Chapter 13 #3
“No,” Sophia said. “He is not.”
Beatrice looked at her. “They never are,” she said.
Sophia turned to look at her sister. Beatrice met her gaze steadily, without surprise or alarm.
She had refused a perfectly good man herself rather than become someone smaller for him, and later been chosen by a man who understood exactly who she already was.
She understood, from her own experience, the distance between what was expected and what was real.
“What do I do,” Sophia said. It was not quite a question.
“You go back,” Beatrice said. “You finish the Season. You see what happens.” She paused. “You do not arrange the ending in advance.”
Sophia looked at the south window. The sky was nearly dark now, the first star appearing above the elm line, faint and early.
“I have always arranged things in advance,” she said.
“I know,” Beatrice said. “That is why I am telling you not to.”
* * *
Beatrice left at half past five, Henry’s carriage crunching back down the drive with Mary’s face briefly visible at the window, already conducting negotiations about something with her father.
Sophia stood in the hall until the sound of it was gone. Then she went upstairs.
She sat at the desk and looked at the south window.
The garden was still lit beneath a pale sky above the elms, the June evening lingering with that slow reluctance peculiar to the longest weeks of the year.
Downstairs she could hear the familiar sounds of her parents, her father settling heavily into his chair, her mother moving about the kitchen with the housekeeper.
The ordinary sounds of the house ending its day.
She opened the drawer and took out the manuscript.
She had left it at the point where the unnamed observer attended a musicale and sat beside the Golden Boy in candlelight and heard him say something honest and understood that honest was what it was.
The chapter had ended there. At the time she had not known how to continue beyond that honesty, what it might alter, what it might demand.
She knew now.
She wrote for several hours. She did not stop except once to trim the candle and once to hear what the clock said, which was eleven, which meant she had been writing longer than she had planned and intended to continue regardless.
She wrote the chapter she had been building toward since the steeplechase, about the body as an instrument of knowledge, about what a person understood before they understood it, about the difference between observing feeling and being inside it.
She wrote it in the voice she had discovered in the steeplechase chapter and had been learning to trust ever since, no longer the analyst’s voice or the satirist’s, but a voice from inside the experience rather than safely outside it.
She wrote the library chapter.She wrote it carefully and from very near the feeling itself, and she did not name him.
She had never named him anywhere in the manuscript and was not about to begin now.
But every detail belonged to him and every sentence carried the knowledge of it, and it was the best writing in the book.
She could recognise that without vanity, with the same clear certainty that arrived whenever a sentence settled exactly as it should, the knowing and the writing appearing together.
The Johnson two-thirds along the shelf. I like this better.
The cold glass under her hand. All of it.
She did not write what she felt standing at that window. That was hers and would remain hers. But she wrote everything around it, and the everything around it did the work.
At midnight she set down her pen and read back what she had written and found it was still right, which was rarer and meant more than producing it in the first place.
She was nearly done. Three chapters remaining, perhaps four.
She could feel the manuscript moving toward its ending, not there yet but visible from this distance, like the conclusion of a long argument beginning to emerge before the final lines had been spoken.
She had come to London expecting to write a satirical anatomy of the Season and had written something else entirely, something she had not had the material for in January because she had not yet been in it.
She was in it now. The manuscript knew it and showed it on every page.
She closed it and put it back in the drawer and sat for a moment in the dark of the room.
Good work, she thought. Not performed satisfaction, merely the quiet acknowledgment of it, said to nobody.
She went to bed.
* * *
On the fifth evening, after dinner had been cleared and her mother had gone to see about something in the kitchen, Sophia found herself at the door of her father’s study.
He was at his desk with the lamp lit, not reading the paper for once but looking at something in the ledger he kept for household accounts. He had kept it himself for thirty years, in his own hand, though he could have given it to a steward or to Sebastian. He looked up when she came in.
“Sophia.” He closed the ledger without marking his place. “Come in.”
She came in. The study smelled as it always had, of old paper, pipe tobacco, and books that had sat undisturbed on the same shelves for decades. She sat in the chair across from him, the chair she had sat in as a child when she came to ask him questions about words she had found in books.
“You have been writing a great deal,” he said. “Your mother mentioned the candle.”
“I have been working on something.”
“Good.” He said it simply, without requiring elaboration. He had never required elaboration. “Good.”
They sat for a moment in the quiet of the study. Outside the window the June evening was still light, the garden holding the last of the sun.
“Your mother thinks there is someone,” he said. He said it to the window rather than to her. “In London. She has not said so directly but I have been married to her for thirty-two years and I know when she is thinking something she has decided not to say.”
Sophia looked at her hands.
“I am not asking,” he said. “I am not the sort of father who asks. But I will say something, if you will permit it.”
“Yes,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, still looking at the window: “When I wished to marry your mother, my family did not approve. My father believed her family was beneath the Lockwoods. He made this opinion known at length and in writing.” A pause.
“He told me I was throwing away everything the family had built. He told me I would regret it. He told me a great many things, and he was wrong about all of them.”
Sophia looked at him. He rarely spoke of this. He rarely spoke of anything personal at length.
“I married her anyway,” he said. “It cost us. My father did not speak to me for two years. When he finally did, he never admitted he had been wrong. He went to his grave believing he had been right and I had been foolish.” He looked at her then, directly.
“I have been married to your mother for thirty-two years, Sophia. I have not regretted a single day of it. Not one.”
The study was quiet. The lamp flickered once and steadied.
“And you know your sisters’ stories. Juliana’s broken engagement. Beatrice refusing Lord Vane and choosing Henry instead.” He almost smiled. “It seems the Lockwood women do not do things simply. The men who love them must learn to accommodate this.”
Sophia felt something ease in her chest, just slightly.
“I do not know what will happen,” she said. “That is the difficulty.”
“No one ever does,” her father said. “That is not peculiar to you. That is how it works.” He picked up his pen, then set it down again. “But I will say this. If it is right, it tends to find its way. Not always smoothly. Not always quickly. But it finds its way.”