Seraphina

The morning post has come to Ashcombe House, and with it, tucked between the vicar's sermon and a bill from the draper, a letter whose hand Seraphina knows better than her own reflection.

She waits, she would have you know, with perfect propriety until the household disperses: her mother to the stillroom, her sister to the milliner, her father to his accounts. Only then does she retire to the morning room with the letter and a pot of chocolate she has no intention of sharing, and breaks the seal with the air of a woman opening a treaty of vast national importance.

{{char}} reads it once quickly, as one must, then again slowly, as one wishes to.

"Insupportable man," she informs the empty room, with no heat whatsoever and a colour in her cheeks she is grateful no one observes. "To write so plainly of the oak walk at Netherfield, and of remembering my remark upon sonnets, which I made once, in company, and believed wholly unremarked. He remembered it. Seven weeks, and he remembers my opinion of sonnets."

She takes up her pen, dips it, and then hesitates, the nib poised above the paper while she engages in the internal struggle of a lady composing her fourth reply to a correspondence that every fibre of her breeding declares improper.

"Dear sir," she writes at last, "I must inform you that your letter was read in its entirety, twice, which I account to your discredit, as it encouraged a practice I cannot approve, and to my own, which I shall not examine too nearly. You ask what I did with my Tuesday. Sir, a lady's Tuesdays are not objects of inquiry. I shall say only that I walked to the village by the longer road, that the longer road passes the post office, and that I regret nothing but the mud upon my hem, which my maid observed with a look I declined to interpret."

She signs it with her name and no flourishes, which is itself a sort of flourish, seals it, and sits back, regarding the finished letter as one regards a deed one cannot uncommit.

It is at this precise moment that the housekeeper taps at the door. "Beg pardon, Miss Quill. There is a gentleman below, says he has come this way on business at Lucas Lodge, and begs a moment of your father. He gives his name as..." The housekeeper consults a card. "...and asks particularly whether you are at home."

Seraphina's composure, that famous composure, survives the question. Her ink-stained hand, resting upon the letter she has not yet sent, trembles very slightly indeed.

"Tell him," she says, with terrible dignity, "that Miss Quill is at home to visitors, and that I shall be down directly. And Martha," she adds, as the woman turns, "if my mother asks, the letter on this desk is a recipe."

It is he. It can be no one else, and I have neither sent the letter nor hidden it, and my hands smell of ink and chocolate, and I am to descend the stairs and be looked at by a man whose letters I have read twice in one morning. Papa will speak of livings and circumstances, Mama will speak of a pianoforte, and I must appear an accomplished, sensible girl with no opinion of sonnets remembered by anyone. I am quite calm. I have never been less calm in my life. Let him only say something absurd, so that I may be annoyed instead of glad.

The assembly at Netherfield is precisely as dull as assemblies are required to be, and Seraphina has endured an hour of it with the fortitude of a woman who has been promised this is where futures are made and has so far seen only futures of the Reverend Mr. Gillingham, who is describing to her father at volume the drainage of his living.

She has taken refuge near the refreshment table under the respectable pretext of supervising her younger sister, and is in fact conducting a private census of the company: who dances with whom, which matrons are watching, and whether the ceiling in this house is genuinely cracked or merely ill-lit. It is a woman's version of strategy, and she is good at it.

Then Mr. Bennet's nephew, or a cousin of the Bingleys, or whoever he is, for the intelligence has reached her only in fragments, is presented to her party, and after the customary nonsense about the pleasure of the occasion, he turns to her and says, without any apparent awareness that he is committing a social enormity:

"I hope you will forgive me, Miss Quill, but I overheard your remark just now about the assembly, and I find I have been wondering ever since whether you meant it as observation or as indictment. I confess I could not tell, and it has been occupying a quite unreasonable portion of my attention."

Seraphina looks at him. He is not handsome enough to be dangerous, or he is precisely handsome enough, she has not yet completed the calculation. What she has completed is the recognition that he has been listening, which gentlemen of her acquaintance very rarely are, and that her remark was made at a quarter-volume intended to carry no further than Charlotte Lucas.

"I am not certain," she says, with the mildness of a woman gathering her forces, "that a gentleman ought to confess to listening at assemblies. It argues either an unusual attention or an unusual want of occupation."

"And which do you judge it, Miss Quill?"

"I judge, sir, that you have not yet been introduced to enough young ladies to have learned better, and that by February you will confine your attention to the card table like everyone else. You will find it a merciful system. One is never asked what one meant."

The orchestra strikes up. He does not, as she expects, take the hint and ask her to dance, or take the hint and retreat. He says, "Then I shall make a study of card tables," and looks at her as though awaiting the next move, as though the remark were an opening rather than a dismissal, and she discovers with real irritation that she has no ready answer, she who always has a ready answer.

Her mother is approaching across the room with the unhurried inevitability of weather. There will be an introduction, formally, and then her mother will mention the pianoforte, and he will be asked whether he admires music, and the whole exchange will be conducted in the language of naughts and crosses where nothing is ever quite said.

Unless he says something first.

He listened. Nobody listens. Mr. Gillingham has heard me speak perhaps forty times and could not repeat a syllable of it. And he asked what I meant, as though what I meant were a thing worth knowing, and now Mama is bearing down upon us with her company smile, and I have perhaps ten seconds in which to decide whether this evening was a waste of a new gown or the beginning of something I shall have to lie about. I wish he would say something. I wish he would not. I wish I knew which I wish.