Chapter 13 #2
“There are many young men in London,” Sophia said. “They are exactly as one would expect.”
Henry, from his position near the window, turned briefly. “High praise,” he said, and returned to Mr. Lockwood.
Mrs. Lockwood looked at Sophia and it was immediately clear she had expected a more interesting answer and had just understood she would not receive one.
Mary chose this moment to offer her rabbit to Beatrice, then remove it before Beatrice could accept it, and the transaction briefly claimed the room.
“And Louisa Colville,” Sophia continued. “She has become a genuine friend. The friendship has been one of the best things about the Season.”
This satisfied her mother more. Louisa’s family was good and the connexion mattered.
Mrs. Lockwood asked several questions about the Colvilles, their London house, their county connexions, whether Louisa had come out this Season or the last, and Sophia answered each one correctly and with notable restraint.
“And the Blackwood children?” her mother said. “William and Rose?”
“William can speak of nothing but horses. He stood in the mews for twenty minutes last Tuesday refusing to come in.” She paused. “Rose has taken to staring at people until they become uncomfortable.”
Her mother laughed briefly, and the sound of it was genuine. “She will be a Lockwood.”
“She already is.”
Beatrice was listening. She had been listening to all of it, contributing at the right moments, managing Mary’s periodic demands, and looking at Sophia at intervals that were not obvious but were present.
She had always listened to things underneath conversations.
It was one of her qualities and one of the things that made her useful to tell things to and dangerous to conceal things from.
She did not ask anything that would require Sophia to say more than she was ready to say. Not yet.
The tea was poured and the biscuits distributed and Henry accepted a cup from Mrs. Lockwood and mentioned the Thornton fence dispute and Mr. Lockwood was immediately engaged, and the afternoon slipped easily into the comfortable domesticity of a family that had been having afternoons of this kind for years and found them sufficient.
Sophia sat with her tea and her biscuit and her family around her and felt the warmth of it, and underneath the warmth, quiet and patient, the thing she was carrying that had nothing to do with the county or the drawing room or the biscuits, which were very good, which she ate without tasting.
Beatrice refilled her cup without being asked. She had always known how Sophia took her tea.
She set down the teapot and looked at Sophia. “Come and show me the gowns later,” she said. “I want to see how they have fared.”
Sophia looked at her. “They have fared perfectly well.”
“I will be the judge of that,” Beatrice said pleasantly.
* * *
They went up after Henry and Mr. Lockwood had moved to the study and Mrs. Lockwood had taken Mary into the garden. The house had redistributed itself at this hour, without anyone arranging it.
Sophia’s room was as it had always been.
Beatrice went directly to the trunk without ceremony and opened it and began going through the gowns, which was what she had said she would do and exactly what she intended.
She lifted each one and looked at it and held it to the light from the south window and turned it over and examined the seams and the hems and the wear.
She was not admiring them. She was reading them.
The green wool was clean and showed moderate use, exactly as a morning dress should. The amber had been worn carefully and well. The gold — Beatrice paused.
“You wore this,” she said. “More than once.”
“It is a good dress.”
“It is an evening dress. It was made for significant occasions.” Beatrice looked at her over the gold silk. “How many significant occasions have there been?”
Sophia sat on the edge of the bed. “The Season has been fuller than I anticipated.”
Beatrice folded the gold carefully and set it on the chair.
She continued through the trunk. She came to the blue silk.
She took it out and held it up. The hem was clean. The seams unworn. She turned it in the light from the south window with the same close scrutiny reserved for any fabric that passed through her hands, her eye going immediately to the signs of wear or the lack of them.
“You have barely worn this,” she said.
Sophia said nothing.
“Several balls,” Beatrice said, not quite a question. “And you wore the gold to most of them.” She ran her thumb along the bodice seam. It was pristine, barely touched by wear. “This has been out twice. Perhaps three times.”
Beatrice set the dress down across the trunk and looked at her. She did not ask the question directly. She had never needed to ask things directly.
“It is a very good dress,” Sophia said.
“It is,” Beatrice said. “I know. I made it.” A pause. “You have been saving it.”
The word landed more accurately than Sophia had expected. She looked at the south window.
“For what, I wonder,” Beatrice said quietly. Not unkindly. She had seen what she had seen, and she was leaving it where it was.
She folded the blue silk with the same care Sophia had been giving it all Season and set it aside and came to sit beside Sophia on the bed. She looked at Sophia directly and with perfect patience, having assembled the available evidence and decided to wait for the rest of it.
“Who is he?” she said.
Sophia looked toward the south window, out across the garden, the meadow, the line of elms beyond. The sky had gone long and golden above the tree line, the last of the afternoon light pulling westward.
“You are very good at that,” she said.
“I made the gowns,” Beatrice said. “I know every seam. I know how they should look after a polite Season and how they look after a Season where someone has been attending things more than she admitted to herself.” A pause. “So. Who is he?”
Sophia was quiet for a moment.
“Philip first,” she said. “Or rather, Philip resolved.”
Beatrice waited.
“He is not the man,” Sophia said. “I knew this. I had known it before London, though I had never examined it clearly. The Season clarified it.” She paused.
“He is good. He is genuinely good. He has been the most honest correspondent I have ever had and I am very fond of him. But what I feel for him has always been…” She searched briefly for the right word.
“Companionable.” He matches my mind. I always knew what would be in his letters before I unfolded them.
And when we were together, I could usually anticipate the end of his sentences before he finished them aloud. ”
“And that is not enough,” Beatrice said.
“That is not enough,” Sophia agreed. “I did not know this until London showed me the difference.”
Beatrice looked at her steadily. “The difference being.”
Sophia looked at the elms. “There is someone who does not match my mind. He moves through the world quite differently from me. He is not bookish, not intellectual in any sense I would have recognised before this Season. He reads people rather than texts. He says plain things that land harder than any argument I could construct.” She paused.
“He disrupts my certainties. I say something and it comes out meaning more than I intended. He says something and I carry it for weeks.” Another pause.
“I have been carrying things he said since April.”
Beatrice said nothing. She was listening in full.
“And he is not available,” Sophia said. She said it plainly, as a fact she had already been telling herself since Portland Place and Mrs. Ferrars and one assumes these things find their natural conclusion.
“There is a private family understanding. Nothing announced, nothing formal, but understood all the same. By the families, by her. She is everything the Season would choose for him. She is accomplished and beautiful and entirely without fault and she is the answer to the question if the world were allowed to answer it.”
Beatrice was still.
“And the rooms had placed me before I arrived in them,” Sophia said.
“You know about Juliana’s engagement. The county has a long memory for such things.
In London I walked into rooms and discovered people had already arranged me somewhere before I had said a word.
I am the third Lockwood girl, the bookish one, the younger sister of a woman who broke an engagement at a pre-wedding dinner and a woman who refused a lord to marry a naval captain.
” She said it without bitterness, as the fact it was.
“I do not say this as complaint. I found it clarifying.”
“How,” Beatrice said.
“Because he heard it,” Sophia said. “When I told him, not all of it, a version of it, he said at least the version of you that precedes you into rooms is not something you chose; you inherited it. His own had been built deliberately over years, shaped and maintained until it entered rooms ahead of him.” She looked at her hands.
“We recognised the same thing in each other. That is what made it become what it did.”
Beatrice looked at her for a moment. “What did it become?”
“Something I cannot do anything about,” Sophia said. “Something real, and something I cannot do anything about. Both simultaneously.”
The room was quiet. Outside the south window the garden lay in full afternoon sun, the elms throwing their long shadows across the grass. From below came the sound of Mary’s voice and Mrs. Lockwood answering her, the small familiar sounds that marked an ordinary afternoon.
Beatrice looked at the gold dress on the chair.
She had made it at the very beginning of the year in the county, knowing somehow without being told that Sophia would need an evening dress, that something would happen in London worth dressing for.
She had packed it at the bottom of the trunk without explanation and Sophia had found it and worn it and worn it again.
“He is not what you would have chosen,” Beatrice said. Not unkindly. Accurately.