Chapter 7 #2
Louisa was quiet for a moment, not reluctant, locating the answer.
“I arrived thinking I understood it. I had watched Roland for two years before I came out, and I thought I knew what the rooms looked like from the inside. I did not.” She moved a loose stone off the path with the side of her foot, an absent habit.
“There was a girl in my first Season. Clara Ashby. She had come up from Shropshire, good family, modest means, very clever. We found each other early, which was fortunate because neither of us found the rooms easy.”
“What happened to her?”
“Someone said she had been seen in a carriage with a man she should not have been seen with. It was not true. I knew it was not true. I had been with her that afternoon. But it was said, and it was said in the right rooms at the right moment, and within three weeks she had been uninvited to two parties and her card had thinned and she left London before the end of the Season.” Louisa said it without heat.
It had happened. “She married quietly the following year and I believe she is content. But she was destroyed here by a story no one ever substantiated, and the people who circulated it continued to receive invitations and give morning calls and nothing happened to any of them.”
They walked past a woman feeding the ducks at the water’s edge, who did not look up.
“Did you say anything?” Sophia asked.
“I said what I knew to the people I could say it to, which was not many and was not the right people.” Louisa’s voice was steady.
“I was nineteen and I did not yet know the rooms well enough to work against them. By the time I understood enough to be useful, she was gone.” She paused.
“I have thought about that fairly often since.”
Sophia looked at her. She had known Louisa was clear-eyed, had known it from the first evening at the Mertons’ and from the bench in the window, but this was different from mere quick observation.
Louisa had carried a specific failure for three years.
She had not made peace with it, but she had made something else from it.
“That is why you told me,” Sophia said. “This morning. About the risk of befriending me.”
“Partly.” Louisa turned to look at her. “I told you because I do not like people to operate without information relevant to them. It is a general principle.” She paused.
“But yes. Also because I know what it is to find yourself connected to someone whose name has become a social liability, and to have the decision of whether to continue that connexion taken slowly out of your hands by a room full of people who have decided what you should do.” Her voice was even.
“I am making the decision myself. That is the point.”
The path was bringing them back toward the gate.
The morning had gone properly warm, the light stretched across the path ahead of them, the hedges casting short shadows.
Behind the hedge-line Sophia could hear the street beginning again, carriages, voices, the general machinery of the city resuming after the interval of the park.
Something in what Louisa had said was working on her, quietly and without permission.
The mechanism she had been documenting, the morning room, the cluster near the fire, the precision that was not malice, she had been writing it as though it operated independently of anyone’s decision.
As though the rooms simply produced their effects naturally, like weather produced rain.
Clara Ashby had not been rained on. She had been acted upon. By specific people who chose specific words in specific rooms and then continued to receive invitations.
Sophia walked with this and did not say it aloud.
“Are you all right?” Louisa asked after a moment. Not performing concern. Simply asking.
“Yes,” Sophia said. “I am thinking.”
“I know,” Louisa said. “You go very still when you think. It is slightly alarming.”
They went through the gate and back onto the pavement, and the city came back at them with its noise and its indifference, and Sophia walked through it beside Louisa and said nothing further, and what she had understood settled in her quietly, without drama, the way significant revisions always did.
* * *
Sophia walked Louisa back toward Brook Street.
This had not been discussed. It happened, the walk continuing past the point where their routes would have diverged, and neither of them marked it.
The afternoon had turned properly warm, the April light gone from tentative to steady, and the streets had their fine-afternoon look, the pavement dry underfoot, the railings bright, the city briefly not relentless.
They talked about smaller things on the way back: a book Louisa had been reading, a morning call they had both attended the previous week where the hostess had served biscuits so remarkably good that the conversation had essentially stopped for several minutes, which they had both found more honest than most conversations.
The mood between them was easier than the park had been.
The park had cost something. This was the recovery after it.
They turned into Brook Street. The Colville house was perhaps fifty yards ahead on the left: the brown door, the railings freshly painted, a bay tree in a pot beside the step that had not been there when Sophia had first been told to look for the house and which she had since come to use as her landmark.
The scene ahead of them assembled itself gradually as they approached.
A boy of perhaps ten or eleven was on the pavement outside the house two doors down, attempting to manage a large flat parcel that was plainly too much for one person to carry.
The parcel had been wrapped in brown paper and was approximately the size of a small painting, and it had decided, somewhere between wherever it had started and here, to work against him.
He had it wedged between his body and the railing and was attempting to reposition his grip, and each repositioning moved the problem rather than solved it.
His coat was too large, his cap had slipped forward over one eye, and he stood bent awkwardly around the parcel as though unwilling to admit, even now, that he could not carry it alone.
Roland was coming down the Brook Street steps.
He had clearly been on the point of going out, hat and gloves already in hand, and he stopped when he saw the boy.
He did not look around to see who was watching.
He did not make anything of it. He went over, said something brief that Sophia could not hear from this distance, and took the other side of the parcel.
The boy looked up, one eye still half-covered by his cap, and said nothing, which was either suspicion or relief and possibly both.
Roland said something else. The boy nodded.
Together they moved the parcel up the steps of the house two doors down and through the door, which a maid opened apparently in answer to a knock Roland must have given with his foot, and then Roland came back out onto the pavement alone, settling his hat and pulling on his glove.
He had not looked back at the street once. He had not paused to be seen doing it. He merely acknowledged Louisa and Sophia with a slight nod as he passed them and then went on down the street as though nothing of consequence had occurred.
The whole thing had taken perhaps ninety seconds.
Sophia stood on the pavement.
She had written him as incurious and decorative, the Season’s golden product, moving through rooms without ever needing to look at anyone twice.
She had written it from evidence. The ball, the book remark, the effortless distribution of charm to whoever required it.
She had written it from what she had observed.
She had also written it, she understood now, from what she had predicted. She had predicted him before the Season had properly provided him, and she had arranged her observations accordingly.
The boy would have managed the parcel eventually.
Or he would not have. It was ninety seconds out of Roland’s afternoon and he had given them without calculation, without looking around to see whether the gesture was being received, without any of the social apparatus she had been cataloguing for weeks.
He had seen someone struggling and gone over.
The body doing what it did when no one was watching.
She thought about you hear everything, you’re just not in it. Said plainly at a dinner table, without realising it would land. And this — the parcel, the boy, the absent way he pulled his glove back on as he continued down the street. Nothing had happened, to him. That was the point.
Both were real. The book remark was also real. She had three data points now and they did not produce a coherent portrait, and she was not certain her portrait had ever been coherent, only that it had been internally consistent, which was a different thing.
Louisa had said nothing. She was looking at her own front door, her hands folded, her attention apparently elsewhere.
“I will leave you here,” Sophia said.
“Wednesday?” Louisa said.
“Wednesday,” Sophia said.
She turned and walked back along Brook Street toward Clarges Street, the afternoon light warm on the pavements and the railings and the faces of the houses, and she walked through it thinking about a portrait that required revision and not yet knowing how to revise it.
She thought about it all the way home and had resolved none of it by the time she came through the front door of the Blackwood townhouse and found Juliana in the hall with William and the afternoon post.
Juliana looked at her once, over William’s head, and said nothing.