the glass was glazed with frost at the lower corners.

She could see her own reflection dimly in the nearest pane, standing before the brightness of the fire with her hair very fair and her face half in shadow, like a woman in a Dutch interior.

“Where is William?” she asked.

“Last seen attempting to explain something to the mastiff,” Sterling said, without looking up from his paper. “They were reaching an understanding.”

“The mastiff’s understanding is limited.”

“William’s is not. He has been very thorough.” A pause. “Sebastian has him now. I believe they are in the study.”

Rose began to cry in earnest from somewhere upstairs. Not the fretful half-waking sound Sophia had heard on the landing, but the full-lunged, non-negotiable kind. There was a rapid movement overhead, footsteps crossing, and then quiet.

Juliana appeared in the doorway. She had Rose in the crook of one arm, the child’s dark head pressed to her shoulder, one small fist clutched in the fabric of Juliana’s evening gown.

Rose was not crying anymore. She was regarding the room from her mother’s shoulder with the dark, considering gaze she had inherited directly from Sebastian and deployed with equal effect.

“She has been like this for an hour,” Juliana said, not unhappily. “I think she wants the noise and then cannot bear it when it arrives.”

“That is a very Lockwood quality,” Sophia said.

Juliana looked at her. Then she looked at Beatrice, who had paused in her arrangement of ivy to listen. Then she said, “I am going to ignore that entirely,” and sat down in the armchair nearest the fire, shifting Rose to her lap.

Rose looked at Sophia. Sophia looked back. Rose appeared to find the encounter satisfactory and began very deliberately pulling threads from the shawl her mother had wrapped around her.

The smell of the goose was stronger now, which meant the kitchen door had been opened.

Sophia heard Mrs. Harper’s voice from the direction of the dining room, giving some instruction to the under-housemaid about the wine glasses, her tone caught between authority and the suppressed anxiety that preceded any meal where the family was together in full.

Mrs. Harper had been housekeeper at Lockwood since before Sophia was born.

She knew the family’s collective capacity for the unexpected rather better than was comfortable.

“Where is Mama?” Sophia asked.

“Directing the pudding,” Juliana said. “Papa is with her. They have been directing the pudding for some time.”

“The pudding is already made.”

“I know.”

Sebastian came in with William on his shoulders. William had to duck for the lintel, which he did with the seriousness of a procedure learned and intended to be performed correctly. Once through, he gripped Sebastian’s hair with both hands and looked at the room from his considerable new elevation.

“He wants to see over everyone’s heads,” Sebastian said. He did not appear to find this unreasonable. “He has been assessing the pine boughs.”

“They are crooked,” William said, pointing at Beatrice’s arrangement.

“They are not crooked,” Beatrice said, with dignity. “They are informal.”

William studied the boughs. He was three years old, still round-cheeked from the nursery, with Sebastian’s dark eyes in Juliana’s face, and he considered things with a steadiness that became, at length, unnerving. “They are crooked,” he said again, kindly.

“Come and sit down,” Juliana told Sebastian, “before he decides the chandelier requires his inspection.”

Sebastian sat on the arm of Juliana’s chair, which was not really designed for it, but which accommodated them both, a little crowded, without either of them appearing to think about it.

William, released, went at once to the mastiff, which had followed Sterling in from the hall and was now stretched in front of the fire, magnificently indifferent, a creature who had seen Christmases before and expected to see more.

The room smelled of pine and woodsmoke and wet dog.

Outside, the frost was stiffening and the December dark pressed flat and solid against the glass.

Somewhere in the kitchen passage Sophia could hear the distant clatter of the final preparations, Mrs. Harper’s voice rising briefly and then subsiding, the smell of cloves arriving on top of everything else as the mulled wine came to readiness.

Her father came to the doorway. He stood there for a moment in his good evening coat, looking at all of them.

William and the mastiff, Mary asleep with Sterling’s hand at her feet, Rose pulling Juliana’s shawl apart one thread at a time, Beatrice’s ivy going magnificently sideways above the mantelpiece. He said nothing.

Then he said, “Dinner is nearly ready,” and his voice was entirely ordinary, and he went back to find their mother.

Sophia looked at Juliana. Juliana was looking at the fire. Her hand was in Sebastian’s where it rested on the chair arm, their fingers interlaced without either of them appearing to have arranged it.

Rose looked up at Sophia again and offered her a thread she had successfully extracted from the shawl.

Sophia took it. It was very small and damp.

“Thank you,” she said gravely.

Rose appeared satisfied and returned to her work.

* * *

Dinner had been cleared in stages, the goose first, then the removes, then the pudding which Mrs. Lockwood had been directing since three o’clock and which arrived at the table looking considerably better than its long rehearsal had suggested it might.

Mr. Lockwood had said grace. The wine had been poured.

William had eaten half his supper and fallen asleep in his chair, suddenly and completely, one moment upright and the next gone, and Sebastian had carried him upstairs without ceremony, one small boot dropping off on the landing.

Now the candles were burning low at the ends of the table and the conversation had eased into that looser, warmer register that came after the cloth was removed and the port was on the table and no one was pretending to hurry anywhere.

Beatrice was telling Sterling something about a bolt of dove-grey wool she had acquired in October.

He listened without moving, which Sophia had once mistaken for indifference and now understood was the opposite.

Her mother was talking quietly with Juliana at the far end.

Her father had his port and was looking at the candles, easy and content. It had been a very good day.