Chapter 1 #2
Rose had fallen asleep in Juliana’s arms before the pudding and been handed to Sebastian and then handed back and was now somehow asleep on Mrs. Lockwood’s lap, one fat fist pressed to her cheek. Mrs. Lockwood had not moved for twenty minutes. She did not appear to find this inconvenient.
It was Sebastian who brought Sophia into it. He did it without preamble, which was his way, having learned early that in this family a preamble only gave everyone time to prepare their objections.
“Sophia,” he said, refilling his glass, “I have been corresponding with a Mr. Colville, with whom I was acquainted abroad. The family intend to be in town from March, and his sister will be of the party.”
Sophia was aware of the slight shift in her mother’s posture at the other end of the table. She looked at Sebastian. “And you think I should like her.”
“I think,” Sebastian said, “that she is not what you expect. The family is well-connected, not showy about it, which is in their favour.” He set down his glass.
“The point is that Juliana and I intend to open the townhouse in March. The children will come with us. There is room enough, and London in the Season has things to recommend it that the county cannot offer.”
“The smoke,” Sophia said. “The noise. The extraordinary expense of everything.”
“Minds you cannot predict,” Sebastian said. “That was what I was going to say.”
Her father looked up from his port. Her mother had stopped pretending to attend only to Rose.
“I am perfectly content here,” Sophia said. She kept her voice even. “I have Ashworth’s letters. I have the library. I do not require the ton in order to think.”
“The letters are four years old, as a correspondence,” Sebastian said, not unkindly. “And the library has not changed since you were twelve.”
“That is not a flaw in the library.”
Juliana was watching her. Sophia knew that look, the held look Juliana used when she had agreed not to begin a conversation herself. Juliana had thoughts about this, thoughts she was holding at arm’s length while Sebastian made the case, which meant they were not small.
“I am not suggesting you go in search of a husband,” Sebastian said.
“I am not suggesting you go in order to dance, or to be seen, or to do any of the things the Season demands of girls who want something from it. I am suggesting—” He stopped.
He chose the next words with some care. “Sophia, you have spent four years being the most intelligent person in the room. I think London will give you rooms where that is not true, and I think you will find those rooms more interesting than you presently believe.”
The table was quiet. The fire had burned low in the grate. Outside, the December wind pressed at the window frames with a thin, persistent sound.
“That,” said Sophia, after a moment, “is a more persuasive argument than I expected.”
“I have been composing it since August,” Sebastian said.
Her father set down his port. “I would be glad to see you go, my dear. Your mother and I were married at nine-and-twenty—” He caught her mother’s expression. “I was nine-and-twenty. Your mother was considerably younger and has been reminding me of the fact ever since.”
“You were eight-and-twenty,” Mrs. Lockwood said, without heat, and kissed the top of Rose’s sleeping head.
“The point stands.” He looked at Sophia with a directness he rarely used. “I do not say go and find yourself a young man and be settled. I say go and see what is there. You have been very good about not being bored, Sophia, but I am your father and I see more than you think.”
Sophia looked at her hands on the tablecloth. The linen was old and very fine, worn at the hemline from thirty years of Christmas dinners.
She thought about Juliana, five years ago — Juliana at the assembly rooms in that blue dress, assigned to Oliver Fairchild by some combination of their mother’s anxiety and their father’s debts and the county’s collective opinion of what was suitable.
The months that followed: the engagement that was never right, the quiet endurance.
Juliana had learned to carry herself through it, straight-backed and remote, not letting herself know what she was waiting for.
Then Sebastian arriving, abrupt, too observant, not at all what anyone had planned, and the scandal that followed, which had been bad enough and was now, five years on, simply the story of how Juliana’s life had begun.
She thought about Beatrice, whose story was different and whose Henry had arrived from a different direction entirely, with ledgers under his arm and a directness that either alarmed you or did not. Apparently Beatrice had not been alarmed.
Both of her sisters had found their way through things Sophia had watched from the edge of the room.
She had been sixteen when Juliana married, seventeen when Beatrice did.
She had been the one who saw, who noted, who turned things over in her mind and kept them in the part of her mind that was always slightly apart.
She was twenty now.
“Very well,” she said. “I will come to London.”
Her mother’s exhale was soft and she covered it by adjusting Rose’s shawl. Beatrice pressed her foot briefly against Sophia’s under the table, not saying anything with it, simply marking the moment. Sterling reached across and refilled Sophia’s glass without being asked.
“You will have your own room,” Juliana said. “And your own hours. I will not drag you to every card party in Grosvenor Square.”
“How many card parties are there, exactly?”
“Enough,” said Juliana, and did not elaborate.
The candles guttered. Rose slept on. Against the window the winter dark pressed close, and inside the dining room the warmth held, and the wine was good, and Sophia sat with her decision falling around her like the smell of the pine boughs still drifting through from the hall, sharp and green and not quite comfortable.
* * *
The house was quiet by eleven. She heard it arrive, a different thing from the earlier quiet of rooms being tidied and children settled.
This was the quiet of a house that had finished its day.
The last voices, her parents’ on the landing above, then a door closing, and then nothing but the wind finding the gap in the east window that had been finding the east window since before she was born.
Sophia lit her candle from the last of the fire and took it to her desk.
The cold came off the floor through her thin slippers.
December at Lockwood was unambiguous about itself, and no amount of fire in the grate, once banked for the night, could hold the chill out of the corners, and her bedroom faced north and had faced north for twenty years and was not going to be persuaded otherwise.
She pulled her shawl tighter across her shoulders.
The wool was good thick merino, a remnant from one of Beatrice’s workroom projects, and still smelled faintly of the lavender sachets Beatrice kept in her press.
Sophia had borrowed it two winters ago. She had not returned it.
She opened her writing case.