Chapter 2 #2
The house smelled of beeswax, cold grates, and the faint closed-up air of rooms that had been cleaned and waiting too long.
The hall was chill. A carpet had been taken up for cleaning and not yet replaced, the bare boards cold even through the soles of her shoes, and the candles Mrs. Peel had lit against the grey afternoon gave off the flat, faintly animal smell of fresh tallow.
Underneath it all lay something older, other people’s years pressed into the plaster and wainscoting, a century of occupation that no amount of beeswax quite erased.
It was a good house. Narrower than Lockwood, taller, the staircase going up in tight well-proportioned turns rather than spreading out generously as it did at home.
The proportions were London proportions, designed for a plot of ground that cost money, squeezing elegance upward rather than outward.
She liked it, she decided. It was honest about what it was.
Mrs. Peel was waiting in the hall, a woman of fifty, already directing the servants toward the luggage before Sebastian had finished removing his gloves.
William, who had been carried from the carriage asleep and had woken on the front step with no apparent distress at finding himself in an unknown city, looked at Mrs. Peel with the same grave consideration he had inherited directly from his father.
“There is a garden,” Mrs. Peel told him, apparently having encountered three-year-olds before. “At the back. It is small.”
William looked toward the back of the house, straining slightly, as if the walls might yield to scrutiny. Then he turned to investigate the hall.
Rose was handed to Jennings, who took her upstairs without breaking stride, trusting the geography of houses to declare itself.
The luggage began to arrive behind them, brought in by the footmen, boxes and trunks, the hatboxes in their tower, Sebastian’s leather cases that he handled himself, and lastly the long shallow trunk that contained Sophia’s gowns.
She had been watching for it.
* * *
Beatrice had begun the gowns in January, in the workroom at Sterling’s house.
She had come to Lockwood on a Wednesday morning with her measuring tape and her notebook and a sketch she had been working on since New Year, which she set on the table without preamble and waited while Sophia looked at it.
Sophia looked at it for a long moment and said nothing, which Beatrice understood to mean that she was right, and they proceeded.
Beatrice had been measuring her since childhood. The tape went where it needed to go, Sophia stood still, and neither of them made anything of it. Beatrice noted the measurements, made two adjustments to the sketch on the spot, and was back at Sterling’s house by noon.
The trunk arrived in Sophia’s room at the top of the house, a good room, the best of the upper rooms, with a window that looked over the small garden to the rooftops beyond and the pale London sky above them.
Mrs. Peel had put a writing table under the window, which suggested Sebastian had described the occupant.
There was a bookshelf, empty. The bed had been made with good linen, turned down.
The footman set the trunk on the rug and withdrew. Sophia knelt and opened it.
The smell came first, cedar from the trunk, and beneath it the smell of good silk and the faint orris root Beatrice used when she stored anything she considered important.
The gowns were packed in layers of white paper, each one folded with an exactness that was Beatrice’s version of language.
She put the most important things away first, pressed hardest, sealed tightest.
Sophia lifted the first one out.
White muslin, which was expected, which was what unmarried girls of twenty wore at evening assemblies, which she had agreed to on those grounds and no others.
But it was not simply white muslin. Beatrice had done something to the neckline, not added to it, not softened or apologised for it, simply cut it with a confidence that let the line go exactly where it went, and the skirt had a weight that moved correctly, fabric chosen for what it did rather than merely what it was.
Sophia held it up and the muslin shifted in her hands, cool and fine, and she thought of Juliana at the county assemblies five years ago, dressed by their mother in the colours that suited her position rather than her person.
She thought of Beatrice at the Thornbury party a few summers ago, in the grey-green that had done its work so quietly that most of the room had not been able to account for why they had kept looking at her.
Both her sisters had learned, eventually, the difference between dressing for the room and dressing from the self.
Beatrice had understood this since she was sixteen and simply needed the circumstances to catch up with her.
And now she had made Sophia a gown on this principle, and Sophia had not asked her to.
She laid it across the bed and lifted the second one out.
Deep green, for day, the exact dark green Mrs. Gable had once held beneath her chin, then declared too good to be ignored with pale gold hair and blue eyes.
Sophia had worn it ever since with complete confidence.
The fabric was a fine twilled wool, cool and substantial between her fingers, and the cut at the sleeve did what Beatrice’s cuts always did.
It trusted the structure entirely and left ornament to work only where it was needed.
There was a note tucked under the third gown, in Beatrice’s hand:
The blue is for the first ball. Do not argue with it.
The green is for mornings you feel the need to be taken seriously, which I estimate will be most of them.
The white is for evenings when you want to be looked at, which I estimate will also be most of them, whatever you tell yourself.
The wool walking dress is practical and you are welcome.
I have put buttons on it that you did not ask for. They are correct. — B.
P.S. Henry says you are to have an excellent time. He did not actually say this, but I believe it to be his view.
Sophia read it twice. She folded it and put it under the blotter on the writing table.
She unpacked the rest herself. The blue Beatrice had specified for the first ball, a silk that in the room’s flat light looked nearly grey and in candlelight would, she suspected, do something considerably more interesting; the wool walking dress, the grey of early morning, given buttons of blue enamel that she had not asked for and could not now imagine it without; an amber silk Beatrice had not mentioned in the note, the colour deeper and warmer than anything Sophia had chosen for herself before, cut simply and the weight of it well-judged, which she held against herself in the glass and could not yet decide about, only that it would not go to the back of the wardrobe; a deep gold evening dress she had not known was coming, which she held up with some surprise and then with a recognition that Beatrice had seen something in her that she had not quite seen in herself, and had made it into a gown.
She hung them in the wardrobe and stood looking at them for a moment.
Six gowns, and every one of them was a considered argument.
Not for the world, not for the ton’s inspection, not for the purpose of securing a husband or making a creditable appearance at whatever assemblies Juliana had in mind.
For her. For the person Beatrice had been looking at for twenty years and apparently understood rather better than Sophia had assumed.
From downstairs came the sound of the household beginning to arrange itself, Juliana’s voice in the corridor, a fire being laid in the drawing room grate, William’s boots on the stairs. Rose had stopped crying. The London afternoon pressed pale and cold against the window.
Sophia sat down at the writing table. The empty bookshelf was to her left. On the rooftops opposite, a pigeon sat on the guttering, head tilted, wholly uninterested in Clarges Street.
She opened the writing table drawer. It contained a fresh supply of paper, a new pen, and a small bottle of ink. Mrs. Peel’s doing, she suspected. Or Sebastian’s.
She thought about the letter to Ashworth she had written in December, and the last line she had added before she sealed it.
I allow it is possible that I am wrong. She had not yet had his reply, which was expected, since the post from London in the Season was slower than she was accustomed to.
She did not know yet what he would make of it.
She pulled a sheet of paper toward her, uncapped the ink, and sat with the pen in her hand and the grey London sky in the window and the smell of cedar and good silk still faintly in the air, and did not yet write anything at all.
* * *
The house had been quiet for two hours when Sophia lit her candle.
The dinner had been early. Juliana’s household ran on a nursery schedule in the first days of any journey, the children’s needs arranging everything else around themselves, and afterwards Sebastian had read to William in the small sitting room while the boy resisted sleep stubbornly and with complete concentration, as though remaining awake were serious work.
Juliana, having fed and paced the floor with Rose, finally surrendered the infant to Jennings.
She looked frayed at the edges, the frantic energy of the nursery giving way to slumped shoulders and a momentary peace.
The candles in the hall had been snuffed. Mrs. Peel’s domain had gone still.