Chapter 12 #2
She felt it now, standing twenty feet away with Louisa beside her, and the feeling was not simple.
It was not merely the heat in the face she had been managing for weeks.
It was the strange sensation of watching a man she knew, knew from the steeplechase and the musicale and the dinner table and the quiet certainty of you hear everything, you’re just not in it, become the public version of himself again, and understanding for the first time how great the distance between the two versions truly was.
And more unsettling still, understanding what it meant that she had been allowed to see the private one at all, when only a handful of the thirty people in this room ever truly did.
The woman from the Merton ball said something that made Roland smile, and the smile itself was unfairly attractive, easy and bright and perfectly managed, altering the atmosphere immediately around him, and pleasure crossed the woman’s face, the involuntary satisfaction of having been briefly, specifically seen by the Season’s most eligible man plain there as the whole room registered it.
Sophia looked at the fireplace.
“He is very good at it,” she said.
Louisa, beside her, glanced at her and said nothing for a moment. Then: “Yes. He has been doing it since he was twenty and he does not know how to stop.”
They stood with this.
“Does he want to stop?” Sophia said.
“I think,” Louisa said carefully, “that he would like to be in a room where he did not have to decide.”
A waiter came past with wine and they both took a glass, and the conversation moved into the room’s general territory, discussing who was there, who was expected, whether the Fenwick girl had recovered from whatever had kept her from the last three evenings.
Sophia contributed appropriately and watched the room.
Roland moved through it without haste, stopping in turn with each person who claimed him, genuinely present rather than performing.
That was the thing about him the less careful observer missed.
The ease was not indifference. He was actually looking at people.
He was actually hearing what they said. There were simply too many of them for anyone to keep him long.
She watched him stop at a group of four near the window, two young women, their mothers behind them at a small remove, the arrangement of a group that has positioned itself to be visible to the room and is succeeding.
One of the young women said something and he laughed, quickly and without restraint this time, and the girl’s face lit at once with bright, irrepressible satisfaction.
She had drawn that laugh from him, and the room had seen it, and she knew.
Something moved in Sophia’s chest. Not jealousy — she had learned by now to identify jealousy and this was not it.
It was something more complicated. The knowledge that the real laugh existed, that she had heard it before, that it was not common and not manufactured, and that the young woman near the window had just received it and did not know what she had.
She took a sip of wine.
Louisa had drifted toward Philip, who had apparently arrived without Sophia noticing, now standing near the door with the notebook absent from his pocket for once, talking to Westbrook with a contained ease that suggested rooms had become less difficult for him lately.
He saw Louisa and something quiet and unmistakably glad crossed his face.
Louisa said something to Sophia, back in a moment, and went.
Sophia stood alone with her wine and the party around her.
Roland was now across the room, near the entrance to the hall, with a group that had accumulated rather than been arranged, the cluster that formed around certain people without intention, simply the social gravity of it, everyone wanting to be adjacent to the warmth.
Three men, two women, Westbrook at the periphery, all of them deep in it, the conversation long-settled and comfortable.
He glanced across the room. Found her.
It was the briefest thing, lasting a second or less, and then his attention was back on the group and the conversation continued.
But he had found her in the room and the finding had been deliberate, and she had seen it, and she looked back at the fireplace and felt the warmth of the party around her and the warmth of the wine in her hand and the separate warmth that had nothing to do with either.
Westbrook appeared at her elbow.
She had not seen him break from the group, but here he was, holding his own wine glass, entirely at home in the noise and the heat. He was taller than Roland, darker, his face less immediately striking but more readable. He had been in rooms like this one longer than his brother and it showed.
“Miss Lockwood,” he said. “You are enjoying the evening?”
“Very much,” she said. “Your sister is an excellent hostess.”
“Louisa takes evenings seriously,” Westbrook said. “She executes them without mercy.” He surveyed the room. “Thirty people and not a single one she did not approve of. She removed two names from the list on Tuesday. I did not ask why.”
“That sounds like Louisa.”
“It is entirely Louisa.” He took a sip of wine. “She speaks of you often, you know. She says you are the most interesting person she has met this Season.” He glanced at her. “She does not say such things lightly. She has met a great many people and found most of them insufficient.”
Sophia was not sure what to say to this. She said nothing.
“She also says you see things,” Westbrook continued. “That you pay attention.” He looked at the room again. “I find that valuable. Most people look at a room and see what they expected to see before they arrived. It is rarer to find someone who looks at what is actually there.”
“I am a guest in your house,” Sophia said. “It would be rude not to pay attention.”
Westbrook smiled briefly. It changed his face considerably. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose it would.” He finished his wine. “I should return to circulation. Louisa will have noticed I am neglecting my duties.”
“Of course,” Sophia said.
He inclined his head. “Miss Lockwood. A pleasure.”
He went, and Sophia stood with her wine glass and the party moving around her and the small, strange feeling of having been assessed and, apparently, approved.
She stayed for twenty minutes more. She talked to a woman she had met at Lady Hargreave’s, whose name she remembered and who seemed surprised and pleased to be remembered.
She watched Philip and Louisa from a distance and felt, as she had felt in the week since the Friday afternoon, the clean uncomplicated warmth of seeing two people who suited each other finding their way toward it.
And she watched Roland.
She could not stop watching Roland. This was the fact she had to live with, standing in his family’s drawing room in the blue silk among thirty people, none of whom were watching her.
He moved through the room and her eye kept finding him without effort, returning to him again and again as naturally as a needle turning north.
At some point the room’s heat became considerable.
The conversations had thickened and the candles had been burning for two hours and the air had the heavy closeness of a well-occupied space that had used up its freshness.
Sophia set her wine glass on the nearest surface and looked at the door to the hall.
The library was at the end of the hall. She had been in it once before, briefly, to return a book Louisa had lent her in March. She knew it was there and she knew it would be empty and she knew the door had a good latch.
She went.
* * *
She pulled the library door shut behind her and stood for a moment in the quiet of it.
It was a good room, not large, but the books were real books rather than decoration, their spines worn and unevenly coloured, the shelves clearly used rather than arranged for appearance.
A lamp had been left burning low on the desk, throwing just enough light to read by.
The window looked out onto the darkness of Brook Street, a cab disappearing at the far end, the street below gone quiet now that the last of the evening’s foot traffic had passed.
Sophia went to the window and stood in the coolness of the glass and let the party’s noise recede behind the door.
The room smelled of leather and old paper and a faint trace of tobacco, not recent.
Someone’s room, used and lived in. She put her fingertips to the nearest shelf and read spines without really reading them and breathed.
She had been there perhaps ten minutes when the door opened.
She turned. Roland stood in the doorway with his hand still on the latch, looking at her.
He said: “I saw you leave.”
Not I came to find you. He had not dressed it. He had simply said what was true.
“The room was warm,” she said.
“Yes.” He came in and pulled the door to behind him without fastening the latch, and the noise of the party receded further. He looked around the library, then at the lamp, then at her.
“My father’s room,” he said. “He died six years ago. We have not changed it.”
She looked at the shelves. “I can see that. These are his books.”
“You can tell?”
“The reading order,” she said. “Someone has gone through these shelves systematically. Starting at the left and working across. It stops two-thirds of the way along the second shelf. He did not finish.”
Roland looked at the shelves. Something moved in his face — not grief exactly, but something near it, and new. “He was ill for the last year,” he said. “He still came in here. I did not know he was working through them in order.”
“He was reading Johnson,” she said, touching the spine that marked the stopping point. “The Lives of the Poets.”
Roland looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at her. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“See things.”