Chapter 3 #3
“Yes. She was engaged, some years ago, to a man the county considered suitable. She refused him at the dinner before the wedding, in front of both families assembled. It was rather spectacular, in the worst way. The county’s opinion of her did not recover for some time.
” She said it plainly. Sophia always said things plainly.
“She is happy now. But for the following year I watched the county punish my other sister for it, and it was not so different from what I just saw.”
Louisa was quiet. Then: “And your eldest sister married Mr. Blackwood instead.”
“Yes.”
Louisa’s head turned slightly. “My brother knows him; they were acquainted abroad, I believe. My eldest brother spoke of him over the winter.” She paused. “He said he was a man who formed his own conclusions and saw no reason to share the process with anyone.”
Sophia considered this. “That is accurate.”
“High praise, coming from my brother. He does not say much about people that is worth keeping.” A beat. “Your sister did well, then.”
“She did,” Sophia said. “Eventually.”
“He seems entirely capable of managing a county’s disapproval.”
“He does not notice it,” Sophia said. “Which turns out to be the most effective approach.”
On the floor Roland Colville had joined the dancing, paired with a girl in pale green who was visibly gratified and was trying not to show it.
He danced well, easily, without thinking about it, and said something to his partner at the turn that made her laugh.
The laugh was genuine. It was either a skill or a quality, and Sophia could not yet determine which.
She looked away.
At the refreshment table, Miss Prewett had been joined by a young man, thin and eager and slightly awkward in his coat, talking to her animatedly, with no concern for whether the room considered the match suitable.
Miss Prewett had put down the lemonade and was talking back. The smile was different now.
“Who is the young man?” Sophia asked.
Louisa looked. Her face did something. “Mr. Thomas Prewett,” she said. “Her brother.”
A beat.
“Of course,” Sophia said.
The candles burned overhead in their hundreds, the heat of them pressing down through the white air.
From the gallery the music came in pieces, swallowed almost at once by the roar of the room.
Sophia sat at the edge of it with her reticule in her lap and thought that she had been in this room for less than two hours and already had more material than she had collected in a year of county assemblies.
Not because the people were worse. They were not, on the whole.
Because they were more themselves. The machinery was running at full speed, undisguised, and every working part of it was visible if you knew where to look.
She was, she thought, going to need more paper.
* * *
He came to them between sets.
Sophia had not been watching for it. She had been watching Miss Prewett, who had found a chair and was sitting in it with her back straight and her chin up and her lemonade held two-handed in her lap, like a woman making use of what she had.
Then Louisa said “oh,” very quietly, and Sophia looked up.
Roland Colville was crossing the room toward them.
He was taller close up. That was the first thing, not a remarkable observation, but distance had flattened him into the general scale of the room and proximity restored what it had taken.
He moved well; horses and sport and outdoor life since boyhood had made something easy of his body that the ballroom had not manufactured and could not have.
His evening clothes were dark, his cravat tied without ornament, his fair hair, darker gold than Louisa’s and warmer, not dressed in any style that invited comment.
The face was the thing. Not merely regular, though it was, the jaw straight, the brow clear, the whole of it arranged by some fortunate accident of heredity into a proportion that the eye found restful.
When he looked at Louisa, he was actually looking at her.
Not in the direction of her, not toward her as a social object to be acknowledged.
At her. He had come across the room because he wanted to, not because it was required, and that distinction was visible in his face.
She had been expecting handsome. It was still mildly startling.
“Lou.” He bent and kissed her cheek. “I have been trying to reach you for twenty minutes. Lady Merton’s drawing room is…” He paused. “It is very full.”
“It is always very full. You always know this and you are always surprised by it.” Louisa said it without heat. Then: “Miss Lockwood. My brother, Mr. Roland Colville.”
He turned to Sophia and bowed. The bow was natural, not calibrated, made by a man who had been bowing since he was old enough to be made to practise and had long since stopped thinking about the mechanics.
“Miss Lockwood. You are Mrs. Blackwood’s sister, I believe.
Blackwood and I were introduced this evening.
I understand our brothers are acquainted. ”
“So I understand,” Sophia said.
His eyes were grey. She had not been able to tell from across the room. A clear, direct grey, and they moved to her face directly, not appraising, not the sweep she had watched other men give other women across the floor all evening. Just looking.
“Is this your first Season?” he asked.
“My first in London.”
He nodded, taking in the ballroom with a brief sideways glance that suggested he was offering her the companionship of shared assessment rather than making conversation.
“It is a great deal at once,” he said, “the first time. It settles after a few evenings. The noise stops being…” He moved his hand slightly, a gesture that encompassed the room’s roar. “What it is now.”
“I find it interesting,” Sophia said. “The noise.”
He looked at her. “Do you.”
“It has a structure. Most people do not attend to it.” She stopped. She had not intended to say that to a man she had met thirty seconds ago, but he had been actually listening, she could see it, and she had responded accordingly before she had properly decided to.
Something shifted in his face, not much, just a small adjustment. He had recalculated. He was still a moment.
“Roland,” Louisa said, “Miss Lockwood has been here less than two hours and she has already articulated a theory of ballroom acoustics and identified three social mechanisms that I have been living with for years without having words for.”
“Has she.” He said it without irony. He was still looking at Sophia.
“The grammar of it,” Louisa said. “That was how she put it.”
Something crossed his face, amusement that looked less deliberate than the effortless charm he had been moving through the room with all evening.
It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then his gaze moved to the reticule in Sophia’s lap, where the corner of the Cowper spine was showing at the gap because she had still not remembered to fasten it.
“You have brought a book,” he said.
“I have.”
A brief pause. His mouth curved, not the smile he had been giving the room, but something easier, less constructed.
“How very…” he began, and then he said it, lightly, as a man says a thing that has occurred to him and that he sees no reason not to voice: “How very singular. A girl who brings a book to a ball.”
It was said pleasantly. His tone was the tone of a remark addressed to the room as much as to her, the tone he had been using all evening, charming and general and requiring nothing back.
The kind of thing that landed differently when you were the object of it than when you were observing it from a distance of thirty feet.
Sophia looked at him. He was already half-turned toward Louisa, ready for whatever came next. The remark had been made and he had moved on from it before it had finished landing.
She said nothing.
She did not say I brought it because I was not certain the evening would provide sufficient material, and it has, so I have not opened it.
She did not say You are the third interesting thing I have seen tonight, and until thirty seconds ago you were the most useful.
She said nothing at all, because the remark did not invite a response and he was not attending for one, and because something cold and clear had lodged in her chest that she recognised, and that she did not intend to explain.
He exchanged a few more words with Louisa, something about supper, something about their brother’s whereabouts, and then he bowed again, to both of them, and moved back into the room.
Within fifteen seconds he had been claimed by a man on his left and was shaking hands, easy, frictionless, already absorbed.
Louisa was quiet for a moment.
“I am sorry,” she said, not looking at Sophia. “He did not mean it unkindly.”
“I know,” Sophia said.
That was the thing about it. He had not. It had been a passing thought, voiced, dropped. By morning he would not place her face. The girl with the book would be somewhere in the general warmth of the evening, undifferentiated, already replaced by whoever stood next to him at supper.
He had not meant it unkindly.
It was unkind nonetheless.
Sophia straightened the reticule in her lap and fastened the clasp, and the spine of the Cowper disappeared, and she looked at the floor where the next set was assembling and said nothing further, and the musicians above them began again.
* * *
It was Sebastian who did it.
He appeared at Sophia’s elbow between the sets, with a young man in tow, fair-haired and pleasant-faced, his neckcloth tied with anxious precision and his smile arriving half a second too early, and performed the introduction with the smooth confidence of years spent managing rooms. Mr. Alderton.
A friend of a friend, recently come to town, he was agreeable without effort or consequence, passing through an evening lightly and leaving almost no impression behind him.
He asked Sophia to dance. She looked at Sebastian, who was already turning away, and accepted.