Chapter 10
The invitation had come from Louisa on a Thursday in a note as brief and direct as all Louisa’s notes, saying there was to be a small musical evening at Brook Street the following Tuesday, eight people or perhaps ten, and would Sophia come.
Sophia had written back yes. She had not mentioned it to Juliana until Saturday, and Juliana had said good and gone back to whatever she was doing, which was Juliana’s version of approval.
On the Tuesday evening Sophia put on the deep gold dress, the one she had discovered packed at the bottom of the trunk without explanation, which Beatrice had evidently made for an occasion she had anticipated without ever being told of it.
Sophia stood in front of the glass and looked at it and thought about what Beatrice knew and did not say, and then she went downstairs.
The Brook Street house in the evening was different from the Brook Street house in the morning.
Sophia had been there a dozen times now in the daylight hours, in the morning room with Louisa and the comfortable ordinary business of their friendship, and she knew the house with the familiarity that comes quietly over time, the proportions of the hallway, the smell of it, the loose step on the second stair.
In the evening, with candles lit and the drawing room rearranged and eight people in it rather than two, the house carried a different weight.
More itself, in some way. The evening showed what the morning kept private.
Two dozen chairs had been arranged in the drawing room in the semicircle of a musical occasion, facing a small raised platform where a pianoforte had been positioned.
The guests settling themselves did so with quiet self-possession, clearly used to it.
The candles had been placed for the music rather than for conversation, throwing the room into shadow and light warmer than a party and more intimate than an ordinary gathering.
Westbrook was already there, along with two couples Sophia did not know and an older man whose manner suggested he belonged more to the musical arrangements than the social ones.
Louisa came to meet her and took her arm briefly in greeting. “You came. Good,” she said. Which was Louisa’s version of warmth and entirely sufficient.
“Where would you like me?” Sophia said.
“Here,” Louisa said, and led her to two chairs near the centre of the semicircle, slightly apart from the others, positioned well for the music. “Roland will be beside you on the other side. He has been delayed, something to do with a horse. He will be five minutes.”
She said it plainly, as she would have said where to put a chair.
Sophia sat down. Louisa went to attend to the other guests, and the room arranged itself around the impending music, and the candles burned with their warm indifferent light, and Sophia sat and waited and did not arrange her expression into anything in particular.
He had come straight from whatever the horse business had been, his hair not quite in order for the evening, his coat properly on but put on in some haste.
He came in and took in the room with the swift, comprehensive glance he gave any new space and found Sophia before he found his chair, and something brief passed across his face.
Not surprise, exactly. He had known she would be there. But not neutrality either.
He sat down beside her. “Miss Lockwood.”
“Mr. Colville.” They had not spoken since the Ashcombe tea, and neither of them mentioned it, and the not-mentioning was itself a kind of acknowledgment that something had been in the room that afternoon and was not being named.
“Louisa arranged this,” he said. Not quite a question.
“The seating? Yes.”
“She is not subtle.”
“She is not,” Sophia agreed. “But she is usually right.”
He looked at her for a moment, the grey eyes direct, and whatever had been moving through his expression since he sat down settled into something quieter. He said nothing further because the musicians were beginning to tune and the room was quieting around them.
The music started.
It was Haydn, at least at first, a string quartet the two musicians played with a third and fourth performer who had apparently been elsewhere in the house and now appeared to take their places.
The room stilled completely. Eight people in a candlelit room with good music is its own condition, somewhere between privacy and occasion, and Sophia felt it arrive.
She was very aware of him beside her.
Not in the way she was aware of things she was studying.
This was the body registering proximity before the mind had given it permission to.
The warmth of him at the distance of a chair’s width.
The slight movement when he shifted his weight.
She could see his hands in her peripheral vision, resting quietly on his knees, long-fingered hands marked by riding and by the habit of handling things carefully, and she realised, as the Haydn began, that she was watching his hands more closely than she was watching the musicians and needed to stop doing so immediately.
She listened too. The Haydn was good. She had not expected to find a string quartet in a Brook Street drawing room on a Tuesday evening and discover that it was genuinely good, but she had been mistaken about a number of things this Season and was beginning to grow accustomed to revising her opinions.
Between the first and second movements, while the room held the brief collective pause before the musicians gathered themselves again, he turned slightly toward her and said, very quietly so as not to disturb the silence, “Do you know this piece?”
“The opus fifty-one,” she said, equally low. “The second in the set.”
He looked at her. “Of course you do.”
It was said without mockery, without the edge the same words would have carried at a ball three months ago. Simply: of course you do.
“Do you?” she said.
A brief pause. “No,” he said. “I know it sounds right. That is as far as I get with music.”
“That is further than most people get,” she said. “Most people know whether it is loud or quiet.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “It sounds right,” he said again, half to himself.
And then the second movement began and they both turned back to it, and the music filled the room, and beside her he was still and warm and present, and she sat with the gold dress and the candlelight and the Haydn and the fact of him next to her and let it all simply be what it was, without arranging it into anything, which was, she recognised with quiet surprise, the first time she had done that since she arrived in London.
* * *
She let it be what it was. And what it was was good.
The interval arrived between the third and fourth pieces. Others stood and moved. Sophia did not, and Roland did not. The footman came with wine. Roland took two glasses and set one beside Sophia without asking. She picked it up.
“You enjoyed it,” he said.
“Very much.” A pause. “The second movement surprised me.”
“How?”
“I expected it to resolve and it didn’t. It went somewhere else.” She looked at the musicians at the far end. “I was not ready for it and then I was glad I wasn’t.”
He considered this. “I had the same feeling. I couldn’t have named it.”
They sat with that for a moment.
“Do you come to these often?” she said.
“When I am in London, yes. Louisa arranges them.” He turned his wine glass in his hand. “I find them easier than balls.”
“Because the music is the occasion.”
“Because I am not.” He said it without self-pity. “At a ball I spend the entire evening being what people have decided I am before I arrive. It is not unpleasant. It is just —” He stopped.
“Tiring,” Sophia said.
He looked at her. “You know the feeling.”
He had turned to face her and the light from the nearest candle caught the underside of his jaw and the line of his throat, and for one entirely unguarded moment she imagined the nearness of him with unsettling clarity.
The thought arrived complete. She set it aside immediately and did not examine it, and it remained where she had put it, warm and present, for the rest of the evening.
“Not in the same way. The rooms do not know me well enough to have decided anything.” She paused.
“Or they did not, at the beginning of the Season.” She looked at her wine.
“I found out rather quickly that a name carries things you have not put there yourself. My sister’s broken engagement.
My other sister’s marriage. None of it mine, but I walked into rooms this Season and discovered people had already arranged me somewhere before I had said a word. ”
He was quiet. He had turned toward her fully and was listening, not looking away.
“That is —” he said, and stopped.
“Disorienting,” she said. “Yes.”
“I was going to say unfair.”
She looked at him. He said it plainly, without making anything of it. It landed differently than she had expected. Not because it was generous, which it was, but because he had heard the specific thing she had said and not the general version of it.
“It is both,” she said.
“Yes.” He looked at his glass. “Though I imagine it is worse to be placed by other people’s history than by your own.” A slight pause. “At least the version of me that precedes me into rooms is mine. I built it, or allowed it to be built. That is a different thing from inheriting it.”
Sophia looked at him.
This was not what she had expected him to say. She had expected something kind and general. He had said something exact.
“Yes,” she said. “It is a different thing.”
The musicians were picking up their instruments at the far end. In a moment the interval would be over. Louisa passed behind them and Sophia felt, without looking, the brief warm glance Louisa cast between them.
“The fourth piece is the finest of them,” Roland said.
“So you said.”
“I did not say that.”
“Someone did.” She looked at the musicians. “Perhaps I assumed it.”