Chapter 7
Louisa called for her at half past ten on a Tuesday.
She arrived on foot, as she usually did when the weather permitted, her fair hair pinned with the same mild carelessness as always and a loose thread at the hem of her pelisse that she either had not noticed or had decided not to address.
Sophia fell into step beside her and they went out into the April morning, which was warm enough, or nearly, the sun not yet committed.
The first call was with a Mrs. Fanshawe, in Upper Brook Street, whom Sophia had met briefly at the Merton ball.
The house was ordered and unshowy, the fire properly laid, the tea brought without fuss.
Mrs. Fanshawe greeted Louisa warmly and turned to Sophia with a look that was pleasant, thorough, and not yet decided.
She did not address Sophia directly for the first several minutes, which was itself information.
She was waiting to see what Sophia would do without being prompted.
Sophia found an opening on the subject of Henderson’s recent pamphlet, which she had gone to hear discussed at the Institution.
Mrs. Fanshawe had read it. She had a view, and the view was not borrowed from anyone else.
The temperature of the room rose by a degree or two, and they left twenty minutes later on terms that Sophia assessed as satisfactory.
There was no warmth in it, but there was genuine regard, and she considered that worth more.
The second call was in Grosvenor Square.
Lady Hargreave’s morning room was larger and louder.
The room had its own arrangements and maintained them regardless of who was in it.
Five women were established near the fire when Louisa and Sophia were shown in, and a sixth joined them within minutes, and the social arithmetic had long since been performed and the results already known by everyone, without discussion.
Louisa moved through it easily. She had been here before, many times, and the room received her accordingly.
Sophia was introduced as Miss Lockwood, staying with the Blackwoods this Season, and the women near the fire absorbed this without a word, each of them quietly revising something.
Lady Hargreave was not unkind. She offered tea, asked after Mrs. Blackwood with genuine enquiry, having met Juliana briefly at an evening the previous Season, and remarked that she had always found the Clarges Street house agreeable.
Sophia answered correctly and was absorbed into the general orbit of the room, which closed around her completely and immediately, leaving no visible mark.
She stood slightly apart, as was her habit. Here the habit read differently. She could feel herself being read, not unkindly, but thoroughly, the room quietly determining where she belonged.
She was listening to a conversation about a proposed assembly at Almack’s, who had vouchers, who was seeking them, whether the committee’s decisions this year were consistent with their decisions last year, when she heard her own name from somewhere behind the cluster near the fire.
The voice was not lowered. It was pitched at the level of a remark addressed to one person that expects to reach two or three.
“The older one married Blackwood, after the business with Fairchild, you recall, and the second married a naval captain. Sterling. Quite respectable, I understand, though she had a lord courting her first. Refused him.”
A murmur from someone.
“Yes. Refused him. For the captain.” The voice carried no malice. It was simply a woman putting facts in order. “The family has had an interesting few years. One wonders what this one will make of the Season.”
Sophia kept her eyes on the middle distance. Her cup was in her hand and she did not set it down, which would have been a tell. She stood where she was and looked at the window across the room and kept her expression where she had put it.
She was not surprised. She had known the Lockwood name carried a history in London.
Juliana had never pretended otherwise, and Sebastian had said as much on the journey up.
She had written the mechanism of this in her novel.
She had documented it, categorised it, given it precise and accurate language.
She had not, until this moment, been the subject of it.
The room did not pause. The assembly conversation continued at the fire, someone said something about the Lord Chamberlain, Lady Hargreave asked a question about a card party, and the morning room continued.
Tea was replenished, someone moved a vase, the clock on the mantel struck the quarter-hour and was not answered.
Louisa appeared at her side. She had been across the room and navigated back with no appearance of haste.
“The window at the back looks onto the square,” she said quietly. “It is worth seeing.”
They moved through to the smaller room. It was unoccupied. Through the glass the square lay in its April morning: a carriage turning at the far end, a woman with a basket, two small boys conducting some negotiation near the railings that appeared to require considerable animation on both sides.
Sophia stood at the window and looked at it.
She was, she found, not distressed. She was disconcerted.
Not by the content of what had been said, which was accurate, but by the experience of being in the room when it was said.
Of being the element under assessment. Of hearing her sisters’ lives reduced to two neat social summaries, the business with Fairchild, the naval captain without a title, and finding herself placed immediately afterward as the third item in the series, the one whose outcome was still to be determined.
She had been writing this chapter. She had not known she was also in it.
Louisa said nothing. She stood beside her at the window and let the silence remain, which was one of the things about Louisa that Sophia had come to value most.
After a moment Sophia said, “Are we expected to stay longer?”
“We have been here the correct amount of time,” Louisa said. “We may go.”
They went back through the morning room.
Sophia made her farewells to Lady Hargreave with the correct formulas and received the correct response, and they went out onto the pavement where the air was cold and direct after the overheated drawing room.
Sophia took a breath of it and felt, with some clarity, that the morning had altered her understanding of where she was and what was happening to her here.
She had come to London to observe the Season. It had not occurred to her, until this morning, that she was also its subject.
“The promenade?” Louisa said.
“Yes,” Sophia said. “Let us walk.”
* * *
The park was ten minutes from Lady Hargreave’s house and considerably preferable to it. They went in through the gate and the noise of the street fell back. Ahead of them the path stretched out empty, the garden wall on one side and the open lawn on the other, and the house behind them.
They walked for a while without speaking. The silences between them never required filling. They lasted exactly as long as they needed to.
“Mrs. Fanshawe,” Sophia said after a time.
“Solid,” Louisa said. “She has been coming to these things for fifteen years and she is not impressed by most of it, which means when she is interested she is genuinely interested. She will remember you.”
“And Lady Hargreave’s morning room.”
“That is a room where information circulates. Lady Hargreave herself is not unkind. She is simply indifferent to the effect. She likes the room to be full and does not attend to what is said in it.” Louisa’s voice was even.
“The cluster near the fire are a different matter. They are three women who have known each other since their first Seasons and who have managed the room’s social arithmetic for the past several years.
They were not talking about you cruelly.
They were talking about you accurately. That is how they work: precision rather than malice. ”
“It amounts to the same thing,” Sophia said.
“It does,” Louisa said. “But knowing which it is tells you what to expect. Malice can be confronted or avoided. Precision of that kind continues.” She looked ahead at the path.
“They will form their view of you over the next few weeks. You cannot prevent that. What you can do is give them better material than they currently have.”
“I am not particularly interested in managing their view of me,” Sophia said.
“I know,” Louisa said. “That is itself a piece of material, and it will register as either very confident or very naive, and how they read it will depend on what else you give them.”
Sophia considered this. It was not the kind of advice she would have sought. It was also not wrong.
“The business with your sister,” Louisa said carefully. “The broken engagement. I know the outline of it; most people in London know the outline.”
“It was five years ago.”
“Five years is not long in this world. And it was not simply a broken engagement. It was the manner of it. The dinner, the families assembled.” She paused.
“I am not saying this to be unkind. I am saying it because you should know that what you heard this morning is not exceptional. It will be said again, in different rooms, by different people who have formed their view of the Lockwood family and are not particularly inclined to revise it.” She turned briefly to look at Sophia.
“Your eldest sister has made something very good with her life. But the ton does not entirely forgive the method.”
Sophia walked for a moment with this. The path curved around the water and the April light moved across its surface, grey and silver in turns.
“You have been navigating this for three Seasons,” she said.
“Yes.”
“What was your first Season like?”