Chapter 13
The decision had been made on a Wednesday morning, quietly, over breakfast, Juliana saying that Sophia had been in London since March and perhaps it was time, and Sebastian nodding once, which meant he had been thinking the same.
The letter to Lockwood went that afternoon.
The reply came two days later in Mrs. Lockwood’s hand, full of exclamation marks and only lightly disguising her relief since she had evidently been hoping for exactly this outcome.
Sophia packed on the Friday evening. The gowns went back into the trunk, the blue silk, the green wool, the amber, the gold, folded by the maid who had been caring for them since March.
She knew good fabric and handled it accordingly.
The manuscript went into the bottom of the smaller travelling case, wrapped in a length of plain linen, under the books.
She stood in the room at Clarges Street with the trunk packed and the travelling case buckled and looked at the bare surface of the desk where the manuscript had been. The room had already stopped being hers.
She went downstairs. The carriage was at eight.
The city gave way slowly. The houses loosening their grip on each other, the streets widening, the noise becoming less insistent and then intermittent and then absent.
By the time they had been an hour on the road south and west the sky had opened properly and fields stretched out on both sides, the grass thick and bright, the hedgerows in full leaf, all of it indifferent to London, having never needed to account for it and never likely to begin.
Sophia had her book in her lap and was not reading it.
She looked at the fields instead. After three months of London’s orange-lit nights and stone-smelling air and streets that never quite went quiet, the county came at her through the carriage window with the force of something she had forgotten she missed.
The June light lying flat across the fields, the full unbroken stretch of it, nothing between it and the ground.
The smell of it. Warm earth and the faint sweetness of whatever was flowering in the hedgerows.
A farm at a distance, its buildings the colour of the land, the slow movement of cattle in the lower field.
She breathed it in and felt her chest ease, tension loosening quietly beneath the breath.
The road climbed after the third hour and the county opened out around them.
The long view west toward the hills, the familiar silhouette of the ridge she had walked since she was old enough to walk it.
The carriage crested the rise and there below was the valley they had come from, the river catching the light in the distance, the church tower of the village just visible above the trees.
She was nearly home.
She let the book fall to the seat beside her and lifted her hand toward the glass without quite touching it, looking out at the landscape with the same close observation she had spent three months giving London drawing rooms, and felt the country receive her, quietly and without ceremony; her return required no acknowledgment. It had always been assumed.
There was, alongside the ease of it, something else.
She did not examine it immediately. It was there, a low note under the relief, a quietness that was not entirely contentment, and she let it sit where it was while the carriage descended toward the valley and the familiar shape of Harbury church tower grew larger in the window.
The Lockwood gateposts appeared at the end of the lane, the same stone, the same slight lean of the left one that had been leaning since before she was born.
The lime trees in the drive were in full leaf, making the avenue green and cool, and the house came through them piece by piece.
The roof first, then the east wing, then the full south face with its windows and the wisteria that had been climbing it since her grandmother’s time and showed no sign of concluding.
The carriage stopped.
The front door opened before Thomas reached it, which meant Mrs. Lockwood had been watching from the hall window.
She came down the steps already in motion, done with waiting, and took Sophia’s face in both hands before Sophia had properly descended from the carriage.
After twenty years of the quick reading look, the hands on her cheeks, the searching concern, Sophia had never learned to be unsentimental about any of it.
“You look well,” Mrs. Lockwood said. “You look very well. London agrees with you.”
“Parts of it,” Sophia said.
Her mother’s eyes moved quickly over her face, searching for what had not been said. Sophia let her look and gave nothing away, and her mother finally released her with a small satisfied look that suggested she had understood more than she intended to mention.
Her father was in the hall. Mr. Lockwood, who did not come to doors as a rule, was in the hall today with his newspaper still in his hand, which meant he had been reading it in the hall rather than the study, which meant he had been waiting and had arranged a reason to be waiting in the right place.
He put his arm around her briefly. The feeling itself was unmistakable even if he was not a man much given to displaying it, and he said nothing.
“Good journey?” he said.
“Very good,” she said. “The road after Harbury is excellent.”
“They resurfaced it in April,” he said, sounding genuinely pleased by the improvement in the road. “I wrote to the county surveyor in January about the state of it. He has apparently acted.”
“He has,” Sophia said. “You would be pleased.”
He looked at her, satisfied. “Good,” he said. “Good.” He patted her arm once and went back to the study.
Her mother was already talking about dinner, and about Beatrice coming tomorrow with Henry and Mary, and about whether Sophia would want the south room or her own room, and the hall had the smell it always had, beeswax and old stone and the faint drift of something cooking, the layered warmth of a house that had been lived in for a long time by the same family and showed it in every surface.
Sophia stood in the middle of it and breathed.
The portrait of her grandmother on the stair landing. The slightly uneven third step. The window at the end of the hall that faced west, catching the afternoon light and throwing a long rectangle of gold across the stone flags. Everything exactly as it had been. Everything the same.
She was, she found, very glad to be here.
She was also, she found with equal honesty, aware of the distance between this place and London, more specifically between one house in Brook Street and this hall, the breadth of the country lying between them, and what that implied about where she was now and where she was not.
She went upstairs to her own room.
It was exactly as she had left it in March, the books still arranged in her chosen order, the desk by the window looking south across the garden, the quilt her grandmother had made folded neatly at the foot of the bed.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked out at the view she had known all her life, the garden, the kitchen garden beyond it, the meadow, the line of elms against the sky, and felt a deep uncomplicated gladness at the sight of it.
She sat with both things for a moment. The gladness of being here and the quietness underneath it, sitting side by side without resolving into each other, both true.
Then she unpacked the manuscript and placed it in the desk drawer, washed her face, and went downstairs to help her mother with whatever required doing, and the house folded her back into its ordinary rhythms, the three months away merely an interruption.
The south room, the west window, the quilt folded at the foot of the bed remained the fixed points of things, which was perhaps what they had always been.
She told herself it was enough. It nearly was.
* * *
The Sterlings came at two, which was when they usually came on Sundays, and arrived in their usual fashion, Henry already in conversation with Mr. Lockwood before the carriage had properly stopped, Beatrice following behind with Mary on her hip.
Mary was holding the small cloth rabbit that had been a necessity since morning and showed no signs of ceasing to be one.
Sophia came down the hall to meet them.
Beatrice transferred Mary to Mrs. Lockwood, who received her immediately and warmly, nothing managed about it, and turned to Sophia.
They embraced properly. Beatrice pulled back and looked at her.
“You are different,” she said.
“London does things to people,” Sophia said.
“Yes,” Beatrice said. She was still looking at her, steadily, reserving her verdict. “It does.”
They went inside.
The drawing room fell naturally into an afternoon of this sort, tea things already laid out, the best biscuits produced, Mary deposited on the floor with her rabbit and the wooden horse from the basket Mrs. Lockwood kept for occasions exactly like this.
Henry and Mr. Lockwood settled into their customary places near the window, where they could discuss the land, the road, and the village in peace, without requiring the attention of anyone else in the room.
Mrs. Lockwood sat near Mary. Beatrice and Sophia took the settee.
“Tell us about London,” Mrs. Lockwood said. “Tell us everything.”
“The Season is well underway,” Sophia said. “Juliana has been a very good hostess. Sebastian found his own amusements and reported back periodically.”
“And the parties? The balls?”
“Several balls. Several parties. Lady Hargreave gave a morning reception that was extremely well attended and not particularly comfortable.” She might have been describing the road conditions. Her mother’s frustration was visible. She had been hoping for more.
“And have you met people? Have you — are there any young men worth —”
“Mama,” Beatrice said, not unkindly.
“I am merely asking,” Mrs. Lockwood said. “She has been in London since March and I am her mother.”