Chapter 5 #2
It was a proper library, not the decorative sort that existed in houses to demonstrate that the family was the kind of family that owned books, but the lived-in kind, the kind where the shelves went from floor to ceiling on every wall, and the books on them looked as though they had been opened more than once.
There was a smell to it, that particular smell of old paper and leather binding and something else she had never been able to name but had always associated with the best kind of afternoon.
Two armchairs sat beside the fireplace at a slight angle to each other, worn to exactly the right degree of comfort, with a low table between them.
"I thought you might like this room," he said, and she heard something in Thomas's voice when that might, under other circumstances, have been amusement.
"How could anyone not like this room?" She stepped inside and turned slowly, taking it in from the center of it. "How many volumes?"
"Several thousand. I have not counted recently." He had followed her in and stood near the doorway, watching her with that same unreadable expression. "My father added considerably to what his father had. I have added to it further."
"What do you read?"
The question came out before she had particularly decided to ask it, and she wondered for a moment if it was too much, too direct, too presumptuous, too soon. But he answered it without hesitation.
"History, mostly. Some natural philosophy. The occasional novel, though I would not admit it widely." A pause, and then, very dry: "My grandmother considers fiction a moral failing."
Genevieve laughed. It surprised her slightly, a real laugh, involuntary, the kind that arrived without consultation.
"Mine considered it essential to the development of character."
"Then they would have had a great deal to say to each other," Thomas said.
She looked at him, and he looked at her, and there was a moment, brief and unexpected, of something that was simply easy. Then he moved to indicate the door, and they continued on, and she held the moment in her mind like a small, useful thing and did not examine it too closely.
The grounds were extensive and beautiful in the way that grounds were beautiful when they had been tended with genuine care over a very long time, not the rigid perfection of a garden maintained purely for appearance, but something with more generosity to it.
They walked through the kitchen gardens, where the afternoon sun sat warm on the espaliered fruit trees along the south-facing wall, and the smell of warm earth and herbs rose up from the beds in a pleasant, drowsy wave.
Through the walled garden with its roses, not yet in bloom, but she could see the scale of it, the old climbing varieties already beginning to put on new growth against the stone.
And then out through a wooden gate onto the wider grounds, the parkland stretching away toward a line of trees in the middle distance.
She had not expected to feel so much. She had prepared herself, on the carriage ride over, for a kind of pleasant detachment, an ability to appreciate the house and its grounds as fine things without being particularly moved by them, the way one could admire a painting without needing to own it.
She had not prepared herself for the specific, quiet feeling of walking through a rose garden in the afternoon and knowing it was hers. That she could come here tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.
"The roses are best in June," Thomas said, pausing at the gate at the far end of the walled garden, his hand resting on the old iron latch. "My mother planted most of them."
She looked at him sideways. The afternoon light caught the angles of his face, the slight furrow between his brows that she was beginning to understand was simply how he looked when he was thinking rather than an indication of any particular displeasure.
He was looking at the rose beds with an expression she recognized, not because she had seen it on him before but because she knew the particular quality of it, the look of a person regarding something they loved and missed at the same time.
"It must have been a very long time ago," she said carefully.
"I was twelve." He released the gate latch. "She had an eye for it. I have tried to maintain it as she had it, though I confess I rely heavily on the gardeners for the specifics."
"I would like to learn them," Genevieve said. "The specifics."
He glanced at her.
"You garden?"
"Not well. But I should like to." She looked back at the roses, at the neat beds and the old stone walls and the sense the whole space had of being carefully, patiently loved. "It seems worth doing properly."
He said nothing for a moment.
"I will introduce you to Mr. Dobson. He's been head gardener here for thirty years and has opinions about roses that would fill several volumes," he said, then paused. "He will be delighted to have someone ask about said opinions."
“I will ask as much as I can then,” she said with a smile. He nodded, his eyes locking back onto the pink and yellow roses with petals curled tight, not yet ready to reveal all of themselves.
They turned back toward the house, the gravel path curving gently ahead of them through the parkland, the building itself visible now between the trees, warm stone in the lowering afternoon light.
The day had cooled slightly. Somewhere in the distance, a wood pigeon was calling.
The familiar noise was strangely comforting.
She had never thought that noise would do more than annoy or amuse her.
She glanced up at Thomas, taking in the profile of his face in the fading light.
Something tugged at her mind, as if remembering this was a view that used to belong to Clarissa.
She felt it again. That quiet, particular sadness on his behalf.
I am sorry, she thought. I am sorry for what brought us here.
I am sorry for what you lost, and I am sorry for what you are having to make the best of, and I know that you are making the best of it because you are, whatever else, a good man, and I know you would not say any of this is my fault, but I am sorry for it regardless.
She did not say any of it. He had told her, clearly and without room for misunderstanding, that he did not want her apologies, and she had heard him, and she would respect that.
What she could give him instead was simpler and more practical.
To be easy. To be undemanding. To be someone whose presence in his house cost him nothing and, if she could manage it, offered him something.
She was not a consolation prize; she refused, quietly and firmly and entirely internally, to think of herself as such.
However, she was also clear-eyed enough to understand the shape of what they were building, and what it required.
I will be a good wife to you, she promised him, in the wordless way of a private resolution.
They reached the house. Thomas held the side door open for her, and she passed through it into the cool of the corridor, and the smell of the house came back around her, old stone and beeswax, wood polish, and something faintly floral from a vase somewhere nearby.
The door closed behind them, and the afternoon was shut out.
"I think," Thomas said, from behind her, "that you should see your chambers before dinner."
She turned. He was looking at her with that quiet, attentive expression, focused without being unkind, serious without being cold, and she felt the full weight of it in a way she was becoming familiar with.
"Yes," she said. "I should like that."
He inclined his head and moved to lead the way, and she followed him deeper into the house that was, in every legal and practical sense, her home now.
She thought, I will learn every room of it. I will learn all of it.
She kept her hands perfectly still at her sides, and her chin level, and followed her husband up the broad curve of the stairs.