Chapter 16 #2
“It would have to be anonymous,” she said.
“Obviously,” Juliana said.
“And the names changed.”
“You have already changed them. I noticed. Lord Ashford.” A slight pause. “Good choice.”
Sophia almost smiled.
“The Season ends in a fortnight,” Juliana said.
“You will go home. I know a publisher. Sebastian knows him properly, but I have corresponded with him on another matter. He is serious and he is discreet and he has published one or two things that required both.” She looked at her sister. “You do not have to decide today.”
“I know,” Sophia said. She looked at the manuscript for a long moment and then she stood, and held it, and looked at it, and said: “I will think about it.”
Juliana stood also. She looked at Sophia fully, for few things mattered to her like this, and those she tended to well.
“Whatever you decide,” she said, “you are not the woman in the last chapter. She has no choices left. You still have them.”
Sophia held the manuscript and looked at the roses and felt the August morning around her and the Season nearly over and everything unresolved and the pages in her hands that contained all of it.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
* * *
She did not tell Juliana she had decided until the morning she was ready to send it.
She came downstairs with the manuscript under her arm, copied clean into a fresh set of pages she had spent three evenings on, and found Juliana in the breakfast room with Rose and the morning post. She set the manuscript on the table beside the teapot and sat down.
Juliana looked at it. Then at Sophia. She said nothing, which was the right response.
“The publisher,” Sophia said. “You said Sebastian knew him.”
“Merton and Cross, in Fleet Street.” Juliana poured tea and set it in front of Sophia. “His name is Merton. Sebastian has corresponded with him about a separate matter entirely. He is serious and he does not talk.”
“I do not want Sebastian involved,” Sophia said.
“He will not be. I will write the accompanying letter myself. You will not be named in it.” Juliana looked at the manuscript. “Have you written a title page?”
“Yes.” Sophia opened the manuscript to the first page. The Manners of Mayfair. By a Lady of Quality. She had written it at two in the morning and it had seemed both accurate and sufficient.
Juliana read it. “Good,” she said. “That will make them curious without telling them anything.”
Rose reached across the table and placed her hand flat on the manuscript with the decisive authority of a one-year-old claiming territory. Sophia moved it gently out of reach. Rose registered this injustice and moved on to the teaspoon.
“If he declines,” Sophia said.
“He will not decline,” Juliana said. “But if he does, there are others.”
Sophia drank her tea. The manuscript sat on the table between them in its clean copy, five months of a Season in it, the whole of what she had been and what she had become and what she had not managed to remain, all of it on the pages, Lord Ashford moving through the rooms of it unnamed and entirely himself.
“When it is published,” she said, “if it is published — I will be at home. I will not be here.”
“No,” Juliana said. “That is probably wise.”
“And if anyone —” Sophia stopped.
“No one will know,” Juliana said. “The names are changed. The houses are not named. The details are yours and no one else’s and the only people who could recognise them are the people in the book, and even they would have to have been paying the kind of attention —” she paused. “Even they.”
“He pays attention,” Sophia said.
Juliana looked at her. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
A silence. Rose had moved from the teaspoon to a small piece of toast and was dismantling it with quiet, absorbed concentration.
“He will read it,” Sophia said. It was not quite a question.
“Everyone will read it,” Juliana said. “That is the point.”
Sophia looked at the manuscript. She thought about Roland in the morning room, his cuffs turned back, the grey eyes finding hers across a room he had expected to find empty.
She thought about a shelf of books two-thirds read.
She thought about I know this is not fair said into the middle of a country dance while Genevieve stood somewhere behind her in ivory.
She thought about the woman in the last chapter and the mechanism working exactly as it always worked and the man walking away unchanged.
She pushed the manuscript across the table to Juliana.
“Send it,” she said.
Juliana took it. She held it for a moment, fully aware of what she was holding, and then set it beside her own letters on the writing slope she kept at the breakfast table.
Her handwriting, when she began, was clear and steady, exactly as it would be for any ordinary piece of literary business and nothing more.
Sophia drank her tea and looked at the garden through the window. The roses still warm in the August light, though past their best. The Season in its final days, the town thinning, everyone beginning to speak of the country and when they were leaving.
She had come to London in March expecting to observe the Season from a comfortable distance.
She was leaving it at the end of August with a manuscript on its way to a publisher in Fleet Street and a fortnight’s dance still on her hands and a man she loved who was promised to someone else and an ending she had not written because she did not yet know what it was.
She had not been wrong, exactly, in March. The Season had been exactly what she had predicted it would be.
She had simply not predicted that she would be inside it.
Juliana sealed the letter. She rang for Mrs. Peel. When she came she gave her the manuscript and the letter and said it was to go to Fleet Street that morning and she was not to mention it to Mr. Blackwood.
“Of course, Mrs. Blackwood,” she said, and went.
Sophia looked at the empty place on the table where the manuscript had been.
It was done. It was out of her hands. Five months of a Season in a package on its way to Fleet Street on a Tuesday morning in August, which was not how she had expected the Season to end.
She finished her tea. Rose was still dismantling the toast. Outside the window the August light lay flat and warm across the garden, and the roses held on.