Chapter 3
The house in Grosvenor Square had been lit since dusk, and by the time the Blackwood carriage turned into the square Sophia could see the windows blazing from fifty yards away, a solid unbroken brightness on the first floor, the windows shining across the square into the blue-black April evening.
The sound arrived before they stopped, not music yet, or not only music, but the noise underneath it, the dense continuous sound of two hundred people in the same rooms talking at once, which was altogether different from any noise Sophia had previously encountered, and which she felt through the carriage wall as a kind of pressure.
She had her book in her reticule. She had put it there before they left Clarges Street, slipping it in alongside the handkerchief and the small bottle of sal volatile that Juliana had pressed on her in a moment of sisterly realism, and she had not mentioned it to anyone.
It was Cowper’s Task, small, worn at the spine, a book she had read four times and could find her place in by touch.
She was not intending to read it. She simply wanted it there.
The carriage stopped. A footman appeared.
Juliana went first, then Sophia, stepping down onto the pavement where the cold hit immediately.
The air had a raw edge for April, and her thin evening slippers found every irregularity in the stone with the cheerful thoroughness of shoes designed for floors rather than streets.
Sebastian came last, and the three of them joined the slow procession of arrivals moving up the steps and through the open door into the light and heat of the hall.
The heat was the first thing. After the cold of the street it landed on the skin like something physical, a wave of warmed air carrying the smell of hundreds of candles burning, beeswax and hot tallow mixed, and underneath it the smell of the crowd, powder and pomade and perfume and the warmer, closer smell of too many people assembled in rooms designed for half the number.
Sophia stood for a moment in the doorway before Juliana’s hand at her elbow moved her forward.
The staircase rose ahead of them, already thick with people making the ascent, the women’s silks catching the candelabra light in slides of colour, white and pale yellow and a deep rose that belonged to an older woman near the top who wore it without apology, without consultation, the skirt sweeping wide as she turned and the room parting to let it.
The sound grew as they climbed. By the time they reached the first-floor landing it was no longer possible to isolate any single voice, only the aggregate, the continuous wash of it, punctuated at intervals by a laugh that cut through higher than the rest.
Juliana turned at the landing and looked at Sophia. The look was not quite a question.
“I am perfectly well,” Sophia said before she could ask.
“You have that look.”
“I am observing.”
“You have been observing since the carriage.”
“The carriage contained material.”
Juliana’s mouth moved. She turned back toward the ballroom.
The ballroom was larger than Sophia had expected, or perhaps she had been thinking in county-assembly dimensions and London operated at a different scale.
The ceiling was high enough that the chandeliers, five of them, each massed with candles, the heat of which she could feel from twenty feet below, did not oppress the room but floated in it, shedding a light so uniform and bright that shadows were almost entirely abolished.
The floor had been chalked for dancing, white patterns already being erased at the edges by the feet of those who had arrived earliest. Along the far wall the musicians were placed in a gallery, visible from the shoulders up, sawing away at something the noise of the room had largely consumed.
Sophia let Juliana steer her through the first introductions.
Their hostess, a Lady Merton, was gracious and immediately distracted.
Two women whose names Sophia caught and retained, Lady Fanshawe and Mrs. Copley, appeared to require nothing further from her at that moment.
A man bowed and said something she did not hear over the general roar, and she never saw him again.
Then she found herself at the edge of the room.
There was a chair near a column to her left. She took it.
From here she could see the whole floor, the dancers assembling for a set, the groups at the perimeter standing near one another and conducting ten conversations simultaneously in a language of gesture and inference that she was not yet fluent in but was beginning to learn the grammar of.
The mothers were easy to identify. They positioned themselves with a view both of their daughters and of any gentleman within range of their daughters, and they held their fans at angles that had nothing to do with heat management.
The daughters, for their part, distributed their gaze with a thoroughness that looked like general sociability and was in fact a very focused survey of the room.
She saw three of them do it within the first two minutes, the sweep, casual, complete, and then the eyes finding some point of genuine interest, followed immediately by the resumption of whatever conversation they had been performing before.
She wanted her notebook. She had not brought her notebook, which was correct, for a woman writing at a ball was a woman immediately disqualified from everything a ball was designed to produce, but she had brought her mind, and her mind was doing what it always did, which was to receive, sort, and hold.
“You are sitting at Mrs. Drummond’s usual chair.”
The voice came from her left. Sophia looked up.
The young woman was fair-haired and blue-eyed, taller than Sophia, standing very straight from long habit rather than effort, at ease in the space she occupied.
She looked at Sophia with a directness that stopped just short of rudeness and arrived at something more interesting.
Her dress was pale yellow and had been put on without much ceremony; there was a small crease at the left sleeve that suggested she had been sitting somewhere in it already and had not thought to shake it out.
“I was not aware,” Sophia said. “Is she likely to want it imminently?”
“She is in the card room and she will not emerge until supper.” The young woman looked at the chair, then at Sophia. “I only mention it because if she comes back and finds someone in it she makes a scene. It is not a very interesting scene, but it is a scene.”
“I shall risk it,” Sophia said.
The young woman looked at her for a moment. Then she sat down in the adjacent chair. “I am Louisa Colville,” she said. “You are not from London. I know everyone from London and I do not know you.”
“Sophia Lockwood. My sister is Mrs. Blackwood; she and her husband opened the townhouse in March.”
“Your first Season in London?”
“Yes. I have been to assemblies at home. They were not like this.”
“No,” Louisa agreed. “They never are.” She looked at the room for a moment. “What do you make of it?”
It was not the question Sophia had expected.
She considered it honestly. “It is louder than I anticipated. And more various. I have been trying to work out the grammar of it, how information moves across the room without anything actually being said, but the vocabulary is larger than I have so far been able to map.”
A brief silence. Then: “I have never heard anyone describe a ball as having a grammar.”
“Everything has a grammar,” Sophia said. “Most people simply do not notice they are using it.”
Louisa Colville turned and looked at her more carefully. “You have a book in your reticule,” she said.
Sophia looked down. The corner of the spine was showing where the reticule gaped. She had not fastened it properly. “Cowper,” she said. “I am not going to read it.”
“I know. It is for emergencies.” Louisa settled back in her chair, which she had the air of having occupied for several hours already. “I brought a letter last year. My brother found it and I have not been allowed to forget it.”
“Your brother attends balls with you?”
“My brother attends everything.” She said it without complaint. “He is the reason half the room is arranged as it is at this moment. You will have noticed that everyone is facing roughly the same direction. That is the door.”
Sophia had not noticed this specifically, though she had observed the general orientation of the room’s attention toward the entrance.
She looked now. The clusters at the perimeter had all arranged themselves, some more subtly than others, with a view of the ballroom door. The mothers’ fans had stilled.
“He is arriving soon?” Sophia asked.
“He is always arriving soon. He has been arriving soon since he was twenty.” Louisa picked up her own fan and turned it in her hands, not opening it. “He does not do it on purpose. Which is, I think, the more interesting thing.”
“What is his name?” Sophia asked, though she had begun to have an idea.
“Roland,” said Louisa Colville. “He is the Golden Boy of the ton, which is a thing people say in earnest and which he has long since stopped finding amusing, if he ever did.” She paused. “He is a very good brother. But he is not what the room has made of him. The room does not know this.”
Sophia heard it and held it; the statement itself, and the affection underneath it, and something in Louisa’s voice that came from years of watching her brother be misread.
“Do you always speak so plainly to people you have just met?” she asked.
“Do you always bring Cowper to balls?”
A beat.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
“Then we shall get along,” said Louisa Colville, and opened her fan.