Chapter 18
The card arrived on a Thursday morning.
Miss Ashcombe. No other information. The card was cream with excellent handwriting, and its very brevity was a statement in itself: she was a woman who did not need to explain her visits.
Sophia turned it over in her hands at the breakfast table and said nothing.
Juliana looked at it and then at Sophia and then back at her toast. “Today?” she said.
“This afternoon, apparently. Mrs. Peel said she asked if I would be at home.”
“And you said yes.”
“I said yes.”
Juliana spread butter on her toast, her movements slow and absent, her mind far more occupied with thinking than with what her hands were doing. “Do you want me to be here?”
“No,” Sophia said.
Genevieve arrived at three o’clock, which was exactly the right time for a call, neither too early to be eager nor too late to suggest afterthought.
She came alone, which was itself information.
She wore deep green, a colour that suited her as all colours suited her, and she brought with her a warmth that was genuine and undirected.
She liked people and showed it, and there was no calculation in the showing.
The maid showed her into the sitting room where Sophia was waiting, and they greeted each other with the pleasantness of two women who were not quite friends and had always been entirely civil.
“Miss Lockwood.” She took the chair across from Sophia and set her gloves in her lap and looked at the room with interest, as she looked at all rooms. “What a pleasant house. I have always liked Clarges Street.”
“My sister keeps it well,” Sophia said.
“She does. How is Mrs. Blackwood? And the children? William must be nearly four now.”
“He is. He stood in the mews for twenty minutes last week refusing to come in.”
Genevieve smiled, the warm, genuine smile. “They always do at that age.” She accepted the tea that was brought and held it and looked at Sophia directly. “I heard you were back in London. I hoped I might find you at home.”
“I am glad you called,” Sophia said. She said it correctly, and meant something adjacent to it.
Genevieve looked at her for a moment. She was not assessing Sophia, having done that long ago and reached her conclusions, but simply present, attending. She was very good at attending.
“I have been reading The Manners of Mayfair,” she said. Her voice was pleasant, conversational. She might have been discussing the weather.
Sophia held her cup steadily. “It has been much talked about.”
“Very much. Everyone is hunting for the author.” She looked at her tea. “I found it very good. Sharper than I expected, and kinder, in some ways, than the talk suggested. The book is not cruel. It is honest.” A pause. “That is rarer.”
“Yes,” Sophia said.
“The woman in the last chapter,” Genevieve said. She said it without looking up, her attention on the tea. “I read that chapter twice.” A pause. “It stayed with me.”
The room was very quiet. The November afternoon light had gone grey and thin at the window. Somewhere in the house Rose could be heard, a sound quickly absorbed by the walls.
Sophia did not say anything. She waited, which was what you did when someone had come to say something and was finding their way to it.
Genevieve looked up. Her eyes were steady, dark and composed. She had been raised to manage herself in all circumstances and had done so without effort for as long as anyone had known her.
“You were in London all Season,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You know Louisa well.”
“Very well. She is one of my closest friends.”
“I know.” A pause. “I have always known.” She set her cup down. “I want you to understand that I do not think badly of you. I want to say that plainly.”
Sophia looked at her. The firelight caught Genevieve’s hair, fair and smooth, everything composed and exactly placed, and Sophia felt that familiar recognition settle over her.
Here was a woman she could not dismiss, someone she had never been able to dismiss.
She was not wrong. She had not done anything wrong.
She was simply the answer the world would give, and the world was not wrong to give it.
“I appreciate that,” Sophia said. She meant it.
“I also want you to understand,” Genevieve said, and her voice was still pleasant, still warm, still entirely within the rules she had been raised to operate within, “that I have known Roland Colville since we were children. Our families have been close for twenty years. My mother and his mother understand each other very well.” She looked at Sophia steadily.
“These are not arrangements that dissolve easily. They are not —” she paused.
“They are not arrangements that a book dissolves, however good the book.”
Sophia held her gaze. “I did not write it to dissolve anything,” she said.
“No,” Genevieve said. “I believe you.” A pause.
“I believe you wrote it because you had to. That is the kind of book it is.” She picked up her gloves from her lap and smoothed them between her fingers, ready to go now that she had said what she came to say.
“I simply wanted to see you. And to say that I know you are here, and that I trust —” she paused, choosing.
“I trust that we both understand the situation clearly.”
“We do,” Sophia said.
Genevieve looked at her for one more moment. The look was not hostile. It was not even competitive. She was acknowledging Sophia as real, as someone who existed and mattered and had to be accounted for, and it was, Sophia thought, the most honest thing Genevieve had done all Season.
Then she rose, and gathered herself, and said that she had taken enough of Sophia’s afternoon, and thanked her for the tea, and left.
Sophia heard the front door close. She sat for a while in the sitting room where the fire burned quietly and the November afternoon went on darkening at the windows and the tea had gone cold and Genevieve’s cup sat where she had left it, perfectly placed, nothing spilled.
She thought about I trust that we both understand the situation clearly.
They did. That was the thing. They both did, entirely. Genevieve was not wrong. The arrangements were real and longstanding and not dissolved by books. Roland was still reckoning and had not decided anything. The world was still arranged as it had always been arranged.
She sat with all of this and let it be exactly as heavy as it was, which was very heavy.
* * *
Juliana came down twenty minutes after Genevieve had gone.
She came in without knocking. It was her house and her sitting room, after all, and she had clearly been listening for the front door.
She glanced first at Genevieve’s cup, still perfectly placed on the table, and then at Sophia.
She sat down in the chair Genevieve had occupied and said nothing. She had been waiting. She was ready.
“She was not unkind,” Sophia said.
“No,” Juliana said.
“She was entirely reasonable. She made no threats. She said nothing that could be objected to.” Sophia looked at the cup. “She was also entirely clear.”
“Yes,” Juliana said.
Sophia was quiet for a moment. The fire burned. The November dark had arrived properly at the windows now, the London sky orange behind the glass.
“She is right,” Sophia said. “About the arrangements. About what they are and how long they have been in place.” She paused. “She is right that a book does not dissolve twenty years of family understanding.”
“Yes,” Juliana said. “She is right about all of that.”
Sophia looked at her. “Then what are we saying?”
Juliana looked at the fire for a moment. “I am going to tell you something I have not said yet,” she said. “About that year. Before the dinner.”
Sophia waited.
“I was not a woman who did not know what she wanted,” Juliana said.
“I knew exactly what I wanted. I had known since May. What I did not know — what I could not see, while I was inside it — was whether I had the right to want it. Whether wanting it was enough to act on. Whether the cost of acting was one I could make other people pay.” She paused.
“That is what the three months were. Not uncertainty about Sebastian. Uncertainty about whether I was allowed to choose him.”
“And then you chose him,” Sophia said.
“And then I chose him. At the worst possible moment, in front of everyone, in a way that made everything considerably harder before it became easier.” She looked at Sophia. “I do not recommend the method. But I recommend the choosing.”
Sophia looked at the window.
“Roland is where I was,” Juliana said. “That is what I see. A person who knows what is true and has not yet found his way to acting on it. Not because he does not know. Because he is reckoning with what it costs.”
“I cannot make him choose anything,” Sophia said.
“No,” Juliana said. “You cannot. And that is not what I am saying.” She held her sister’s gaze.
“I am saying that you are in a position I recognise. Not mine, but Sebastian’s.
He knew what he wanted. He held still. He waited while I found my way to the same place.
” A pause. “He is the one you should speak to.”
Sophia looked at her.
“He will not dress it up,” Juliana said. “But he knows what holding still requires. And he knows what it is to wait for someone who is reckoning.” She paused. “He also knows Roland, through Westbrook, well enough to have formed a view. I will leave him to tell you what that view is.”
Sophia was quiet for a moment. The fire sank into a steady glow. Somewhere above them Rose was being managed toward sleep: a voice, a small protest, and then the quiet click of a door.
“Go and find him,” Juliana said. “In the morning. He will be in the study.”
* * *
She found him in the study the following morning.
He was at the desk with the estate papers and a cup of coffee that had gone cold. He looked up when she came in and read her quickly — Sebastian read everything quickly.
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat. He set the papers aside and waited.
“Juliana said I should speak to you,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
A pause. She understood he already knew what she had come about.
“I have done what I can,” she said. “The book. Coming back. The conversation with Roland.” She looked at her hands. “There is nothing further available to me. That is the honest accounting.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said.
“So I am waiting.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him. “You waited for Juliana.”
“I did.”
“How long?”
“Three months,” he said. “From the first evening I understood what was true to the dinner when she refused to sign.” He paused. “I knew what I wanted from the beginning. That was not the difficulty.”
“What was the difficulty?”
He looked at the cold coffee. “Holding still,” he said.
“Knowing clearly and not being able to act on it and not knowing how long it would take her or whether she would get there at all.” A pause.
“Every day you ask yourself whether you are waiting for something real or waiting because it is easier than accepting there is nothing to wait for. Nobody can answer that for you while you are in it.”
Sophia was quiet.
“The difference,” Sebastian said, “is between a person who has settled and a person who is reckoning. They look the same from the outside. They are not the same.” He looked at her directly.
“Juliana was reckoning. For three months she was entirely composed, attended everything, said nothing that would have been visible from the outside.” A pause.
“It was costing her everything. I could see it and I could not say so.”
“How did you know she would get there?” Sophia said.
“I did not know,” Sebastian said. “That is the honest answer. I believed it. There is a difference.” He looked at the papers on the desk.
“What I knew was that she had seen the same thing I had seen and had not yet admitted it to herself. The reckoning was the admission taking its time.” A pause.
“You cannot hurry it. Trying to hurry it would have been the one thing that could have stopped it.”
She sat with this.
“So you held still,” she said.
“I held still,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I have done.” He said it without drama, simply as a fact.
Sophia looked at the window. The December morning was cold and flat outside.
“Genevieve came yesterday,” Sophia said.
“I know,” he said.
“She was not unkind. She was clear.” Sophia looked at the window. “She made it plain that I was already accounted for. That she knew I existed and that it would not change anything.”
Sebastian was quiet for a moment. “I went to the pre-wedding dinner,” he said.
She looked at him.
“The settlement signing. I knew what the evening was, what it had been designed to conclude. I knew my being there would be noticed and would make certain people uncomfortable.” A pause.
“I went because I wanted Juliana to know she still had a choice. Not to pressure her, because she would have felt that and it would have made things worse. Simply to be present. To make it real that there was another possibility.” He looked at Sophia.
“My being there did not decide anything. She decided. But she decided knowing the choice was still available.”
Sophia held this.
“Genevieve being clear,” Sebastian said, “is not the same as it being decided.”
He let that sit for a moment. Then he looked back at the papers.
“There is a steeplechase at Wentworth next week,” he said. “Westbrook mentioned it when he was here. Apparently they are making rather an occasion of it this year.”
She said nothing.
“I am not advising you to go,” he said. He returned to the estate papers. “I am merely observing that people are sometimes easier to understand in open country.”
Sophia stood. She looked at him, at the papers, the cold coffee, the man who had held still for three months and understood exactly what stillness could cost.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded once, and did not look up, and she went.