Chapter 12
The afternoon carried that early-June light that entered through windows at a slant and made everything seem more distinctly itself, the blue of the curtains deepening, the white of the ceiling turning brighter, the dust in the air briefly visible and briefly gold.
Sophia was in her room.
The dress lay across the chair, the blue silk she had worn to the Merton ball, the dress she had been sitting in when Roland Colville made his remark about girls who brought books to ballrooms and then turned away without waiting for her answer.
She had worn it once since, briefly, and in her mind it remained attached to the beginning, not of anything she was prepared to name, simply the beginning of the Season, the night she met Louisa, the night she wrote her best pages about the golden product of the ton and went to bed perfectly satisfied with her assessment and wrong about all of it.
She put it on.
The glass showed her herself, pale gold hair, wide blue eyes, the blue silk precisely as Beatrice had calculated it would be, the figure complete and the background not yet there. She looked at herself for a moment, then turned away.
Rose’s voice came from somewhere down the hall, the sound she made when the day had been long and the evening was making demands on her patience, a sound she had been making since she learned to make sounds and which Sophia had always found unreasonably cheering.
Then William’s voice, lower, with the gravity he had recently begun to apply to everything, explaining something to nobody in particular.
She went to find Juliana.
Juliana was in the nursery, nearly through the end of the day.
Rose was on her hip, mollified by proximity, the small red face subsiding from outrage into something more philosophical.
William was on the floor with a wooden horse he had been riding across the carpet for the better part of the afternoon and showed no signs of concluding.
The nurse, Jennings, was folding something in the corner with great concentration, undisturbed by any of it.
Juliana looked up when Sophia came in.
She looked at the dress for a moment, then at Sophia’s face, then back at the dress. She said nothing about any of it, which was Juliana’s way of saying a great deal.
“You look well,” she said.
“Beatrice made it,” Sophia said. “I cannot take any credit.”
“Beatrice made the dress,” Juliana said. “She did not make the person wearing it.” She shifted Rose to her other hip and looked steadily at Sophia, clearly having observed something for some time and not yet decided whether to speak of it. “Are you looking forward to it?”
“It is a party,” Sophia said.
“That is not what I asked.”
Sophia looked at William, who had directed the wooden horse into a corner and was now conducting a negotiation with it about how to proceed. “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I suppose I am.”
Juliana received this without pressing it. She knew the answer contained more than the word. She kissed the top of Rose’s head and Rose grabbed her necklace with both fists, claiming it.
“Sebastian will have the carriage ready at eight,” Juliana said. “He is attending to something in the study.”
Sophia nodded. She picked up the wooden horse that William had abandoned in favour of lying flat on the carpet to examine something in the grain of the floorboards, and set it upright on the window sill where it looked out at the Clarges Street evening with more dignity than it had shown on the floor.
“Sophia,” Juliana said.
She turned.
Juliana was looking at her with Rose still balanced on her hip, the nursery warm and slightly chaotic around them, carrying the smells of talcum, candle wax, and the close heat of a room inhabited by small children.
She had been considering something for a long time, and she had finally decided to say it.
“Whatever the evening is,” she said, “you are allowed to let it be that. You do not have to stand outside it.”
Sophia looked at her sister. Juliana did not look away.
She was not asking for a response and Sophia did not give one, and they looked at each other for a moment across the nursery floor with William between them examining the floorboards, and the thing Juliana had said sat in the air between them, accurate and unremarked upon.
Then Rose pulled the necklace hard and Juliana made a sound and the moment dispersed into the ordinary evening.
* * *
At half past seven Sophia came downstairs and found Sebastian already in the hall with his coat on, looking at the post on the hall table. He was not reading it. He looked up when she came down and nodded, brief and approving, and said nothing, which was Sebastian’s version of a compliment.
The hall smelled of beeswax and the faint remains of dinner, roasted meat and herbs beneath the lingering warmth of a house that had recently fed people well.
The lamp by the door threw a good yellow light across the floor.
Outside, through the narrow window beside the door, Clarges Street showed two figures on the opposite pavement walking quickly, a carriage at the far end, the June sky still holding a thin line of light along the west.
Juliana came down at twenty to eight, her own coat on, her hair done, Rose presumably surrendered to the nurse and William to sleep. She came down the stairs without hurry and looked at Sophia and Sebastian and said: “Good. Are we ready?”
They went out into the evening.
The carriage ride to Brook Street took ten minutes, barely worth harnessing the horses, Sebastian had remarked, only for Juliana to point out that one did not arrive at a party in blue silk on foot, after which he conceded the matter without further resistance.
Sophia sat with the Clarges Street dark going past the window and the blue silk in her lap and thought about nothing very specifically and quite a lot in general.
The party at the Colvilles would be larger than the musicale. Louisa had said thirty people, perhaps more. Louisa had also said, with the pleasant neutrality she deployed when she was stating a fact she considered Sophia capable of handling: Roland will be there, of course. Westbrook as well.
Of course.
The carriage turned into Brook Street. The Colville house appeared ahead, the brown door gone warm in the light from the windows, light spilling onto the pavement from what sounded, even from here, like a room that had been occupied for some time and had found its pace.
Above the door the familiar bay tree stood in its pot, unchanged.
Sophia looked at it as the carriage drew up.
It was the same bay tree she had used as her landmark since Louisa first described the house to her, the unremarkable domestic fact of it, and she looked at it now and felt the small and odd sensation of arriving somewhere that had become, over the course of a season, something close to known.
The carriage stopped. Sebastian handed Juliana down, and then Sophia, and the June evening received them, warm still, the air carrying the last of the day’s warmth and the distant smell of something flowering in a garden somewhere behind the houses, and they went up the steps and through the brown door into the light and noise of the Colville house at a party, and the evening began.
* * *
The Colville drawing room at a party was a different thing from the Colville drawing room at a musicale.
The musicale had been eight people and candlelight and a room attending to something in silence.
This was thirty people and the full brightness of an evening already in motion, candles and conversation, the smell of hot wax and wine and the faint sweetness of whatever Westbrook had chosen to put in the punch.
The furniture had been moved to allow circulation and the room had acquired the density of a London party in full progress, which was to say every surface occupied, every corner claimed, the air warm and close with the accumulated heat of people enjoying themselves.
Louisa took Sophia’s arm the moment she arrived and steered her into the room.
Juliana was absorbed immediately by Westbrook and Sebastian, the two of them already in the corner they always found at these things.
Juliana went to join them, and Sophia found herself standing with Louisa in the middle of the room while the party sorted itself around them.
She was not looking for Roland. This was what she told herself during the first ten minutes, and it was a statement that was true in the narrow technical sense and entirely false in the sense that mattered.
He was by the fireplace when she found him, not that she had been looking for him, talking to a man she did not know and a woman she recognised from the Merton ball. Both leaned slightly in, knowing they had drawn the evening’s best company. He had not yet seen her arrive. She used the interval.
The dark coat and the simply tied cravat suited him too well.
She had been seeing him in evening clothes for months and the effect ought to have dulled; it had not.
Candlelight caught unexpectedly in his hair when he turned his head.
She noticed these things against her better judgement while holding a glass of wine and attempting to behave like the rational woman who had once intended to write a satirical novel about the Season instead of becoming distracted by it.
She had seen him in rooms before. She had seen the effect he had on rooms, and in the early weeks had documented it as fieldwork, the recording itself a small cool satisfaction.
Conversations redirected when he moved through them.
Women’s shoulders changed and men’s posture firmed, the room recalibrating to his presence. She had documented all of it.
She had not felt it from the inside before.