Chapter 14
She came back on a Monday.
The carriage from the county arrived in the late afternoon, when London had reached its daily peak of noise and heat and general insistence on itself, and Sophia stepped out into Clarges Street and stood on the pavement for a moment while the groom lifted her trunk and felt the city land on her like a hand on the shoulder. Not unpleasant. Definite.
The house received her. Juliana in the hall, Rose on her hip, William conducting an investigation of some kind on the stairs that he declined to explain.
Sebastian appeared from the direction of the study and took the trunk from the groom and said good journey?
, pleased she was back, not going to say so at any length. She had come to rely on this.
She went upstairs.
Her room at Clarges Street was as she had left it.
The Blackwood household ran on order, and Juliana had touched nothing, but the fortnight away had altered Sophia’s relationship to the room itself.
In March it had felt like temporary accommodation, a base from which to conduct the Season’s experiment.
Now she stood in the doorway and looked at the desk by the window and the gowns in the wardrobe and the angle of the evening light across the floor and felt that it had become, over the course of four months, a room she knew. Not home. But known.
She unpacked.
The gowns went back in the wardrobe. The blue silk, the green wool, the amber, the gold. The books went on the desk. The manuscript she put in the drawer, under the other books, where it lived.
She stood at the window for a moment and looked at the Clarges Street evening.
The orange light spreading slowly across the rooftops.
A carriage somewhere below, and under it the low continuous sound of the city, a sound she had not been able to hear properly in the county, where it was absent, and could not have described to anyone who had not lived inside it for months.
London’s sound. Low and constant and ungovernable and, she found, not unpleasant to return to.
She was back.
The first two days passed pleasantly, without shape.
She walked with Juliana. She played with William, who had recently become interested in the question of where rivers went and required sustained engagement on the topic.
She sat with Rose in the garden on the Tuesday afternoon, the July sun full and warm, and Rose fell asleep against her shoulder, which was the highest form of trust available from a one-year-old, and Sophia sat very still with the child’s weight on her and the bees in the lavender and the smell of cut grass and thought about nothing much.
She did not write. The manuscript was in the drawer and would stay there until she was ready, and she was not yet ready, and she knew why and did not examine it closely.
She was aware, as she was now always aware of it, of where Brook Street was in relation to where she was. Ten minutes on foot. The bay tree in the pot. The brown door.
She was not avoiding it. She was simply not yet ready for it.
On Wednesday morning she woke early and lay in the half-light of a London July morning. The city never went fully dark at that time of year; the sky kept a faint lingering brightness until three and began whitening again by four. She thought about the day ahead.
She wanted to go to the park. The Season was in its final weeks and London in July was warm and slower than it had been, the crowds thinned, the gardens accessible, the light more generous than it had any right to be.
She had not been to the park in a fortnight.
She wanted to go, and she wanted to go with Louisa, and this was the honest accounting of it.
She got up and dressed and came down for breakfast and told Juliana she was going to call on Louisa.
“Shall I send a note?” Juliana said.
“No,” Sophia said. “I will go and see.”
Juliana looked at her over Rose’s head with the same steady perceptiveness Sophia had been unsuccessfully trying to outmaneuver since approximately Chapter Six of the Season. She said nothing with it.
Sophia ate her toast and looked at the window.
Outside, Clarges Street was already occupied with its Wednesday morning.
A man with a cart, two women walking quickly in the direction of the square, the sound of something being delivered to the house next door.
She listened to it while she finished her tea and then she put on her gloves and her hat and went out.
The walk to Brook Street was ten minutes and she knew it without thinking now.
The turns, the specific paving stone near the corner that was higher than the others and required attention, the house with the yellow door that was two doors before the corner and served as the landmark that told her she was close.
She walked it in the warm morning air and felt the pleasure of it, the city at this hour before the heat had fully arrived, the light still slanted and the shadows still long.
She turned into Brook Street.
The Colville house appeared ahead. Brown door. Bay tree, unchanged in its pot. She came up the steps and knocked.
The housemaid answered. Miss Colville had gone out, she said, but was expected within the half hour and would Miss Lockwood like to wait?
Sophia thought about the park, which would still be there in thirty minutes, and about Louisa, who was expected, and said yes.
She was shown into the morning room.
She sat down. The housemaid left.
The room was quiet, Louisa’s book left on the table, a work basket on the chair, the bay tree visible through the window in the July morning sun.
She took off her gloves and set them in her lap and looked at the street outside and thought about nothing specific and everything general, her mind running loose, given nothing to settle on.
She heard a step in the hall.
* * *
Not the housemaid. She knew before the door opened, knew from the weight of the step in the hall, measured and certain, and she had one moment and did not manage to do anything useful with it before Roland came in.
She was at the window.
He stopped when he saw her, clearly having expected the room to be empty.
His coat was off and his cuffs turned back, and for one disorienting moment Sophia noticed the bare forearms before she properly looked at him.
Then the grey eyes, the familiar line of his jaw, and the whole of him arrived at once, and something in her tightened quietly in response. Her hands went still in her lap.
“Miss Lockwood.” No social performance in it. Just her name.
“I did not write,” she said. “I came to see Louisa.”
“She has gone out. She will be back shortly.” He came further into the room and the door closed behind him. He came to stand near the window. Not across the room. Near enough that she was aware of him immediately. He was at home here and needed no reason to be in any room of the house.
He looked out the window. She could feel the warmth of him. Not touching. Present, fully, without performance, the whole weight of him here rather than distributed across a room.
“How was the county?” he said.
“Quiet,” she said. “Good.”
He nodded. He was looking at the bay tree in the pot below. She was looking at it too. They stood like that for a moment, two people at a window looking at a bay tree, and the silence between them had weight.
“And London?” she said, because she wanted to know and because it was safer than silence.
“The usual,” he said. “There was an evening last week with the Carrs, the Wentworths and someone’s cousin from Derbyshire.” He looked at the bay tree. “It went on rather long.”
“Was it dreadful?”
“Not dreadful.” He paused. “Flat.”
She looked at the street. “The Colvilles’ evenings are never flat.”
“This one was.” He said it simply, without complaint. “The conversation was fine. Everyone said the right things.” Another pause. “Something was missing.”
She did not ask what. She was not sure she could ask it steadily.
He turned slightly toward her. The grey eyes, direct. “Louisa said afterward that the conversation had been perfectly adequate.” A beat. “We both knew what that meant.”
Sophia looked at the bay tree below. She understood what sat beneath the sentence, unspoken but unmistakably there, and it landed where his plain truths always seemed to land, before she had agreed to receive them.
The silence came back, and it had more weight in it now than before.
“I went to my father’s library,” he said, after a moment. “Last week. I looked at the shelf.” A pause. “You were right about the Johnson. He stopped two-thirds along.”
She kept her eyes on the street below. “I did not mean to—” she began.
“I know,” he said. “That is why it mattered.”
She became aware of a subtle change in his stillness.
He had already said more than he intended; she could feel him deciding whether to say the rest. She did not move.
She was aware of his hand near hers on the window frame, not touching, simply near, and the half-inch between them did not feel like half an inch all Season and was not half an inch now.
“Six years,” he said quietly. “I have looked at that shelf for six years and not seen it.” He paused. “You saw it in three seconds.”
She looked at his hand on the window frame. The knuckle of his thumb, the roughened skin across the back of his hand, signs of reins and outdoor life still visible beneath the polish of London rooms.
She raised her eyes to his face.
He was close. Closer than the morning call had been, the decent distance long since dissolved by the window and the bay tree and what had been said, and his eyes were on hers and there was nothing managed in them, nothing distributed across a room full of people, simply here and looking.
“I see things,” she said. Her voice was not entirely steady. “I cannot help it.”
“I know,” he said. “I find I am glad of it.”
The room went very still.