Chapter 20
She woke early.
The December light at the Clarges Street curtains was thin and grey and she lay in it for a moment with the whole of the previous day settling over her.
She had been there. He had come across a field and taken her hands.
She had held on. These were facts now, as solid as the ceiling above her, and they were real in a way that the Season’s almosts and not-quites had never been.
She went downstairs.
Juliana was at the breakfast table with her letters, which she set down when Sophia came in. She looked at her with the direct, steady gaze she had been using since November.
“Well,” Juliana said.
“Well,” Sophia said, and sat down and accepted her tea.
Sebastian came from the direction of the study, kissed the top of Juliana’s head, looked at Sophia once, having understood the situation and decided not to remark on it, and poured his coffee. He sat down and opened his paper. The morning proceeded.
Roland came at eleven.
Mrs. Peel showed him in. She had been showing people in and out of this house for years; she was composed about it, and showed nothing.
Juliana disappeared. Sebastian went somewhere with William, who had recently discovered that the fringe on the morning room curtains came away if you pulled it, and had been pulling it.
Sophia received Roland in the sitting room.
He sat in the chair across from her at the decent distance of a morning call, which was both correct and faintly absurd given that he had stood in a December field holding her hands in front of fifty people the day before.
She felt this and did not say it and saw from the brief movement at the corner of his mouth that he felt it too.
“I have spoken to Genevieve,” he said.
Sophia looked at the fire.
“Last evening. At her house.” He looked at his hands. “I said what needed to be said and she — she was herself about it. Which means she was composed and honest and said things I needed to hear and did not make it easy, which was right.” He paused. “I did not deserve easy.”
“No,” Sophia said. “But you did it.”
“I did it.” A pause. “She asked me one question. She asked whether I had known, before the book, and I told her the truth, which was that I had known and had not acted on what I knew, and she said that was what she had thought.” He looked at the fire. “She was not wrong to ask.”
Sophia was quiet for a moment. She thought about Genevieve’s cup, perfectly placed, and the four sentences that had said everything and nothing, and the woman who had conducted herself with more grace than the situation had required.
“Your mother,” she said.
“My mother is —” he stopped. Something crossed his face that was not quite amusement and not quite pain.
“She will come to it. She is not a woman who comes to things quickly or quietly but she comes to them. Westbrook has been very useful.” A pause.
“He took my side before I had finished saying anything, which was not what I expected.”
“Perhaps he had been watching longer than you knew,” Sophia said.
Roland looked at her. “Yes,” he said. “I think perhaps he had.”
They sat for a moment in the quiet of the sitting room. The fire. The December light at the window. The whole of a year between them and nothing performing itself, simply two people in a room.
“The ton,” he said. “It is talking.”
“I assumed it would be.”
“Some of it is unkind.” He held her gaze steadily. “About the book and about you and about what they have decided the connexion means. I want you to be prepared for that.”
She looked at him. He was not managing her. He was telling her the truth in the plain way he always told truths, and she received it the same way.
“I am a Lockwood,” she said. “We have some practice.”
The corner of his mouth moved again. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
He did not stay long. He stayed long enough for it to be real, not a duty call, not a performance. When he rose he stood for a moment and looked at her, as he always had, without evasion, the grey eyes and nothing managed in them, and she looked back and did not retreat.
“I will come tomorrow,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Come tomorrow.”
He went.
She stood at the sitting room window and watched the street below, the bare trees and the cold light and London going on without interest in any of it. She stood there for a while with the warmth of the fire at her back and the December morning in front of her and his voice still in the room.
* * *
The note came that afternoon.
Mrs. Peel brought it on the small silver tray she used for correspondence that had arrived by hand. The writing on the outside was Genevieve’s, her hand neat and considered on the page, each letter formed with the same careful precision as the last.
Sophia took it to the window.
Dear Miss Lockwood,
You will forgive the informality of a note rather than a call. I find, upon reflection, that what I wish to say is better said in writing, where I have the liberty to be more exact than conversation usually permits.
I have known Roland Colville since we were children.
For a considerable portion of my life I believed, with every reason to believe it, that our families’ expectations would conclude in the way everyone expected them to conclude.
I want you to know that I do not say this with bitterness.
I say it because I think you are a woman who prefers the honest account to the managed one, and I have always found that quality worth respecting.
I read your book in October. I read the last chapter twice.
I will not pretend it was a comfortable reading.
It was not. But it was an honest one, and I recognised its honesty even in the places where it cost me something to do so.
The mechanism you described is real. I have moved within it all my life and had not, until your book, had occasion to look at it from the outside.
I spoke with Roland last evening. He said what he needed to say and I said what I needed to say and we parted on terms that I believe will, in time, be manageable for us both.
He is a good man. I say this not to be gracious but because it is true.
He is a good man who was doing what was expected of him, which is not the same as doing what was right, and I think the difference between those two things is something he has spent this autumn understanding.
I do not think the world is quite large enough for the book you will write next. I find, despite everything, that I am curious to read it.
I wish you well, Miss Lockwood, and I mean that without reservation.
Yours sincerely, Genevieve Ashcombe
Sophia read the letter twice.
She stood at the window for a long time afterward, the December street below going about its business, the letter in her hands.
She thought about a woman who had been raised to inhabit that world and had done so with grace, only to find that world rearranged without her consent.
She thought of how that woman had sat across from her in this very room and said I trust that we both understand the situation clearly, believing she was right, and she had been right, until she wasn’t.
She thought about what it cost to write that letter. The exactness of it. It was not a comfortable reading alongside I recognised its honesty. The acknowledgment that the mechanism was real, from a woman who had never had to stand outside it before.
She folded the letter carefully. She put it in her desk drawer, in the same place as the manuscript notes, alongside the Season.
She sat down. She looked at the empty desk.
She thought: I should like to write something for her. Not a response, not yet. Not today. But something, eventually, that was equal to the letter, something that acknowledged what it had taken.
She opened her desk drawer and took out a fresh sheet and her pen and sat for a moment with the blank page and the December afternoon around her.
Then she began.
* * *
The Colville dinner was four days after the steeplechase.
Roland collected Sophia from Clarges Street at half past six, which was the correct hour for a family dinner and also the first time he had come to collect her from anywhere, which was itself a thing.
He said nothing about it and neither did she.
They drove the short distance to Brook Street in a quiet that was no longer careful, but the comfortable silence of two people who had finally arrived at a place where words were no longer needed.
The Brook Street house received her differently.
She had come here many times. She knew the door, the step, the bay tree in its pot, the specific way the hall smelled of winter and beeswax.
She had come as Louisa’s friend, as a morning caller, as a guest at a musicale.
She came now as something else, not yet named, not yet formal, and the house understood the difference even if it said nothing about it.
The butler, Harrison, a stout and unreadable man of fifty who had been with the Colvilles for thirty years, admitted them. He was composed. He had seen a great deal in this house and had opinions about none of it.
The drawing room was warm. Louisa came across it immediately and took Sophia’s hands in both of hers. She looked at her with the full, open look that showed everything she felt before she had even decided whether to show it, and said nothing because nothing was required.
Philip was standing near the window with Mr. Ashworth senior beside him.
Sophia registered the older man immediately.
Sixty or thereabouts, dark-haired as Philip was dark-haired but the hair gone grey at the temples, the same contained stillness in the set of him.
He was looking at the bookshelf on the far wall with genuine interest, something she could tell even from across the room.
Philip brought him across.
“Miss Lockwood,” Philip said. “My father. Mr. Ashworth.”
Mr. Ashworth senior looked at her quickly and comprehensively, decades in libraries having trained him to read things at a glance. He took her hand.