Chapter 13 #4
They sat for a moment longer in the quiet of the study. The evening light had gone gold at the window.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded, opened the ledger, and returned to his figures. She stayed a while longer, not speaking, and the familiar evening sounds of the house gathered around them.
* * *
She stayed a fortnight.
It was enough time to fall back into the rhythms of the house: her father’s study hours, her mother’s household arrangements, the hay not yet cut in the fields beyond the gates, the cow parsley thick along the lane, the evenings long enough that the light was still good at nine o’clock.
She walked the paths she had always walked.
She sat in the garden in the afternoons when the light was right.
She ate the food of home, which tasted different from London food; it was plainer, more itself, the flavour of things that had not travelled far to reach the table.
She wrote every morning from eight until noon and sometimes longer. By the tenth day she had two chapters left. By the thirteenth she had one.
The final chapter she did not write yet.
She understood the shape of it now, the observer becoming a participant, the separation between the two selves narrowing until it could no longer hold.
But she did not yet know the ending, and she was not willing to invent one she had not lived through herself.
She left the last chapter unwritten and closed the manuscript and put it in the trunk under the books and let it rest.
On the last morning Juliana’s letter arrived with the post. It was short and in Juliana’s hand, direct and affectionate, her personality always coming through more plainly in letters than in conversation.
Three pages of commentary on a book she had been reading, and then, at the end: We are looking forward to having you back.
Sebastian says he will believe it when he sees the carriage. I told him to have a little faith.
Sophia folded the letter and put it in her pocket.
She went down to breakfast.
Her mother was pouring tea. The regularity of it was its own comfort.
“Today,” her mother said.
“This afternoon. The carriage is at two.”
Mrs. Lockwood set the tea in front of her and sat down. The morning light came in across the table.
“Your father said you came to the study the other evening,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He said it was a good conversation. He did not say more than that.” She looked at Sophia. “Will you tell me?”
Sophia set down her toast.
“There is someone,” Sophia said. “In London. It is complicated.”
“Is he good?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know?”
Sophia looked at the window. “I think so. I am not certain.”
Her mother was quiet for a moment. “And you? Do you know?”
“Yes,” Sophia said. “I know.”
Her mother nodded. She did not offer advice. She did not tell Sophia what to do or what the Lockwood women had done before her. She sat with what Sophia had said and received it.
“That is hard,” she said. “Knowing and not being able to act.”
“Yes,” Sophia said. “It is.”
Her mother reached across the table and put her hand briefly over Sophia’s. Then she picked up the teapot.
“More tea?”
“Please.”
At that moment her father came in with his paper tucked beneath his arm.
“Road will be good today,” he said as he sat down. “Dry all week.”
“Good,” Sophia said. “I am glad.”
He nodded once and opened the paper while Mrs. Lockwood poured the tea, and the morning resumed its ordinary course.
After breakfast Sophia carried her trunk down and checked the straps and helped the groom with the horses’ harness. She was not useful and she knew it. Her hands needed something to do.
At one o’clock she went to find her parents.
Her father was in the study. She stood in the doorway and he looked up and she crossed to him and kissed his forehead, which she had not done since she was very young. He put his hand briefly on hers.
“It will find its way,” he said quietly.
She nodded. He released her hand and returned to his paper.
Her mother was in the drawing room. They embraced and her mother held on for a moment longer than usual, then released her and stepped back and straightened Sophia’s collar, brisk, automatic.
“Write,” her mother said.
“I will.”
Her mother looked at her for a moment. Sophia recognised the look on her face from her own mirror, a steady acknowledgment of difficulty without any attempt to soften or deny it.
“You are a Lockwood,” she said. “We do not do things simply. But we do them.”
She stepped back, and Sophia understood that this was all she would say, and that it was enough.
The carriage came at two. Sophia got in and the gates of Lockwood passed on either side and the lime trees closed overhead and then opened again into the lane, and she looked at the county through the window: the fields, the hedgerows, the long sky.
She felt the gladness of it and felt the going back, and held both without trying to resolve them, and the lime trees gave way to open road and London was ahead of her somewhere, and the carriage moved on.