Chapter 4 #2
“That is London at work,” Louisa said, and there was a dryness in it that was not unkind. “You arrive prepared to find it oppressive and it is oppressive, and then three weeks pass and you cannot remember what you did before there were six things happening at once.”
“I am not sure that is an endorsement.”
“It is not. It is simply what happens.”
They walked past the bench at the water’s edge.
A blackbird was singing in the trees to their right, the full morning song, and it sounded so entirely like the garden at Lockwood that Sophia registered it with a small involuntary pang and then set the feeling aside before it could make any further demands.
“Did you know anyone,” Louisa said, “before you came? Anyone in town?”
“I knew of people. And I have a correspondence with Mr. Ashworth. He came to our house some years ago in a professional capacity, assisting with some business of my father’s.
” She paused, which was all the explanation she intended to give of that particular history, which was not hers to tell in full.
“We began writing to each other afterward. He is very well read in natural philosophy, literature, and some political economy. He is the first person I corresponded with who did not find it odd that I had opinions about things.”
“And he is in London this Season?”
“He is. I have not yet called on him but we have exchanged letters since I arrived.” She paused. “He is the reason I was not entirely unwilling to come. The correspondence is… it is very good. I knew him before, of course, but not like this.”
“And are you looking forward to finding out?”
Sophia considered it honestly. “Yes,” she said.
“Though I am also slightly apprehensive. Letters allow for more care than conversation. You can choose your words. You have time to think before you respond.” She looked at the path ahead.
“He may find me less interesting now that I am an actual person again rather than a sequence of pages arriving twice a month. I may find the same of him. It is possible we have each grown attached to the version of the other that exists in letters.”
Louisa was quiet for a moment. “That is a very clear-eyed way to anticipate meeting someone.”
“I find it preferable to be clear-eyed beforehand.”
“Most people are not.”
“No,” Sophia agreed. “Most people prefer not to be.” She glanced at Louisa. “What about you? Have you met anyone interesting this Season, or do all three Seasons blur together by now?”
Something shifted in Louisa’s face, a flicker of something that appeared and was gone before it had fully arrived. She was quiet for just a beat too long.
“The Season produces a great many people,” she said. “Interesting is a smaller category.”
It was not an answer. Sophia noted this without pressing it.
“There was someone,” Louisa said after another few steps.
She had been deciding whether to say it.
She had decided. “Last Season. He is not in town this year.” She looked at the water rather than at Sophia.
“He is perfectly good and perfectly ineligible and I was perfectly sensible about the whole thing, which is to say I was miserable about it for a month and have since been entirely recovered.”
“Entirely?” Sophia said.
Louisa’s mouth curved, brief and wry. “Largely.”
They walked for a moment in the comfortable quiet that had settled between them intermittently since the garden. The ducks’ disagreement had resolved itself, one paddling away briskly. The blackbird was still singing, unconcerned with any of it.
“Does your Mr. Ashworth know you are coming to meet him with a hypothesis about whether he resembles his letters?” Louisa asked.
“He does not.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“I am not.”
“Probably wise,” Louisa said. “In my experience, telling people they are an experiment does not improve the experiment.”
Sophia felt the corner of her mouth move despite herself. “I am not telling anyone that.”
“You told me.”
“You are different.”
Louisa looked at her, warm and direct, and said nothing, which was answer enough. “Am I,” she said. Not quite a question.
“You arrived at it yourself,” Sophia said. “From insufficient evidence. That is not something I can ignore.”
The path was bringing them back toward the gate, the morning having moved on without anyone consulting it.
The light had shifted a degree, less new and more settled, and the nurses had begun to outnumber the solitary walkers, and somewhere beyond the trees the street was audible again, gathering itself toward noon.
“We should go back,” Louisa said.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
Neither of them moved immediately. The blackbird finished its song and the park filled briefly with a lesser quiet, and then a child somewhere behind them began to cry, and the moment resolved itself into the ordinary business of a London morning, and they turned back toward the gate.
* * *