Chapter 12 #4
At half past ten Juliana appeared at her shoulder. She had found Sebastian, assessed the evening, and concluded it had run its course. All of this was legible in the set of her.
“The carriage?” Juliana said.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
They found Sebastian near Westbrook, mid-conversation, one they would clearly continue at another time. Sebastian registered Juliana’s arrival and concluded the conversation without difficulty. He had long since learned to read her signals and did not find the reading a burden.
The farewells began, the pleasant gradual dispersal that marked the end of a successful evening. Sophia said goodnight to Westbrook and to the woman from Lady Hargreave’s morning room whose name she had remembered, and went to find Louisa.
Louisa was at the door to the hall. She took Sophia’s hand briefly, her touch warm and direct, without any trace of performance.
“Wednesday,” she said.
“Wednesday,” Sophia said.
Philip was nearby. He bowed. “Miss Lockwood. It was a pleasure.” He meant it. Philip did not say things he did not mean.
“And for me,” Sophia said. She looked at him and at Louisa standing beside him and felt the same clean uncomplicated warmth she had felt since the Friday afternoon, and nothing else, and was glad of that.
Then Roland was there.
He had come from across the room, not hurrying, simply moving toward the door as the evening began naturally to gather itself into departures.
He reached the hall as she did, seeing people out with his usual ease, and they stood briefly side by side in the narrowing of the doorway, Juliana and Sebastian just ahead of them, the party’s noise still carrying behind.
He looked at her, and for a brief moment something unguarded crossed his face before composure returned and the moment disappeared.
“Miss Lockwood,” he said. “Good evening.”
“Mr. Colville.” She met his eyes for one moment. “Good evening.”
That was the whole of it. Correct, brief, everything a farewell between a host’s brother and a guest should be. She went through the door and down the hall and out onto the Brook Street steps and the June night came at her, cool at last, the air clean after the candles and the crowd.
She breathed it in.
The carriage was drawn up at the step. Sebastian handed Juliana in, then Sophia. The door closed. The carriage moved.
Juliana looked at her once, in the carriage.
She had seen something and was deciding whether to say it.
She decided not to say it. She looked out the window at the Brook Street dark and then at Clarges Street as they turned, the familiar roofline of their own house appearing at the end of the street, the lamp in the hall window.
Sebastian said something about Westbrook and the estate. Juliana responded. The carriage moved through the London night.
Sophia sat with the window and the blue silk in her lap and the evening behind her and did not arrange any of it.
She let it sit unresolved, the library, the Johnson on the shelf, I like this better, the one moment in the doorway, the whole of it, and looked at the lamp in the hall window as the carriage drew up and thought about nothing specifically and everything at once.
The carriage stopped. They went in.
* * *
She was at her desk by eleven.
The house was quiet. The blue silk was on the chair.
She sat in her nightgown with the candle and the manuscript open in front of her and she did not write about the party and she did not write about the library.
She turned to a page she had written in April about the Golden Boy, incurious and decorative, the Season’s most successful product, and read it again.
She read it twice.
It was well-written. She could see that clearly and without vanity.
It was some of her best early work, the observation sharp, the language precise.
It was also wrong in every way that mattered.
Not the words, which were accurate to what she had seen.
Wrong in what it had failed to see, which was everything underneath, the man who had stood in his father’s library during his own party and told her he was simply a man at home, and had said it without performance or self-consciousness, meaning it entirely.
She picked up her pen.
She did not cross out the old pages. She turned past them to a new one and she wrote.
Not the library scene. That was not ready to be written yet and would not be for some time.
She wrote something else, about the difference between seeing a person from the outside and being seen by them.
About what happened to an observer when the thing being observed looked back.
About the crack that appeared in a certainty you had not known you were standing on.
She wrote for an hour. The candle burned down.
Outside the window the street was quiet. A lamp still burning across the way. The orange cast of the London dark against the glass.
When she stopped she sat back and looked at what she had written and felt the same sensation she had felt after the steeplechase piece, when she had written about bodies acting without calculation and found the prose arriving somewhere she had not consciously intended, reaching something that had not been constructed so much as discovered.
She closed the manuscript.
She put out the candle and sat for a moment in the dark, the warm scent of wax still in the air, the city beyond the window, the blue silk draped across the chair, everything she was carrying resting quietly with her in the room.
Then she went to bed.
She did not sleep for a long time. But she lay in the dark without resistance, which was different, and outside the window the lamp across the street burned steadily on, and she watched it through the curtain gap until it went out.