Chapter 17
September passed and most of October.
The county was good in autumn. The light going slant and golden across the fields, the harvest done, the lanes quiet.
Sophia walked the paths she had always walked and read by the fire in the evenings and helped her mother with the things her mother needed help with and was, by every visible measure, exactly where she had always been.
She was not the same person who had left for London in March.
This was not dramatic. It had no outward signs that anyone could have pointed to specifically.
She ate at the same table and slept in the same room and answered her father’s questions about what she had read and talked to Beatrice about Mary when the Sterlings came on Sundays, which they did most weeks, Henry and Beatrice and Mary arriving in the usual way and staying until the light went. Everything the same.
Underneath, the Season was still in her.
She had been inside it, rooms and friendships and a book she had written from the centre of it, and she had come home and the home was the same home and she was not the person who had left it.
Not worse. Not better. Simply different.
Like a room where the furniture has been moved back to its original arrangement and everyone can still see the marks on the floor.
She did not hear from Roland. She had not expected to. He was not a man who wrote letters to women he had kissed at an unchaperoned morning call while formally attached to someone else, and she would not have known what to do with such a letter if it had arrived.
Juliana wrote twice. Her letters were cheerful and substantive, full of William and Rose and Sebastian and the usual business of a household.
The second letter, in late September, mentioned in its final paragraph that a novel called The Manners of Mayfair had been published by Merton and Cross and was already drawing considerable attention.
Several people had mentioned it to her at a dinner.
The search for the author had begun. She did not say anything further about it and Sophia read the paragraph three times and then put the letter in the desk drawer.
She wrote back about the harvest and the question of whether the lime tree at the end of the drive needed tending and said nothing about the final paragraph.
In October a letter came from Louisa.
Sophia was at the desk when it arrived, the October light amber at the south window, the house quiet around her. She opened it and read it and held it for a while and felt the genuine uncomplicated warmth that Philip and Louisa had been producing in her since the Henderson lecture in May.
Philip had asked. Louisa had said yes. The families had given their blessing. They were to be married in the spring.
I want you here, Louisa wrote, in the direct way she said everything.
I know the Season is over and you are at home and I am not asking you to come immediately.
But I want you here when you come back to London, and I think you should come back to London.
There are other reasons too. Juliana can tell you one of them if you ask her.
Sophia read the letter again. Then she went to find her mother.
Her mother received the plan sensibly. Sophia wished to go to London for Louisa’s engagement celebrations, yes she understood Louisa Colville was an important friendship, yes a week or two at Juliana’s house was quite reasonable.
She asked when and Sophia said November and her mother said very well and that was the whole of the negotiation.
Her father said: “Safe journey,” over his newspaper at breakfast on the morning she left, which was his version of everything he could not say in the remaining time available.
Beatrice came to see her off. She stood in the drive with Mary on her hip, Mary having recently discovered that departures were events requiring her attendance, and looked at Sophia through the carriage window.
“The other reasons,” Beatrice said. “Louisa’s letter.”
“Yes,” Sophia said.
“Do you know what they are?”
“I have a strong suspicion.”
Beatrice looked at her steadily. “Good,” she said. “Then go.”
The carriage moved. The gate passed on either side and the lime tree stood at the end of the drive, bare now, the last of its leaves down, and the county opened out around her, gold and late and quiet, and Sophia sat back against the seat and looked at it going past and felt the pull of what was ahead at the same time as the pull of what she was leaving, both real, neither cancelling the other.
She had come back from the Season in August changed, and the county had been exactly itself, and she had been glad of it and had found it insufficient, and she had not known what to do about the insufficiency until Louisa’s letter arrived and gave her a reason to stop waiting for something to happen and go and find out whether it would.
The road to London was five hours in good weather. The November sky was thin and pale, the clouds high and broken, cold but dry.
She watched it and thought about a book on its way through the ton’s drawing rooms and a man who would have read it by now and the thing Juliana had said: even they would have to have been paying the kind of attention —
She looked at the road ahead.
He paid attention. She knew this better than anyone.
The carriage moved south and east and London came up gradually, insistently, the fields giving way to the first buildings and then the streets closing in and the smell of the city at the windows before the city itself was fully visible, and Sophia watched it come and felt it land on her as it did now: not as a foreign habitat but as somewhere she had been inside.
Six months ago she had arrived here expecting to observe. She was returning to find out what she had set in motion and whether there was anything left to do about any of it.
The carriage came into Clarges Street. The familiar roofline. The lamp in the hall window.
She went in.
* * *
He came the next morning.
She was in the Clarges Street sitting room with Juliana, the November light thin at the windows, when Mrs. Peel showed him in, and she had one second, the time it took Roland to cross from the door to where she was standing, to compose herself, which was not enough time and she knew it and composed herself anyway.
He had the book.
He was carrying it at his side, not opened and not offered, held the way one carries something one has come to return or to dispute.
He looked at her directly, which he always did, and she looked back at him, and the room had three people in it for approximately five seconds before Juliana found something she urgently needed to attend to upstairs and the door closed.
“Mr. Colville,” Sophia said.
“Miss Lockwood.” He looked at her for a moment. “You are back.”
“Yesterday.”
“Louisa told me.” He set the book on the table between them and looked at it and then at her. “You wrote this.”
It was not a question.
She looked at the book. The Manners of Mayfair. By a Lady of Quality. She had not seen a printed copy before. It was smaller than she expected, thin and plainly bound, the kind of book that did not announce itself. She felt a complicated thing looking at it that she did not have time to examine.
“Yes,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment. He had his coat on, his hat in his hand, the November chill still on him from the street. He had not sat down and she had not invited him to and neither of them had moved toward the social formulas.
“The grey horse,” he said. “The race at Surrey. The way I spoke to her at the finish.” He paused.
“My father’s library. The shelf.” Another pause, harder than the first. “The man in the fourth chapter who makes a remark at a ball about a girl bringing a book. Who cannot remember saying it by the following Tuesday.”
She held very still.
“Those are not general observations,” he said. “Those are specific. Nobody else was paying that kind of attention.”
“No,” she said. “Probably not.”
“You were writing about me all Season.”
She looked at him. He was not the Golden Boy in this moment, not the performing version with its smooth distributed social ease. He was genuinely unsettled. Something had slipped beneath his usual management and he had not yet decided what to do about it.
“I was writing about what I saw,” she said. “You were part of what I saw.”
“I was apparently the central part of what you saw.”
She did not deny this.
“Lord Ashford,” he said. The name she had given the character. He said it without inflection. “You changed the name.”
“I changed all the names.”
“But not the details.” He looked at the book on the table between them. “Anyone who was in those rooms would know. Anyone who attended the Fentham ball, the Merton ball, the steeplechase at Surrey —” He stopped. “The man who kissed her,” he said. “In the morning room. And walked away.”
The room was very still.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. Something moved through his expression, not anger exactly but something more complicated than anger, for he had not known the mirror was there, and had not expected to see himself in it.
“You described me,” he said, “as a woman in love would describe someone.”
She felt it land. She kept her eyes on his face and did not look away.
“Yes,” she said.
“Every detail,” he said. “The horse. My father. The things I said at dinner.” He paused. “The things I said at the park. In the library. Things I said without —” He stopped again. “Things I did not intend to be noted.”
“I could not help noting them,” she said. “I told you that. I cannot help what I see.”
“You put it in a book.”
“Yes.”
He picked up the book, held it, and looked at it. She could see him finding his way through something, not performing the finding but actually doing it, his instinctive intelligence working on a problem it had not yet been given enough material to solve.
“The last chapter,” he said. He did not finish the sentence.
“What about it?” she said.