Chapter 4 #3
They came back through the gate and the street closed around them again with its noise and cobblestones and the smell of horse and coal and an April sharpness that belonged neither to winter nor to summer. Louisa’s pace adjusted itself to the pavement without comment, and Sophia matched it.
At the corner of Clarges Street they slowed.
“I should not keep you any longer,” Louisa said. She said it practically, without the false regret that usually accompanied such statements. “Your sister will be wondering.”
“Juliana does not wonder. She waits and then asks one question.”
“A useful quality.” Louisa looked down the street briefly, then back. “We are in Brook Street. Number twelve, the brown door, if you have occasion to call.” She said it without the machinery of a formal invitation, plainly and without ceremony.
“Thank you,” Sophia said.
“We have a morning room that nobody uses before eleven, and my mother, when she is in London, is generally occupied with correspondence until noon, which means it is largely free of arrangement. You could come and read in it, if you wanted, or not read.” A pause.
“I am there most mornings when we have not been out the night before. Westbrook uses the library and Roland…” she stopped.
“Roland rides in the mornings. So the morning room is generally quiet.”
“That is very convenient,” Sophia said.
She meant the morning room, and the quiet, and the proximity to Louisa, all of which were genuinely convenient and none of which required further examination.
Louisa looked at her steadily for a moment. “Wednesday still, if you like,” she said. “Or before, if the mood takes you.”
“Wednesday,” Sophia said. “I am meeting Ashworth on Thursday and I should like to have had a good morning before it.”
“Wednesday then.” Louisa pulled her glove straight, which had been loose since the park, the same pin working free from her hair, and then looked up. “I enjoyed this.”
“So did I,” Sophia said.
It was true and plainly said, and Louisa received it without ceremony, and they parted at the corner, Louisa turning north toward Brook Street and Sophia turning back along Clarges Street toward the townhouse, the stone flags solid and familiar beneath her feet.
* * *
The house was at luncheon when she returned.
She could hear it from the hall, William’s voice, and Sebastian’s, and the domestic sound of a meal in progress, the sound of a household that had found its feet in a new place.
She took off her outer things and hung them herself rather than waiting for anyone, and went upstairs.
Her room was where she had left it. The writing table, the empty bookshelf, the manuscript pages face-down under the paperweight in the corner. The window over the rooftops. The London sky, pale and clear, indifferent to the hour.
She sat down.
She thought about the morning: the park, the blackbird, Louisa saying you told me with that quick unguarded warmth, the conversation moving through London and the country and Mr. Ashworth and the largely recovered something that Louisa had not named.
The ease of it. A morning that had not required anything and had produced more than she expected.
Wednesday, she had said. Brook Street, number twelve, the brown door.
She thought about this. It was a short walk, perhaps ten minutes along streets she was beginning to know.
She would go on Wednesday and they would sit in the morning room that nobody used before eleven, and Louisa would say something direct that required thought afterward, and she would say something that Louisa would find irritating in the manner of a compliment, and it would be — she reached for the word and found it without difficulty.
Good. It would be good.
She reached for the paperweight and moved it aside and looked at the top page of the manuscript before turning it over.
She did not write anything. She sat with the page and the pen and thought about the morning, and Louisa’s face, the directness in it, the warmth that never softened into vagueness, and the blackbird, and Roland rides in the mornings, said as plainly as one might mention the hour of breakfast and carrying, apparently, no greater significance than that.
She was aware, sitting at her writing table in the April afternoon with the light flat and clear through the window, that she had not thought of this when Louisa said it. She had thought of it now, in the quiet of her room, a full hour later, and the thought had arrived without being summoned.
Roland rides in the mornings. So the morning room is generally quiet.
She was going on Wednesday for Louisa. That was the reason she was going. It was the whole and sufficient reason and she had no others and did not need any.
She put the pen down. She picked up her book, not the Cowper, which was in her reticule on the hook by the door, but the Edgeworth she had been reading before the ball, left open on the writing table at a page she had now read so many times it had stopped meaning anything. She found her place. She read.
Below, the sound of luncheon continued, William’s voice rising briefly above the rest and then subsiding. The house was ordinary in the ordinary afternoon.
She did not think about it again.
Or not immediately.