Chapter 6 #2
“Fair enough,” he said. “And London only looks like noise if you’re not paying attention either.”
The table had quieted slightly around them. Westbrook and Sebastian had paused their own conversation. Louisa watched with composed patience, evidently having decided that intervention was unnecessary.
“You assume I am not paying attention,” Sophia said.
“No,” Roland said. “I think you notice more than anyone I’ve met.” He said it simply, without decoration, without first checking whether it was the right thing to say. “But I think you pay attention the way someone pays attention from the next room. You hear everything. You’re just not in it.”
The sentence landed.
It was not a philosophical observation. It was not a metaphor he had reached for. It was the plain thing he had seen, said plainly, and it went through every defence she had because it had not occurred to her that he would see it.
She looked at her plate.
“That is a strange thing to say to someone at dinner,” she said, and her voice was steady, but something underneath it was not.
“Probably,” he said.
He did not apologise for it. He picked up his fork and returned to the meal, and after a moment the conversation around them resumed, the candles burning steadily while the April dark pressed against the windows.
Sophia ate. She contributed to the general conversation when it required her. She said something to Westbrook about political economy that was intelligent and appropriate, something she could produce without being fully present.
She did not look at him again for the rest of the meal. She did not need to. She was aware of where he was at the table as she was aware of the fire: constant, warm, not requiring to be watched and watched anyway.
* * *
The Colvilles left at half past ten.
The farewells were warm. Westbrook and Sebastian shook hands, and Sebastian walked him to the door, which he did not do for everyone.
Louisa pressed Sophia’s hand briefly and said Wednesday in the tone of a thing already settled.
Roland bowed, naturally, without ceremony, and his eyes met Sophia’s for a moment that contained nothing remarkable and which she nevertheless found difficult to place in her customary terms.
Then the door closed and the house was quiet.
Mrs. Peel’s people moved through the dining room, and the candles were snuffed one by one in the hall, and presently the ground floor fell still again.
The creak of a door somewhere, the smell of snuffed wicks, the house finding its shape again after the evening.
Sophia said goodnight on the landing and went upstairs.
Sebastian stood at the window of the sitting room, looking out at the street below where the Colville carriage had long since gone, and Juliana came in and closed the door.
She sat. He remained at the window for a moment, then turned.
“Good evening,” he said, meaning the dinner.
“Very good,” she agreed.
The fire had been banked but was still giving out heat, and the room was warm and smelled faintly of the candles that had been burning all evening.
Juliana tucked her feet up onto the settee, which she never did when anyone else was present, and looked at her husband with the contentment of a night that had gone well.
“Westbrook is exactly as you described,” she said.
“He is better in person than in letters,” Sebastian said. “His letters are correct. He is warmer than his letters.”
“Most people are.”
He sat down. The fire burned lower. Outside, a carriage in the street, the distant sound of someone’s front door. He found himself thinking of what Sophia had said, that it was not the same as silence. She was right.
They were quiet together for a moment.
“Louisa and Sophia,” Juliana said then, without preamble. “That friendship is real.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said. “I had hoped it would be.”
“You arranged it.”
“I introduced the occasion. They arranged the friendship.”
Juliana looked at the fire. She had watched them at the window in the drawing room before dinner, the two of them side by side, easy with one another, the conversation already established. She had been watching Sophia for twenty years. She knew what it looked like when her sister let someone in.
“And Roland,” Sebastian said after a moment. He said it carefully, in the tone he used when he had made an observation and decided to offer it rather than keep it.
“What about him?”
Sebastian looked at the fire. “She argued with him.”
“She argues with everyone.”
“Not like that.” He paused. He was choosing his words with more care than the sentence appeared to require.
“She was present in a way she is not always present in conversation. The analytical distance was not there.” He looked at her.
“The last time I saw that in someone’s face was at an assembly dance —”
Juliana looked up.
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. They had been married five years, and she had spent enough time in rooms with him to know when he was saying something directly and when he was saying it by not saying it. This was the second kind, and she understood it completely.
She looked back at the fire.
She thought about the assembly rooms in the county five years earlier.
The blue dress, Oliver beside her, Sebastian crossing the floor and saying things nobody said at county assemblies, and herself answering in kind, the words coming sharper and more honest than anything she had permitted herself in months.
It would be two months before she knew what it meant.
She had known, even then, that something had shifted.
“She does not know,” Juliana said.
“No,” Sebastian agreed. “Not yet.”
The fire shifted softly on the grate. Outside, a door closed somewhere on the street and then the night was very quiet. William asleep, Rose asleep, the whole household still.
“He is not what she would choose,” Juliana said.
“No,” Sebastian said. “He is not.”
Neither of them said anything further. They sat with the fire and the quiet and the knowledge that there was nothing to do with this observation except hold it, because Sophia would arrive at her own conclusions in her own time and any assistance would be neither wanted nor useful.
Juliana uncurled from the settee after a while and said she was going up. Sebastian said he would follow. She paused at the door.
“She looked surprised,” she said. “When he said she wasn’t in it.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said. “She did.”
Juliana looked at the fire once more, and then she went upstairs.