Chapter 20 #2
“Miss Lockwood,” he said. “Philip has written of you often.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “Four years of letters in which your name appeared rather more frequently than any other subject, including trees.”
Philip, beside him, said nothing. He did not need to.
“Your son is very knowledgeable about trees,” Sophia said.
“He is.” Something in Mr. Ashworth’s face moved toward warmth.
He kept most of it for things that had earned it, and something here clearly had.
“He is also, I have been given to understand, knowledgeable about a number of other things that he was not before this year.” He glanced at Louisa, who was already back in conversation with Roland across the room. “I find I am grateful for that.”
Sophia looked at him for a moment. “As am I,” she said.
He received this with a nod, finding the honest answer sufficient.
Westbrook appeared at her elbow and shook her hand with direct, brotherly warmth. He had clearly decided something and was acting on it. “Miss Lockwood. I have been looking forward to this.” He said it plainly, as a fact, and she believed him.
Mrs. Colville was by the fire.
She was composed, as she always was, but tonight her composure felt different in kind from the one Sophia had watched throughout the Season.
That earlier version had come from certainty in her position.
This was the composure that came from choosing a clear course of action and carrying it out, and it was not the same thing. It cost considerably more.
Roland brought Sophia to her.
“Mama,” he said.
Mrs. Colville looked at Sophia for a moment. Then she said: “Miss Lockwood. I am glad you could come.”
She said it with the evenness that came from having arrived, through effort and something resembling grace, at a form of words she could truly mean. Not warmth, for warmth would come later, if it came, and could not be demanded. But it was genuine, and Sophia received it as such.
“Thank you, Mrs. Colville,” she said. “It is very good to be here.”
Mrs. Colville looked at her son deliberately, consciously choosing to extend rather than withdraw.
“You look well, Roland.” She said it to him and meant something by it that was partly for Sophia, and both of them understood it, and Sophia felt a respect for the woman she had not expected to feel so soon.
The dinner was six. Roland and Sophia, Westbrook, Louisa and Philip, and Mr. Ashworth senior at the far end of the table from Mrs. Colville, who sat at the head and managed the evening. It was not what she had imagined for this table, and she managed it nonetheless with every tool she had.
The food was good. The wine was excellent. Harrison and the two footmen moved around the table without a word between them, each already where they were needed.
Westbrook and Mr. Ashworth senior found each other across the table.
Both of them had been in rooms all their lives.
They had developed, independently, the same mild scepticism about most of what happened in them, and recognised it in each other without comment.
They talked about the autumn and the question of whether the northern roads had been properly attended to and a shared acquaintance in Northumberland who had opinions about both.
Mrs. Colville directed the conversation from her end of the table.
She asked Mr. Ashworth senior about his estate in Wiltshire, inquiring after the yields, the tenants, and the difficulties of the northern soil.
He answered at length, which was its own quiet measure of how well she had asked.
Sophia watched her and thought that under other circumstances and in another year she would have liked her considerably.
Louisa was talking about the spring.
“Philip thinks March,” she said. “I think April. March is too cold and I want flowers.”
“March,” Philip said, “has adequate flowers if you plan for them.”
“I want flowers that arrive on their own without being planned for,” Louisa said. “That is the entire point.”
“The entire point of flowers,” Philip said, “is that they require planning. Nothing that grows does so without arrangement.”
“That is the most depressing thing you have said since Tuesday.”
“What did I say on Tuesday?”
“That the Wiltshire library needed reorganising.”
“It does need reorganising.”
“It is perfectly organised,” Louisa said. “It is organised in the way it has always been organised, which is the correct organisation.”
“The organisation appears to have been established by someone who put political philosophy beside natural history because both had brown spines.”
“Those books have always been beside each other.”
“Yes,” Philip said. “That is the problem.”
Sophia looked at the table and felt the warmth of it moving through her chest. They had found the right kind of argument and intended to conduct it for the rest of their lives, and their happiness in it was easy and unperforming.
She looked at Philip’s face while he argued with Louisa and saw something she had never seen in their correspondence: the full, vivid animation of a mind that had finally found the thing it was made for.
She had matched his mind. Louisa disrupted it. The difference was everything.
Roland leaned slightly toward her. “Is this what your letters were like?” he said, quietly.
“Our letters were considerably more decorous,” she said.
“That sounds dull.”
“It was not dull,” she said. “It was… It was what it was. Which was good, and not enough.” She paused. “He is better like this.”
Roland looked at Philip, who was now explaining the organisational failure of the Wiltshire library in terms that Louisa was listening to with great interest and no intention whatsoever of acting on. Something moved through Roland’s face, not quite amusement but the thing that lay beneath it.
“Yes,” he said. “He is.”
After dinner the party moved back to the drawing room and arranged itself in the way such evenings always did.
Westbrook and Mr. Ashworth senior resumed their earlier conversation near the fire, Mrs. Colville sat with her tea and quietly attended to the room, and Louisa drew Philip toward the window seat where she had apparently continued the curtain discussion that had begun before dinner.
Sophia was near the bookshelf at the far end of the room when Philip came to find her.
He came without hurry, gave the shelf a quick glance that took inventory rather than pleasure, and then stood beside her.
“I owe you a letter,” he said.
“You do not,” she said.
“I have owed you one since September.” He looked at the books.
“I wrote several versions. They all said the same thing and none of them said it adequately, which is why I did not send them.” He paused.
“What we were to each other, four years of correspondence and everything in it, I do not think I was wrong about what I felt. I think I was wrong about what it was.”
“Yes,” she said. “I think so too.”
“I believed for a long time that the kind of exchange we had was the highest available thing.” He glanced at her briefly.
“I think I was wrong about that as well. Not wrong that it mattered. Wrong that it was sufficient.” He looked back at the shelf.
“Louisa does not finish my sentences,” he said. “She disputes them.”
Sophia looked at the books. “That is considerably more valuable.”
“I have found that it is.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, without looking at her: “You are well, Sophia.”
He had never used her name. Not once in four years. She felt it arrive exactly as he had intended: not as impertinence or carelessness, but as recognition. The intimacy of two people who had been honest with each other for a long time and had reached the place where the formality had done its work.
“I am,” she said. “Genuinely.”
He nodded. Still looking at the shelf, he said, “The Evelyn. The 1664 edition. Have you established whose hand wrote the margin notes in the third part?”
“A woman’s,” she said. “I noticed immediately.”
He turned to look at her fully then. She had never seen this look on his face before, something that had moved past admiration and intellectual pleasure into a warmer current beneath both.
“Of course you did,” he said.
Then he went back to Louisa.
Sophia stood for a moment at the shelf and then turned to find the room had rearranged slightly around her. Westbrook and Mr. Ashworth senior were still by the fire, Mrs. Colville in conversation with the elder Mr. Ashworth now, the evening reaching its comfortable later hour.
Roland was beside her before she had crossed the room.
He had been watching from across the room. She knew this without needing to confirm it. Over the past year she had learned to read his attention, to recognise when it was directed at her and not at the room in general. She looked at him and found him looking back.
“What was that?” he said.
“A friendship finding its right shape,” she said.
He looked at Philip, who had arrived back at Louisa’s side and had taken her hand, and at Louisa, whose fingers had closed around his before he had quite finished the gesture.
“Good,” Roland said.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her. Then, quietly, with the plain directness he had always had and which she had spent the better part of a year learning to receive without retreating from it: “Are you glad you came?”
She looked at the room. Mrs. Colville was doing the hard work of grace, Westbrook was talking with his characteristic ease, and Louisa and Philip were deep in their argument about the library, fully engaged as only two people can be when they have found the most interesting person they have ever met and intend to argue with each other indefinitely.
Mr. Ashworth senior watched his son with quiet, contained warmth, clearly glad of something he had not expected to see.
“Yes,” she said. “Very.”
He held her gaze for a moment. Then: “My mother asked me this morning whether you played.”
Sophia looked at him. “Played what?”
“The pianoforte.”
“Adequately,” she said. “Why?”