Chapter 25: The Season Concludes; The Sea Remains

The London Season had a precise mechanism for concluding itself, as orderly in its recession as in its advance: morning calls grew shorter, correspondence thickened with farewell notes that were really accounting statements dressed in social language, and the great houses of Mayfair began, by increments, to look slightly less certain of their own permanence. Fires were banked earlier. Curricles appeared in mews that had not seen them since May. The subscription libraries experienced a final surge of returns that constituted, among their more literary patrons, a kind of valediction.

Miss Petra Calloway observed all of this from the front window of the Henrietta Street lodgings on a Tuesday morning in late October, drinking her second cup of tea and making the private assessment that Seasons, like divine confrontations in east galleries and conversations in front of gamekeeper's cottage doors, were considerably easier to enter than to leave with one's accounting in order.

The morning calls had begun at half past ten. By noon, she had received four: Mrs. Alderton, who had decided the Thames incident was a meteorological anomaly and wished to discuss it as such; Lady Featherstone, who had decided it was divine and wished to discuss it as something else entirely; Miss Dunmore, who had heard several conflicting accounts and wished Petra to arbitrate between them; and young Lord Pembury, who had been present at the Thames and could not quite bring himself to leave without saying—he did not know precisely what. He had stayed twelve minutes and departed without saying it, which Petra thought was probably the more honest resolution.