On May 23rd, I received a letter, brief to the point of rudeness, addressed to me care of Mr Rowsell and brought to me by Atkins. Mrs Frant begged to inform Mr Shield that, if the weather was fine, she usually walked in the Green Park between the hours of two o’clock and three o’clock in the afternoon. It was an invitation in the form of a statement.
I at once decided I would not meet her. If a man scratches an itching scab, the wound will reopen and start to bleed again.
Instead I snarled at Mrs Jem’s children when they stumbled over their lessons. I sent away a man who would have paid me well to write a begging letter to his uncle because I thought him grasping and odious. I could not concentrate for more than a moment or two at a time on any one thing or any one person. My mind would think of nothing except the implications of that curt little note.
Shortly after midday, I went up to my room. An hour later, I left the house: I was scrubbed, scraped and polished, and looked as much the beau as my limited resources would allow. I reached the Green Park shortly before two o’clock. The Season had begun, so its walks were sprinkled with the fashionable and the not so fashionable.
I saw Mrs Frant almost at once. She was pacing slowly along the line of the reservoir at the park’s northern corner, opposite Devonshire House, in the direction of the fountain at the end. She was not attended by a maid. I approached her, watching her while for a moment she was unaware she was observed. Her eyes were on the water, which flashed gold and silver in the sunlight. She was still obliged to wear mourning for Mr Frant but she had pushed aside her veil and her weeds were not at all out of place in that fashionable throng. I remember with exactitude how she looked, and how she dressed, because it showed me in an instant the chasm that lay between us, that would always lie between us.
I went up to her and bowed. She gave me her hand but did not smile. My scab was picked: my wound began to bleed once more. She suggested we walk away from the roar and rattle of Piccadilly and the crowds who promenaded at this end of the park. We paced slowly southwards. She did not take my arm. When we had gone a little way, and there was no possibility of our being overheard, she stopped and looked directly at me for the first time.
“You have not been frank with me, sir. You have worked behind my back.”
I said nothing. I stared at the white skin of her arm between glove and cuff, noting the smudge of London black.
“My cousin Flora has restored my uncle Wavenhoe’s legacy to me,” she went on.
“I am rejoiced to hear it.”
“She said she would not have done it, had it not been for you.” Sophie glared up at me. “What did you do for her, pray? Flora does nothing for nothing.”
“I told her I was unhappy with the circumstances in which your uncle signed the codicil. If you remember I witnessed his signature. Miss Carswall’s generous nature did the rest.”
She moved away and I followed her across the grass. Suddenly she stopped and turned back to me. “I am not a child to be kept in the dark,” she said. “There is more to it than that. A lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn called on me with the necessary documents. As he was leaving, I asked him point-blank if he knew you. He tried to avoid the question, but I pressed him, and in the end he said he did.”
“I wished Mr Rowsell to deal with the transaction because I trust him implicitly. So I recommended him to Miss Carswall.”
“That suggests you do not trust my cousin.”
“I did not say that, ma’am. In affairs of the law, the advice of a disinterested party is always worth having.”
“Oh, stuff!” She glared at me. “And how was it that you were in a position to dictate to my cousin?”
“I did not dictate to her. I merely tried to explain the desirability of following a particular course of action.”
“Then why did you tell her that you did not wish it known that you had – had advised her, if that is what you call it? Come, sir, I have a right to know why you took it upon yourself to interfere in my affairs.”
I turned over in my mind all the answers I might make. In the end, only the truth would do: “I did not wish you to be obliged to feel gratitude.”
Her face blazed. “You are insufferable, sir.”
“What would you have had me do?” I realised I had raised my voice. I took a breath and continued more quietly, “I beg your pardon. But I did not like to think of you trapped with that terrible old man.”
“I am sure your concern does you credit. But you need not have worried. I will not pretend that the prospect of living with him was agreeable to me. But I would not have had to endure it long.” She raised her chin. “Captain Ruispidge has done me the honour of asking me to marry him.”
I turned away. I could not bear to look on her bright face any longer.
“He asked me before my cousin Flora told me of her design to transfer the Gloucester property to me. His motives were of the purest.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “I do not doubt it. I hope you will be very happy. He is a worthy man, I know, and I am sure it is a most prudent course of action.”
Sophie came a step nearer, forcing me to look again at her face. “I have been prudent all my life. I married Henry Frant because it was prudent. I lived in my cousin Carswall’s house because it was prudent. I am sick of being prudent. It does not agree with me.”
“You have not always been prudent.”
We looked at each other for a moment. In my mind I saw that little room in Gloucester, I saw her dear self wantonly displayed for my delight. Her face softened momentarily. She began to turn away but stopped and glanced up at me through her lashes. A coquette might have made the same movement, but she was not a coquette. I think she was afflicted by a sudden shyness.
“I was not prudent when Captain Ruispidge asked me to be his wife,” she said. “I told him I was deeply sensible of the compliment he paid me, and would always consider him my friend, but that I did not love him. He said that did not matter, and he renewed his suit. I told him I wished to have time to turn his offer over in my mind before deciding.”
“So you might be prudent after all?”
“I had to think of Charlie.” She hesitated. “I still do. Then Flora told me that she was going to make over the property to me and – and I wrote to Captain Ruispidge with my decision. Flora heard I was not to marry him, and that was when she told me it had been at your suggestion that she had made over the legacy to me. And you had asked her to conceal your part in the matter. I ask you again: why did you do that?”
“My answer is the same: I did not wish to put you under an obligation.”
“I am under a much greater obligation to my cousin Flora.”
“I do not doubt it.”
“She has made over what amounts to an income of nearly two hundred and fifty pounds a year.” Sophie looked up at me. “So – tell me then: why should I not be grateful to you, as well as to her?”
“I had no intention of deceiving you. I wished to help you secure an independence, nothing more. If you had felt beholden to me, if you had known that I was concerned in any way – I – I feared it might cloud your judgement.”
“With regard to what?”
I did not answer. As if by common consent, we walked on, towards St James’s Park, and it seemed to me that she walked a little closer to me than she had before. I could not see her face because of her bonnet, only the plumes nodding and swaying above her head. She murmured something. I was obliged to ask her to repeat it.
She stopped again and looked up at me. “I said thank you. You showed true delicacy. I would have expected no less of you. Yet there are occasions when delicacy outlives its purpose. It is a virtue, undoubtedly, but it is not always appropriate to exercise it.”
I said, “In that respect, it sounds strangely like prudence.”
We stood for a moment watching three magpies squabbling over a piece of bread and emitting their raucous, grating cry, like beans rattling in a gourd.
“How I detest magpies,” Sophie said.
“Yes – scavengers, thieves and bullies.”
“But do you know the rhyme that country people have about magpies? One for sorrow, two for mirth –”
“Three for a girl and four –”
“Three for a girl?” she interrupted. “That was not what they said when I was a child. Besides four must be boy and it would not rhyme with mirth. No, when I was a child it was always three for a marriage.”
The magpies took fright and flew away.
“And four for a birth,” she added in a very low voice.
“Sophie?” I said, and held out my hand to her. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she replied, and laid her hand in mine. “Yes.”