Chapter 15 #2
She felt the now-familiar shift in herself when he entered a room, her pulse quickening slightly, heat rising into her face, an acute awareness of her own physical presence that had nothing to do with the warmth of the ballroom and everything to do with the man standing thirty feet away with another woman’s hand resting on his arm.
Roland looked at the room with the social ease she had watched all Season, the Golden Boy restored, performing precisely what the Season required of him. Then, for a single second, his gaze moved across the crowd and found hers.
One second. She did not look away and neither did he and then he looked away and she looked at Louisa.
Louisa was watching her. Not Roland, not Genevieve. Her. Open, warm, perceptive. She had been watching this develop all Season and was not going to say a word about it.
“Their mothers pushed for it,” Louisa said quietly. Her voice was neutral, reporting. “Mine and Mrs. Ashcombe’s. They had tea together on Monday and apparently agreed that the Season was nearly over and it was time.” She paused. “Roland was not…” She stopped. “He did not object.”
Sophia looked at the flowers. They were very excessive. Someone had ordered far too many dahlias.
“He did not object,” she said.
“No,” Louisa said.
Philip said something to Louisa about the orchestra and she turned to answer him and the conversation continued, while Sophia stood in the Fentham ballroom in the gold dress and watched Roland and Genevieve move through the room.
The congratulations were already beginning, a small crowd gathering around them, Mrs. Colville appearing from somewhere to the left satisfied, her arrangements concluded.
Sophia held it all and said nothing and attended to the dahlias, which were, she confirmed, significantly excessive.
Mrs. Colville was perhaps fifty, fair-haired like Roland, carrying the composed authority of decades spent managing a household, a family, and the Season.
She received the room’s good wishes with warm certainty, convinced she had done the right thing.
She looked at her son and at Genevieve and back at the room, and the world had arrived at the shape she had always intended for it.
Sophia watched this and thought about a library and a shelf of books two-thirds read, and a man who had told her the room was flat without her in it, and did not let any of this show on her face.
“She is a good woman,” Louisa said, and Sophia realised she had been looking at Mrs. Colville for too long. “She has always wanted this for him. She believes it is right.” Louisa was still not looking at Sophia. “She is not wrong that it is sensible.”
“No,” Sophia said. “She is not wrong.”
They stood together for a while without speaking, and the room continued around them, and the dahlias continued to be excessive, and across the room Roland Colville stood at the centre of his Season’s conclusion and wore it easily, and Sophia looked at him once more and then looked away and did not look again.
She was the observer. She had always been the observer.
Tonight it cost her more than it ever had.
* * *
She had been watching the second set form when he came to stand beside her.
She did not hear him approach. She became aware of him first as warmth.
It was the same warmth she had been carrying since Wednesday, already glowing in her chest before she had registered it anywhere else, and then he was there, at her right shoulder.
She kept her eyes on the forming set and waited.
“Miss Lockwood.” His voice was low, beneath the music and the room’s noise. “Will you dance?”
She turned.
He was looking at her directly, the same way he looked at everything he took seriously.
The social face was in place, it was always in place at these things, but underneath it, in his eyes, was the other thing, the thing she had seen in the morning room on Wednesday and had been carrying since.
He was not pretending. He was asking her to dance at a ball at which he had arrived with another woman, and he was not pretending.
“Yes,” she said.
He offered his arm. She took it, her hand on his sleeve, the warmth of him through the fabric, and they walked to the floor without speaking.
The set was a country dance, long figures.
He led her to their place and they stood opposite each other and the music began and the figure took them apart at once, down the line, other couples between them.
She went through the steps with great care, her eyes on her feet, and felt the waiting of the figure the whole time.
When it brought them back she gave him her hand for the turn.
He was warm. That was the first thing: his hand closed over hers and the warmth of it passed through the glove into her palm and up her arm until she felt it blooming in her chest, the same current she had known in the morning room, the same involuntary response her body had decided to have to this man regardless of her mind’s objections.
She turned with him and was aware of every inch of it, the height of him, the steadiness of him, the place on her jaw that still remembered his fingers, the July heat of the room, and the music carrying them through the figure.
She felt his thumb brush briefly against her gloved hand, not a deliberate gesture but simply contact from the dance’s close proximity, and she looked at the dancers across from them while keeping her face completely still.
The figure moved them apart.
She went down the line. She returned. His hand again, the turn, the proximity.
This was what the dance was. She had danced it twenty times this Season and had not felt it like this once, and she was not going to examine that directly, not here, not in the middle of the Fentham ballroom with three hundred people around them and Genevieve Ashcombe somewhere behind her in ivory.
They came together again in the middle figure, close now in the proper intimacy of the dance, and she could hear him breathe, smell the faint cedar and warm heat of him, and see the clean line of his jaw, its familiar set something she had come to know after a full Season of watching him.
She was aware of all of it simultaneously yet kept her eyes correctly forward.
“I know this is not fair,” he said.
Quietly. The music and the room covered it. It was said for her only, in the plain way he said things he meant.
She felt it land.
She looked at him. He was looking straight back at her with that direct grey gaze, nothing managed or guarded in it, and the figure held them together for three more steps. She held his gaze for all three of them and said:
“No.”
One word. Calm, exact. Not angry. Not forgiving. Simply accurate, which was all she had.
The figure moved them apart.
She went through the remaining figures with meticulous care and came back to him each time and gave him her hand and did not say anything further and neither did he, and when the music ended he offered his arm and she took it and he walked her back to the edge of the floor.
He stopped. Released her arm. Turned to face her.
He looked at her for a moment with the same look she remembered from the morning room, the same look from the library, carrying all the months between them, and she looked back at him without retreating.
Then he bowed. Correctly, precisely. The bow of a ball, a partner returned to her place, everything correct.
“Miss Lockwood,” he said.
“Mr. Colville,” she said.
He went.
She stood at the edge of the floor and looked at the excessive dahlias and felt the place on her hand where his had been and the whole Season pressing against the back of her ribs and said nothing and showed nothing and was, she thought, managing rather well for a woman who had just danced with a man she loved in front of the room at the end of the evening he had announced himself to someone else.
Louisa appeared beside her. She did not say anything. She stood there, which was the right thing.
After a moment Sophia said: “I should like to go home.”
“Yes,” Louisa said. “I think you should.”
* * *
The carriage home was quiet. Juliana had seen the dance, had seen Roland ask and Sophia accept and the figure bring them together and apart, and she said nothing about any of it, which was the most useful thing she could have done. Sebastian looked out the window. The London night went past.
Sophia went straight upstairs.
She did not undress immediately. She sat on the edge of the bed in the gold dress and looked at the south window, which showed her nothing except the city’s orange sky, and stayed there for a while with her hands in her lap and the ball still on her, the heat of the rooms and the music and the hand that had been in hers and the one sentence that had been said in the middle of a country dance in front of three hundred people and which had contained everything.
I know this is not fair.
No. It was not.
She went to the desk, took the manuscript out of the drawer, and opened it to the last written page, the library chapter, the best chapter, the one she had written at her father’s desk in the county with the south window and the elms. She read the last paragraph, then turned to the blank page following it and picked up her pen.
She did not plan what she was going to write. She never planned what she was going to write when it was the truest kind of writing, which had been filling for months and had nowhere else to go.
She wrote the final chapter.