Chapter 2
They left Lockwood at half past seven on a Tuesday in the third week of March, in two carriages and a quantity of luggage that suggested the Blackwood household was relocating rather than merely opening the townhouse for the Season.
The children’s nurse, a composed woman named Jennings who had survived two years with William and showed no signs of deterioration, occupied the second carriage with Rose and a basket of provisions sufficient for a journey twice the length.
William was in the first carriage because he had stated, at some volume, that he intended to ride with his parents, and Sebastian had looked at Jennings and Jennings had looked at Sebastian and nothing further was said.
Sophia had her corner. She had established it before the wheels moved, tucking herself against the window with her travelling cloak drawn up and her book already open on her knee, and William, after a brief exploratory circuit of the available space, had accepted this arrangement and settled himself gravely between his parents, the seating plan apparently resolved to his satisfaction.
For the first hour the country was still her own country; Harbury’s church tower visible above the trees until the road dipped, the familiar farms, the ford where the lane crossed the stream that ran below Lockwood’s kitchen garden.
The lanes and hedgerows were familiar, the pale colour of the sky over the eastern fields a thing Sophia had been looking at all her life.
She read, or appeared to read. The carriage was warm with four people in it and smelled of the leather seats and the faint, clean smell of William’s hair and the bergamot in Juliana’s scent, which she had worn since she and Sebastian married and which Sophia associated irrevocably with the period after everything changed.
Then the lanes broadened and the hedgerows gave way to open road and Lockwood was behind them, and the country began to become other country, and Sophia found she was not reading.
She was looking.
The land flattened as they moved south, the long slow descent from the county into something less certain of itself.
Villages appeared and were left behind, a church, a market cross, a forge with its fire already lit and the smith’s hammer audible as they passed, a quick bright sound that the carriage carried a little way before losing it.
The road was better maintained and there were more people on it, a carter going the other way with a load of timber, two women walking with baskets, a boy on a bad-tempered pony who cut through a gap in the traffic and was gone before she had properly seen his face.
The world had more people in it. More transactions occurring in the open air, more voices she could not hear through the glass, more business being done by people who had not woken that morning thinking of her at all.
She had not been to London since she was eleven.
What she remembered was noise and a persistent smell of coal smoke and the feeling of too many walls at too close a distance, and a great deal of being told to stay beside her mother.
She had found it oppressive then, and she came now prepared to find it confirmed.
She was also, and she acknowledged this without pleasure, curious.
William fell asleep somewhere after the second hour, suddenly and completely, listing sideways against Juliana’s arm. Juliana did not move. Sebastian turned to the window on his side. The carriage went on.
“Are you comfortable?” Juliana asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“You have not turned a page in forty minutes.”
Sophia looked down at her book. The page was where she had left it before the hedgerows gave out. “I have been looking,” she said.
Juliana said nothing to this. She had learned, over twenty years, which of Sophia’s silences wanted a response and which did not. This one did not.
The outskirts arrived without announcement.
The first thing she noticed was that there was no moment of entry, no gate, no clear point at which one was unambiguously in London.
The buildings simply thickened, the gaps between them narrowing, and the road acquired more of everything.
More wheels. More hooves. More voices. A fishmonger’s cart came alongside them and filled the carriage briefly but completely with its smell of cold salt and wet wood and something green and faintly rotting underneath, and then was gone.
William stirred, wrinkled his nose, and slept again.
The noise built by degrees. Cart wheels on cobblestones were quite different from cart wheels on packed earth, harder, more insistent, the sound coming up through the floor of the carriage into Sophia’s feet as a kind of continuous vibration.
Above it came vendors calling, though she could not make out the words.
A church bell measuring the quarter hour.
Somewhere, a dog. The sharp crack of a coachman’s whip from somewhere ahead, and then another in answer, like a conversation.
Sophia pressed closer to the glass.
The streets were narrower than she had remembered, or perhaps she had simply grown.
The buildings rose on either side in long unbroken rows, their brickwork gone dark with years of smoke, their windows giving back the flat March light in dull panels.
Between them the road was a solid press of movement, carriages and hackneys and carts and chairs, horses and people on foot slipping through the gaps as naturally as the traffic itself, never hesitating, never looking uncertain.
A woman in a yellow shawl crossed directly in front of a hackney without altering her pace. The hackney horse flicked an ear.
A crossing sweeper looked up as the Blackwood carriage passed and held Sophia’s gaze for a moment, not looking away first, before returning to his work.
He was perhaps eight, intent on his broom at the junction, his livelihood in every stroke.
His coat was a man’s coat, cut down and still too large, the sleeves turned up twice.
She turned away from the window and found Sebastian watching her.
“Well?” he said.
“It is not what I expected.”
“You expected to find it worse.”
She considered denying this, and did not. “I expected to find it confirming. I have read rather a great deal about London.”
“And?”
She looked back at the window. A pie seller was working the pavement alongside a row of iron railings, the tray suspended from a strap around his neck, the pies steaming in the cold air. The man beside him did not buy but they spoke briefly, and the seller laughed.
“It is too various,” she said. “One cannot read the pattern yet.”
“No,” Sebastian agreed. He sounded unsurprised. He sounded, faintly, satisfied.
Juliana had been listening to this without appearing to. She was looking at William’s sleeping face, her hand resting lightly on his hair, and she did not say anything, but the corner of her mouth moved.
They crossed a bridge; Sophia felt the slight change as the wheels met the bridge planking and the cold rising off the water, and for a moment through the window she saw the river, wide and grey-brown, carrying small boats and coal barges through the haze of smoke that sat over the city like a second sky.
It smelled of river water and wet stone and the black mud dragged up along the banks, heavier and harsher than anything she associated with home.
Even the air felt used differently here.
She breathed it in.
Rose began to cry from the second carriage, audible even above the traffic, a sustained and purposeful sound.
She had apparently decided the journey had lasted long enough and her cry had been going on at intervals since Guildford.
Jennings would manage it. Jennings managed everything competently, and Sophia had come, over the course of the winter, to trust her.
William woke, assessed his surroundings, and looked at the window.
“Houses,” he said.
“Yes,” said Juliana.
“Many houses.”
“We are in London,” Sebastian told him.
William looked at his father and then at the houses. He appeared to find the scale of the thing worthy of attention, which it was, and settled his chin on the window ledge to look at it more thoroughly.
Sophia watched him watch London and thought: yes. That is the right approach. Not the book she had brought, not the hypothesis she had sent to Ashworth in her careful letter, not the naturalist’s detachment she had been composing since Christmas. Just the chin on the ledge. Just the city itself.
She would have to look longer.
The carriage turned into a quieter street, then another, the traffic thinning as they moved north and west into the better streets, the houses growing taller and more certain of themselves, their facades clean stone rather than smoke-blackened brick, their steps swept, their railings painted.
The noise did not disappear; it receded.
Still present from here, still considerable, but it came from a distance now, heard from above rather than from within.
Sebastian was watching the street numbers.
“Here,” he said.
* * *
The carriage stopped.
The Blackwood townhouse in Clarges Street had been opened a fortnight in advance by the housekeeper, a Mrs. Peel, who had sent three letters to Sebastian in that time regarding the state of the drawing room curtains, the temperament of the kitchen range, and the question of whether the east bedroom was to be made up for a single occupant or for two.
Sebastian had answered all three letters in a single reply of four lines, and Mrs. Peel had apparently found this sufficient.