Chapter 1 #3
Ashworth’s last letter lay on top, folded in his neat, deliberate hand.
She had read it twice when it arrived a fortnight ago, and once more this evening upstairs before dinner, while the smell of the goose rose through the floorboards and Beatrice’s voice carried down the hall arguing with no one in particular about ribbon.
She did not need to read it again. She could have reproduced most of it from memory: the passage about the Evelyn he had found in a Bloomsbury bookseller, the remarks on Mill’s new essay, the three careful sentences about the property of evidence in natural philosophy that she had read and re-read not because they were obscure but because they were sentences she wanted to think alongside rather than simply past.
She uncapped the inkwell. Dipped her pen. Wrote the date at the top of the page.
Dear Ashworth,
She paused.
The thing about writing to Ashworth was that it required knowing what she thought.
Not what she had observed, not what she had noted and set aside for later examination, but what she actually believed, and in the space between a Christmas dinner at Lockwood and the cold solitude of her desk at eleven o’clock that distinction felt unusually sharp.
She could write to him about the dinner and the children and the pine boughs losing their needles.
He would read it with interest and reply carefully, and it would be pleasant, and she would feel, as she always felt after his letters, a clean intellectual satisfaction that was very nearly warmth and was certainly not nothing.
But there was the other thing.
She had said very well, I will come to London.
And she had said it because Sebastian’s argument had been better than she expected and because Juliana’s face, across the table, had held something that was not quite a plea but adjacent to one, and because her father had said I see more than you think, and she had looked at the worn linen hem of the tablecloth and understood that he was right, and that being right about her was neither comfortable nor something she could argue away.
She wrote:
I am to come to London in the spring. My brother-in-law has made the case on grounds of intellectual inadequacy — that is, mine, as it pertains to the county’s conversational resources — and I have conceded the point, though I should like it noted that I conceded on my own terms and not under duress.
She stopped. Read it back. The irony was right; the tone was right. But underneath it was the thing she was arranging the irony to conceal, which was that she was not quite certain she had conceded on her own terms at all, and that this uncertainty was new, and she did not like it.
She continued:
I find I am approaching the prospect like a naturalist preparing for a foreign expedition, equipping myself with appropriate scepticism, a working hypothesis, and the reasonable expectation that the specimen in question will confirm what has already been observed of its habits elsewhere.
The ton has been written about extensively.
I do not expect to find it very different from its descriptions.
There. That was the right frame. The Season as study rather than trial; London as material rather than ordeal.
She and Ashworth had read the same novels, knew the same assessments of polite society, had discussed in three or four of their letters the tendency of educated observers to mistake the performance of social form for the substance of human character.
She was not going to be taken in by the machinery of it. She intended to watch.
She dipped her pen again.
I should tell you that the Colville family are to be in town from March, and that my brother-in-law considers them worth knowing. I mention it only because you will ask, when next you write, whether I have made any acquaintance worth reporting, and this appears to be the intended answer.
She sat back. The candle had settled into a steady burn and was throwing her shadow large and crooked up the wall behind her.
The cold had crept from the floor to somewhere around her ankles.
Outside, the bare oak branches were moving, a low, irregular sound, wood against wood, nothing urgent about it.
She read over what she had written.
It was honest. She had also, she recognised with some discomfort, already decided what London would be, and was writing to confirm it to the one person most likely to agree with her.
Ashworth would read this and write back commending her approach, suggesting supplementary reading on social anthropology, perhaps adding a remark about Hume on custom and habit that would be exactly what she wanted to hear.
She knew this. She knew it with some certainty.
She thought about what Sebastian had said. Minds you cannot predict.
She looked at the sentence she had written, I do not expect to find it very different from its descriptions, and did not cross it out.
But she thought about it for a moment longer than was quite comfortable, the pen still in her hand, the candle steady, the oak branches moving in the cold dark outside.
Then she added a line at the bottom of the page, below the closing, in smaller and somewhat less decided hand:
I allow it is possible that I am wrong.
She folded the letter before she could revise it. Pressed the seal. Set it on the corner of the desk where Thomas would find it with the morning post.
The fire was nearly out. The cold had reached her knees. She pulled Beatrice’s shawl up over her shoulders and sat for a moment in the last of the candlelight, looking at nothing, while the house drew quiet around her into its winter silence and the oak outside moved in the dark.