Chapter 16
It was a Tuesday morning and Sophia was in the garden with William, who had resumed the bucket enterprise and required supervision, when Juliana came to find her.
She came across the garden directly, having already decided to say what she needed to say and determined not to wait for a better moment.
William looked up at her, assessed that she was not interested in the bucket, and returned to his work.
Sophia set down the trowel she had been holding, drafted into the enterprise without entirely understanding the terms, and looked at her sister.
Juliana was carrying the manuscript.
She had wrapped it back in its linen and tied it, which was how Sophia kept it, and she held it against her side, composed. She had been thinking for some hours about how to begin this conversation and had still not found a satisfactory approach.
“I tidied your room yesterday,” Juliana said. “You left the desk unlocked.”
Sophia looked at the manuscript. “Yes,” she said.
“I found it under the other books.” A pause. “I read it.”
“All of it?”
“All of it. I took it to my room and read it. Sebastian came to find me for dinner and I told him I had a headache. He did not believe me.” She looked at Sophia steadily. “I read it again this morning.”
Sophia took the manuscript from her. She held it and looked at the linen wrapping and the familiar weight of it in her hands.
“You should have put it back,” she said.
“Yes,” Juliana said. “I should have.” She did not sound apologetic. She sat down on the garden bench without being invited and looked at the roses along the south wall that were past their best and still very good, and waited.
Sophia sat beside her.
William had moved his enterprise toward the kitchen garden gate, which was either an expansion or a retreat. Either way it gave them distance.
“Well?” Sophia said.
Juliana was quiet for a moment. Not gathering herself — Juliana rarely needed to gather herself — but choosing.
“The first chapter,” she said, “I thought it was sharp. Clever. The kind of writing I would have expected from you, exact and a little cold, the way you are when you are being most yourself.” She paused. “By the fifth chapter I understood I had underestimated you considerably.”
Sophia looked at the roses.
“It changes,” Juliana said. “Somewhere in the middle it stops being an anatomy and becomes something else. The same intelligence, the same eye, but warmer. More present. As though the writer stopped observing from the doorway and walked into the room.” She turned to look at Sophia.
“I do not know when that happened to you. I should have been paying more attention.”
“You had William and Rose,” Sophia said.
“I always have William and Rose. That is not an excuse.” A pause.
“The last chapter is the best thing I have read in years. I mean that without qualification. It is not the best thing written by a woman this year or the best thing by a young writer. I am not interested in those categories. It is simply very good.”
Sophia held the manuscript in her lap. The linen was warm from Juliana’s hands and the morning sun both.
“The mechanism chapter,” Juliana said. “Where the woman is ruined and the man walks away with no consequence.” She was looking at the roses again. “I know what that is about. Not just generally. I know what that is about.”
Sophia said nothing.
“He kissed you,” Juliana said. Not a question. She had been watching all Season, had assembled the material, had arrived at the conclusion, and was not going to pretend otherwise.
The garden was very quiet. William’s voice from near the gate, conducting negotiations with someone about something.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
Juliana received this without drama, which was the only way she received things. She looked at the roses for a moment and then back at her sister.
“And then he arrived at the Fentham ball,” she said, “with Miss Ashcombe.”
“Yes.”
A silence.
“And then you came home,” Juliana said, “and wrote the last chapter.”
“Yes.”
Juliana looked at the manuscript in Sophia’s lap.
“You wrote yourself into it,” she said. “Not as a character. As the author. The book knows things an observer would not know. It knows what it costs from the inside.” She paused.
“That is the bravest thing you have done. Not the writing, you have always been a writer. The being in it.”
Sophia looked at the linen wrapping. She could feel the pages underneath.
“I did not intend to be in it,” she said.
“I know,” Juliana said. “That is why it works.”
They sat together on the bench in the August garden, the roses going over around them, William’s voice a cheerful distance away. Beyond the walls the city went on, indifferent.
* * *
They sat for a while without speaking. William’s enterprise had progressed in some direction that required him to be very busy and entirely silent, which was either the beginning of something impressive or the precursor to a significant household incident.
Juliana was the one who spoke first.
“I have been watching you since April,” she said. “I should have said something before now.”
“There was nothing to say,” Sophia said. “Nothing had happened.”
“Things were happening. I could see them happening.” Juliana looked at her hands.
“I chose not to press because you did not want to be pressed, and because I know what it is to be in that position and to find that other people’s questions make it harder rather than easier.
” A pause. “That was perhaps not entirely the right choice.”
Sophia looked at the roses. “It was the right choice,” she said. “What would you have said?”
Juliana was quiet for a moment. “I would have said that I know what it is to love someone you cannot have. Not in the same circumstances, mine were different, but the same essential —” she stopped.
“The same feeling of carrying something you have no framework for because you have not been in it before. How it occupies every room. How you manage it in company and then go upstairs and put it down and it weighs more than you expected.”
Sophia’s hands in her lap were very still.
“It is devastating,” Juliana said simply. “I will not tell you it is not, because you already know it is and it would be insulting to pretend otherwise.”
“Yes,” Sophia said.
“And he —” Juliana paused, choosing. “He is not a villain. That would be easier.”
“No,” Sophia said. “He is not.”
“He is a man who did something he should not have done, and who is now doing what is expected of him, and neither of those things cancels the other.” Juliana looked at the gate where William had disappeared. “You cannot hate him for it.”
“I know,” Sophia said.
“And you cannot —” Juliana stopped again. “There is no action available to you. That is the hardest part. Not the feeling, but the absence of anything to do with it.”
Sophia turned to look at her sister. Juliana’s profile was composed, carrying the Lockwood composure that all three of them shared and that served each of them differently in times of difficulty.
In Juliana it was restraint over feeling.
In Beatrice it was warmth over hurt. In Sophia it was clarity over everything, and the clarity was not as useful in this situation as it had always been because the situation was not one that clarity could resolve.
“You had Sebastian,” Sophia said. “Eventually.”
“Eventually,” Juliana said. “After the dinner and the county and months of knowing and not being able to say so and then saying so in the worst possible way and nearly losing him because of it.” She looked at Sophia.
“I am not going to tell you that your story will end the same way. I do not know how your story ends. But I will tell you that the feeling you are carrying is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is a sign that something is real.”
Sophia looked at the manuscript in her lap.
“It is in there,” Juliana said quietly. “Everything you are carrying. I read it in every chapter after the middle.”
“I did not intend it.”
“I know. The best things never are.” A pause. “Are you ashamed of it? Of what is in it?”
Sophia thought about this honestly. “No,” she said. “I am exposed. There is a difference.”
“Yes,” Juliana said. “There is.”
They were quiet. A sparrow landed on the bench arm at the far end and departed again immediately having found nothing worth staying for.
“What would you advise?” Sophia said. She said it directly, because Juliana answered direct questions honestly and because she wanted an honest answer rather than a gentle one.
Juliana looked at the roses for a long moment.
“About him,” she said, “I would advise nothing, because there is nothing to advise. He is where he is and you are where you are and the Season ends in a fortnight and what happens after that is not something either of you can arrange from here.” She turned to look at Sophia.
“What I would advise is that you do not make yourself smaller on his account. You came to London expecting to stay outside it and you did not, and you wrote a book from inside it that is better than anything you would have written from the outside, and that is yours. Whatever happens with him, that is yours.”
Sophia held the manuscript.
“As for the book,” Juliana said, and her voice changed slightly, the reader’s voice now, not the sister’s, “I think you know what I am going to say.”
“Tell me anyway,” Sophia said.
“It should be published.” Plainly, without hesitation.
“Not for you, not only for you. Because what it says about the Season and what it costs and who pays the cost and who does not, that needed saying and nobody has said it like this.” She paused.
“The last chapter especially. The mechanism working exactly as designed. The man walking away unchanged.” She looked at Sophia steadily.
“That chapter is not just about you and him. It is about all of them. Every woman who has been in that position and had no recourse and no language for it.”
Sophia looked at the linen-wrapped pages.