Chapter 6
Sebastian had mentioned the Colvilles at breakfast on a Tuesday, between the post and the second cup of coffee, and returned to his eggs before anyone had responded.
“Thursday,” he said. “Westbrook and his brother and sister. Their mother prefers Wiltshire, as London has disagreed with her since their father died. The brothers keep the Brook Street house for the Season while Louisa joins them when she likes.” He looked at Juliana.
“I thought six was the right number for a dinner in the house. Informal.”
“Thursday suits,” Juliana said.
Sophia, at the other end of the table, was reading. She turned a page.
* * *
She wore the amber.
She had been looking at it in the wardrobe for three weeks, returning to it now and then with the same quiet certainty she sometimes felt about a sentence she knew was right before she had found where to place it.
On Thursday afternoon she took it out, shook it, and put it on, and looked at herself in the glass.
Beatrice had known it would be correct for an evening like this.
Beatrice had been planning ahead. Sophia had long since stopped finding this surprising.
She did her hair without the braid, pinning it up instead with simple practicality, and went downstairs at half past six.
The drawing room fire had been lit. Juliana was doing the small adjustments that preceded guests, Sebastian was by the fire not reading the book in his hand, and the room smelled of fresh candles and the warmth of a grate that had been burning for an hour.
“You look well,” Juliana said.
Sophia poured herself a glass of water from the sideboard and said nothing, which Juliana received without comment.
* * *
Westbrook came first through the drawing room door, taller than Roland, solidly built, darker in colouring.
He had been head of a household since he was five-and-twenty and it was visible the moment he entered, not loud but without any question of his welcome.
He was perhaps thirty, broad through the shoulder.
He took up his exact amount of space and no more.
He greeted Sebastian warmly, his courtesy to Juliana genuine rather than practised.
Roland came in behind him, Louisa just after. From her chair near the window Sophia watched him take in the room in the brief, comprehensive look he probably did not know he gave every room he entered. Then he saw her.
“Miss Lockwood,” he said. The bow was natural. The grey eyes were direct.
“Mr. Colville,” she said.
He had come straight in from the evening air; his colour was slightly raised, and it made the grey eyes more vivid than she had been prepared for. She had been thinking about him in the abstract for a fortnight. The reality of him in the doorway was a different proposition.
Then Louisa was beside her, warm as Louisa always was, and the moment dissolved into the ordinary business of an evening beginning: the fire, the wine the footman was distributing, the comfortable noise of six people finding their positions in a room.
Sophia kept her chair by the window. From here she could see the whole of it.
Westbrook and Sebastian had already drifted slightly apart from the others, not rudely, but drawn together by the pull of things they needed to discuss.
She could not hear them from here but she could see it: both of them turned slightly away from the room, Westbrook’s hands moving occasionally when he made a point and Sebastian’s never doing so, neither of them appearing to notice the difference.
Roland was talking to Juliana. At a ball Roland belonged to the room and the room to him, his interest distributed among a hundred people, each receiving their portion.
Here he had one person, and the difference was immediately apparent.
He was speaking to Juliana and only to Juliana, listening closely enough that Sophia could see Juliana responding to it.
Juliana, for her part, had leaned slightly toward him, intent and unguarded, as she became when something genuinely interested her.
Louisa came to sit in the chair beside Sophia, close enough to talk and not too close, and they sat for a moment watching the room together without speaking, which was one of the things Sophia had come to value about Louisa’s company.
“Westbrook has been looking forward to this,” Louisa said, after a moment. “He and Sebastian have been thick as thieves since their morning meeting, but it has all been business. He wanted a proper evening.”
“Sebastian does not distinguish,” Sophia said. “Business is his proper evening.”
“Westbrook is the same. Which is perhaps why they get on.” She picked up her wine.
“My mother says he has become entirely insupportable since taking over the estate accounts. She wrote last week that the wisteria at the estate is exceptional this spring and that she does not miss the Season at all, which I take to mean she misses it mildly and finds the wisteria some consolation.”
“That is a very precise reading of a letter about wisteria.”
“I have been reading my mother’s letters for twenty-three years.
The wisteria is never just wisteria.” She glanced at her eldest brother across the room.
“Neither is the insupportable. She means he has been doing too much again. He manages the house, manages the Season, manages Roland and me. He always did, even when my father was alive. My father found administration tiring, while Westbrook took to it naturally, and over time the arrangement established itself without anyone ever formally agreeing to it. He does not resent it. That is the remarkable thing.”
Sophia looked at Westbrook, who was laughing at something Sebastian had said, his head tipped slightly back, the sound carrying across the table before he checked it. “He does not seem to find it burdensome.”
“He does not,” Louisa said. “Which is either very good character or a worrying absence of selfishness, and I have never determined which.” She turned back to the room.
“He should marry. He would be very good at it. But he has not got round to it yet and no one pressures him because he manages everything so competently that everyone is afraid of what would happen if he became distracted.”
Sophia looked at her. “That is an extremely practical way to think about marriage.”
“Westbrook thinks about everything practically,” Louisa said.
“Roland does not, which is why they balance each other well.” She said this without elaboration, the simple domestic fact of two brothers who had arrived at a working arrangement, and moved on before Sophia had time to do anything with it.
From across the room, Roland said something that made Juliana laugh aloud before she could suppress it, and Sophia turned her head fractionally and saw his face in the moment after, something underneath the ease, present for two seconds and then gone.
She turned back to Louisa.
“You were saying Westbrook should marry,” she said.
Louisa’s look was warm and unmistakably understanding. She had seen what she had seen, and out of kindness she let it pass. “I had finished, actually,” she said. “But I can say more if you like.”
“Tell me about the estate,” Sophia said.
“It is in Wiltshire,” Louisa said pleasantly. “The wisteria is exceptional this spring. My mother does not miss the Season at all.” A beat. “Shall I continue?”
Sophia looked at her. Louisa’s expression was composed, warm, and not remotely innocent.
Sophia exhaled once through her nose. “You are the most irritating person I know,” she said.
“That,” Louisa said, “is a compliment.”
Mrs. Peel appeared in the doorway to announce dinner, and the room rearranged itself toward the table, and Sophia set down her glass and went with it.
* * *
The second course had been on the table for perhaps twenty minutes when Westbrook said something about the park, whether it was worth the morning ride at this time of year or whether one was better served waiting for May, and Roland said, without having had to think about it: “The park is perfectly good. I prefer London in spring to anywhere else.”
Sophia looked up from her plate.
“To anywhere?” she said.
He looked at her with mild surprise at the directness of it, then settled. “To most places, at this time of year. The city is at its best in April and May. Everything is happening.”
“Everything is happening in the country in April and May,” she said. “Rather more than here, in fact.”
“More quietly,” he said.
“That is not a flaw.”
“I didn’t say it was a flaw. I said I prefer London.” He held her gaze without effort. “Some of us do.”
He took a sip of wine and looked at her across the candlelight, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he was seeing rather more of her than she intended to reveal.
“And what is it you prefer, specifically? The noise? The parties? The opportunity to be seen in the park by the same people you saw at dinner the night before?”
She had meant it to land cleanly, like a satirist’s cut, precise and dismissive. It did not land cleanly. It landed somewhere between observation and accusation, and she heard it a half-second after it left her, and knew she had showed more than she intended.
Roland looked at her. He did not appear offended. He appeared to be thinking, which was not what she had expected him to do with the remark.
“The movement,” he said. “I like being around people who are doing things. In the country everything has been decided already — the families, the arrangements, who sits where, who speaks to whom. London hasn’t decided yet.
People are still becoming what they’re going to be.
” He picked up his wine. “I find that more interesting than watching the same fields come up every spring.”
It was not a stupid answer. She had been ready for a stupid answer and had her response prepared, and the response did not fit what he had actually said. For a moment she had nothing.
“The fields are not the same every spring,” she said. “They only look the same if you are not paying attention.”