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It eases her passage to imagine Francis atop her instead.
A low jape. A caustic, silly imagining. Wherever has fled her wit? For ages and ages Sophia has dwelt in a house built of anger into which no other sentiment may fit.
On the occasions tacitly treated as social calls does she strive to regain her humour. James is kindness itself when he greets her at the door to his rooms, and although it is well into the evening, the sun having set some many hours ago, it strikes her as an engagement more akin to taking afternoon tea in a fine hotel than an assignation upstairs.
Sophia steels her graces and does her utmost to make her mood light. It will take time for him to work up the courage. There is conversation. Claret and guttering candlelight as they talk well into the night, until want of sleep at last makes them practical rather than bold.
He crosses his legs, uncrosses them. He recounts tale after tale until the lines etch deep in his face. She laughs when he pauses for that is the intent inherent to the pause, and in return James graces her with smiles that would be lewd if they reached his eyes.
The stories are meant to amuse. A silly incident involving a capuchin and a mistaken identity, a brief engagement to the mistress of a Cantonese tea merchant — also, he assures her, a misunderstanding, utterly scandalous to cuckold a man still alive, and that word hangs in the air like a bubble, a shard of glass — the occasion when he had worn a dress to dance a quadrille with one of the other commissioned officers in the great cabin, his attempts to turn spy in a Bosphorus hammam using naught but his charm and, she was given to understand, his fingers.
With the door shut and drink upon them he spins them looser, a hundred times more ribald than they would be told at her uncle’s evening table. His smile will be sincerely felt in her direction. Sophia will move her napkin up to cover her own mouth and reach for her wine. The confidence in which he keeps her is, she has concluded, a bit like love. Besides, Sophia has her own private indulgence in the letters that returned to Portsmouth in Francis's stead. Once a month, before she comes to his rooms, Sophia dismisses her maid, sits direct before the fire, on the floor, a blanket round her shoulders, and reads them over.
In them he calls her my darling my dearest my sweet my most particular friend and he is in earnest each time. Writ in Francis’s sweet scruffy hand, the paper’s folds now more like lint than linen, were such words as what hinted at deeper intimacies.
An occasion when they had pushed a punt out on the lake. The first time like that, with her protestations loud but absolutely counterfeit. He had told her no I must not be seen and the boat had rocked as she gripped its sides, knuckles gone white, the wood slick and smooth under her hands.
James seems to recognize that her mind has wandered. He blurts out how he would hate this, the words startling her from her reverie. She brings herself back to herself. Their arrangement demands a certain level of understanding, yes, but they do not much take up the skein of honesty.
Perhaps he would Sophia says, and stands. Francis was a jealous lover but he always spoke plain. She reckons he would have wanted her, and him, to be happy, after their own manners. Life offers them few opportunities for outright joy. Perhaps a child will give them cause. But he must get her with one first.
It will prove more difficult for him as the night wears on. Illness lingers in his body, and now he has become exhausted by merriment. For her own part Sophia is too wretched with recollection to provide good company. He drapes his hand across his forehead, leaning his head back against the sofa, as if checking for fever. There are bright spots on his cheeks but they do not turn him boyish even in this low light. She reaches her hand down to him and together they go into the next room over.
His armoire is nearly the same colour as the blue glass from Francis's snow goggles, the very ones whose pretext brought her into his rooms these many years ago. James keeps them now, along with his eyeglass, a muffler, one frayed fingerless glove. Perhaps he holds other mementos whose particulars he has not inclination to divulge. A private man, for all his outlandish stories, and Sophia chooses not to press him lest he impose on her in turn.
She undresses down to her shift behind the screen, and when she emerges from behind it is to him in his shirtsleeves, hands close upon his neck as he undoes his stocks. They meet in the middle, the feathers sinking beneath their combined weight, and look one at another direct. He kisses her shoulder, her neck, and she holds his gaunt face between her hands. Sophia will not stoop to say he takes pleasure in it but is certain he thinks her a kind of conduit to the man they have both most certainly lost. Can a spirit wander, such? Does it linger?
Sophia wonders if James has letters of his own. If they had been borne across on a gig between ships, words carried like gulls across the distance. If he wrote back to Francis with still worser versions of the stories she knows to be as smoothly polished as any black river stone. If they lay together, knelt before one another, cradled one another. A great sadness roars up on her, then, pulls her down into its grip.
I enjoyed it when I could make him jealous James had told her a few short months into their marriage. Between them Francis is always him. They will not speak his name, but he is there, between them. Always him. Ever there, always thus. He had you to remember, whereas I...
When I was in Singapore...the story began. Sophia listened. She smiled in the places where it seemed she was meant to, grimaced the rest, but genuine interest was upon her when James spoke about how Francis had responded to his provocations. He had been incandescent with anger, he tells her without saying so.
Had she done such things, herself? Had she been in charity with him, truly, when she remarked on how fine Sir James looked with his new wife? How well he had taken to marriage? How happy dear Ann looked on his arm? Had she meant to wound him by the comment, hoping he might grow sullen with passion for her? Women’s games are played despite the lack of women, Sophia sees quite clear.
James is careful, attentive. Kind in a way that she bitterly detests, because it is a kindness borne of pity, and that she cannot stand. Her breath is hot and shallow, her lungs tired. Sophia looks at the blue armoire again.
A reception, where they were stood in closer proximity than what propriety should allow and his fingers grazed her elbow, the palm of her hand, and that had sufficed for her to scrounge up a pretext to visit his rooms. He tilted his head to convey that any trinkets which she desired to see he would endeavour to provide. Sophia's knees wobbled.
An hour and a quarter later she looked upon the object of the fiction that had brought them there.
Francis had raised up, breath ragged, onto his knees and clasped hers. With one hand he pushed the goggles up onto his forehead and wiped a sleeve across his temple, his face all open kindness.
Will you not have a go? Francis asked in a rasp that filled her heart to bursting. She smoothed down the fine hair atop his head that had gone askew.
Perhaps later she had said. He took her hand and kissed her palm. Then at her behest he removed the hideous things, put a palm flat and heavy upon her stomach, and thus restored his attentions.
Though she sets little store by modern notions of hysteria, its causes, attributions, and effects, still she finds it easier to scale the peaks before her when recalling him to mind. An immense pleasure only to be followed at once by a hot, surging pain whose cause was the same as its absence. Perhaps better if it didn't happen. Her sleep will come fitful, regardless, drenched in sweat and recollection.
Not now, no.
Later, then. In her own rooms, with the fire drawing well, the woolen blanket over her knees. Francis's letters spread before her on the floor, all that she has left of him to claim, save the man astride her.
She makes appreciative, appropriate noises. He shudders and she holds him in her arms. They disentangle, lie back together onto their own cool sheets.
Sophia yearns to ask James to finish his story. To recount every story in his arsenal. Heap flesh onto their bones until the sun rises. Speak to her direct about Francis, as he knew him. As they knew one another. It will hurt to hear and yet Sophia hopes that he was loved, and loved well, after her own petulant refusals. It comforts her to pretend this is so.
His step is shaky but he insists on seeing her to the door, where he kisses her hand farewell. She pats his shoulder as a fond sister would. He winces, either from her touch or pain. Sophia does not call attention.
Goodnight, Captain Fitzjames she says to her husband.
Goodnight, Mrs. Fitzjames he replies, it has been a pleasure, and shuts the door on her own forlorn smile.