Chapter 17 #2
He looked at her. “The man walks away,” he said. “The woman is — the mechanism does what it does. And the man walks away and nothing happens to him.” A pause. “Is that what you think of me.”
She held this carefully.
“I think the mechanism works exactly as designed,” she said. “I was documenting the mechanism. Not pronouncing on any individual.”
“That is a very careful answer.”
“It is an accurate one.”
He set the book down. He looked at her with the direct grey eyes and she looked back and the room held them both inside the November morning, the thin light at the windows, the house quiet around them.
“You are angry,” she said. She said it plainly, because it was true and because pretending not to see it would have been a form of the distance she had been trying all year to leave behind.
“I am —” He stopped. He looked at the book. Then he looked at her. “I do not know what I am,” he said. Which was also plainly said, and more honest than the accusation had been, and she recognised it as the more accurate thing.
“I know,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment and picked up his hat. She could see the decision forming in him. He was going to leave, and she made no move to stop him because she could not give him what he needed from this conversation: an answer to a question he had not yet asked himself.
“The book is very good,” he said, at the door. He said it without looking at her. Flatly, as a fact he had been carrying and needed to put down somewhere.
She did not say thank you. She said: “I know.”
He went.
She stood in the sitting room and looked at the book on the table and heard the front door close and the November street resume.
She stood there for a while with the thin light moving across the floor and the book lying where he had left it and everything unresolved, which was exactly what she had expected, and which did not make it any easier to stand in.
Juliana appeared at the sitting room door after a sufficient interval.
She looked at the book on the table. She looked at Sophia.
“Well?” she said.
“He does not know yet,” Sophia said, “what upset him.”
Juliana came in and sat down and looked at the book. “No,” she said. “I expect he doesn’t.”
They sat with that for a while. Outside the window the November morning was cold and still.
* * *
She went to Brook Street the following afternoon.
Louisa was in the morning room, the same morning room, the bay tree in the pot outside with its branches bare and wet from the morning’s rain, the work basket on the chair, the room that had witnessed the beginning of everything in July.
Philip was not there. Louisa had arranged for him not to be there, which was the kind of thing Louisa arranged without mentioning she had arranged it.
They embraced properly. Louisa held on a moment. She had been meaning to do this since August, and it was in the grip of it.
“You look well,” Louisa said, pulling back and looking at her.
“You look happy,” Sophia said.
Louisa’s face opened, the brightness starting in her eyes before it reached her mouth, the whole of it unguarded and nothing held back.
She was entirely glad and entirely unashamed of it.
“I am.” She sat down and Sophia sat across from her, and the room was easy around them as it had always been, with no performance required from either of them.
“He came yesterday,” Sophia said.
“I know,” Louisa said. “He told me he had been.” She looked at her hands. “I should have warned you. I thought perhaps he would manage it better than he did.”
“He did not manage it badly,” Sophia said. “He was honest.”
“He was upset.”
“Yes.” A pause. “It is honest to be upset.”
Louisa looked at her, completely open, reading her with quiet concern that carried no performance at all. “Are you all right?”
“I have been better,” Sophia said. “I have also been worse.” She looked at the bay tree through the glass. “Your letter. You said there were other reasons to come to London. I assumed you meant him.”
“Yes,” Louisa said.
“What did you not want to write?”
Louisa was quiet for a moment. Not gathering herself, finding the right starting point.
“He came home in October,” she said. “Not from anywhere, he had been in London all autumn, but he came home to the house one evening and went straight to his room and did not come down for dinner, which he never does. Roland always comes down for dinner.” She paused.
“Westbrook was concerned. I was less concerned and more… attentive.”
“He had read it,” Sophia said.
“He had read it. I found the book on the table in the library the next morning. He had left it there, open, face down.” She looked at her hands. “I read it that afternoon.I already knew it was yours. I had suspected it from the first chapter, and by the third I was certain.”
Sophia looked at the floor.
“I want you to know that I read the whole of it,” Louisa said.
“Including the last chapter. And I want you to know that I think it is —” she paused.
“I think it is one of the most honest things I have ever read. And I was angry on your behalf for about a week, which Philip found baffling, and then I was sad, and then I was something else altogether.”
“What were you?”
“Hopeful,” Louisa said. Simply, without dressing it. “Because of what it did to him.”
Sophia looked at her.
“He went quiet,” Louisa said. “Not his social quiet, that performing ease he wears in rooms. This was different. This was a man sitting with something that had got underneath him and not being able to get it back out.” She looked at the window.
“He did not talk about it. He is not a man who talks about things. But I watched him for two weeks and I know him and I have been watching him perform himself for five years, and what I saw in those two weeks was not performance.”
“What was it?” Sophia said.
“Reckoning,” Louisa said. “That is the word I kept arriving at. He was reckoning with something.” A pause.
“He came to me one evening, appearing quietly in the sitting room where I was reading. He sat down and said nothing for about half an hour. Then he said: she saw everything. Just that. Not as a complaint. Not even as a statement about you specifically.” She looked at Sophia directly.
“As if he had been seen. And had not known, until the book, what it looked like from the outside.”
Sophia held this.
“The last chapter,” Louisa said. “The man who walks away unchanged. I watched him read it. I came in while he was still on it and stood there watching his face, and I do not know exactly what he understood in that moment, but it was not nothing.” She paused.
“He has not been the same since. Not worse. Not better. Simply reckoning.”
They sat for a while in the quiet of the morning room. Outside the bay tree. Inside the work basket with its trailing blue fabric, still the same one from July, still the same distance from finished.
“He is still —” Sophia began.
“Yes,” Louisa said. “He and Genevieve. Nothing has changed,” Louisa said. A pause. “Nothing has changed formally.”
Sophia understood the distinction. “But.”
“But he is not the same man who arrived at the Fentham ball in August.” Louisa looked at her steadily. “I cannot tell you what that means. I am his sister and I know him and I cannot tell you what it means because he has not told me and he is still —” she stopped. “He is still reckoning.”
Sophia looked at the bay tree.
“I could not write this,” Louisa said. “I tried. I wrote four letters in October and destroyed them all because it was too much for paper. It needed a room.”
“Yes,” Sophia said. “I understand.”
They were quiet. Outside the window the November afternoon was losing its light early, the sky already deepening as the first orange glow began against the rooflines.
“Philip,” Sophia said, because she needed to move and this was the thing she could move toward. “Tell me.”
Louisa’s face changed entirely, the warmth and unguarded brightness returning all at once.
“He asked in September,” she said. “We were out in this very garden. He was talking about the old oak at the Fenwick estate, saying it was two hundred and forty years old and wondering whether they should cut it down and what the root system would do to the foundations. Then he stopped, looked at me, and said, ‘I should like very much if you would marry me.’ Just like that. No preamble at all.”
She smiled, soft and amused. “Of course I told him it was actually two hundred and sixty years old, because the estate records go back to the planting. And then I said yes, of course.”
“Of course you did,” Sophia said.
“He thanked me for the correction,” Louisa added, laughing quietly. “While we were engaged. Before he said anything else.”
She looked at Sophia. “I knew from that that it would be all right.”
Sophia felt the warmth of it, the clean and full warmth with no loss in it and no shadow at all. “I am glad,” she said. “I am genuinely glad.”
“I know,” Louisa said. “That is one of the many reasons I love you.”
They sat for a while longer in the November afternoon, two women who had been through a Season together and come out the other side changed in their different ways, yet still here, still this, still wrapped in the friendship that had been the best thing London had given her since March.
“What do I do,” Sophia said. Not for the first time she had asked this question. Not expecting an answer this time either.
“You wait,” Louisa said. “Not passively. You live your life, you stay here, and you let him reckon with it.” A pause.
“You have done the brave thing. You wrote it down and you sent it out into the world and he read it and it got underneath him. That is all you can do.” She looked at Sophia. “The rest is his.”
Sophia looked at the bay tree and the November sky going dark behind it.
“Wednesday?” she said.
“Wednesday,” Louisa said. “Every Wednesday. For as long as you are here.”