Chapter 7
Three days was, Genevieve reflected, not very long at all in which to become accustomed to an entirely new life. And yet there she was, sitting in her drawing room, feeling almost recognizably like herself. Whatever had caused that feeling?
One Miss Caroline Wentworth. She was sitting on the edge of the settee, her large, brown eyes fixed on Genevieve, her fingers twitching slightly on the fabric as if wanting to grasp at something, and her hair neatly piled under a hat that Genevieve knew all too well that Caroline did not own before that day.
Mrs. Wentworth had likely insisted upon it.
Caroline had the expression of a person physically restraining themselves from asking a question, as if storing them up would make them disappear.
The tea setting was between them. The afternoon light lay warm and unhurried across the carpet, picking out the pattern of it in golds and creams that Genevieve was only just beginning to learn.
Outside, somewhere in the gardens, she could hear the distant, rhythmic sound of someone doing something purposeful with what she suspected was a pair of shears.
The ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon, in a house that was, improbably and irrevocably, hers.
The staff had withdrawn with the quiet efficiency she was already beginning to recognize as characteristic of the Harrington household, the door pulling shut behind them with a soft, definitive click. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Genevieve looked at her dearest friend, at the familiar sharp face and the bright brown eyes and the particular quality of Caroline's stillness, which had never in fifteen years of acquaintance been the stillness of a person with nothing to say, and felt something loosen in her chest that she had not entirely realized was tight.
It was, she thought, the specific relief of being in the presence of someone who had known you long enough that you did not have to perform anything. She had been performing, in one register or another, for three days. She had not fully appreciated the cumulative weight of it until this moment.
"Right," said Caroline, sounding like a general about to conduct troops.
Genevieve laughed. A real one, unguarded and involuntary, the first she thought she had properly produced in several days, and it felt like setting something down that she had been carrying without noticing the weight of it.
"Right," she agreed.
Caroline set her teacup down with the decisive click of a woman done with pleasantries.
"Your letter," she said, leaning forward. "It said, and I am quoting directly, because I have read it no fewer than eleven times, there have been some unexpected developments."
"That is accurate."
"Genevieve."
"Yes?"
"Your sister," Caroline said, and her voice had taken on the particular precision of someone choosing their words carefully in order to be as clear as possible. "Eloped with an officer on what was supposed to be her own wedding morning, and you married the man she left behind, on the same day!"
"Yes."
"In her dress!"
"The alterations were really remarkably good, considering the timeframe—"
"Genevieve!"
Genevieve folded her hands in her lap.
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like something that happens in a novel," Caroline said, with feeling.
"It sounds like something that happens to a character, not to an actual person, not to you—" she stopped.
Something shifted in her expression, the sharpness of it softening into something more careful and considerably more serious.
She had known Genevieve since they were four years old, and there were certain things she could always find in Genevieve's face when she looked for them, and she was looking for them now.
"Are you alright? Truly, I mean. Not the version of alright that you tell people because it's easier than the alternative. "
"Truly," Genevieve said. "I am, yes. It has been a very strange few days. But I am alright. I promise you."
Caroline looked at her for a long moment with those sharp brown eyes, searching for the truth of it with the efficiency of long practice. Whatever she found appeared to satisfy her, because after a moment she gave a small, tight nod.
"And Clarissa," she said, with the careful neutrality of someone trying very hard to be neutral about something they were not at all neutral about. She had never been neutral about Clarissa. Genevieve had long since made her peace with this.
"Is making her own choices," Genevieve said. "As she always has."
Caroline pursed her lips, and Genevieve could not tell if her friend was stopping herself from speaking, or from laughing.
I am not going to be kind about it, Genevieve, I am sorry for what she has done to you, what she has done to your family, the position she has put everyone in without so much as a—"
"Caroline." Genevieve's voice was gentle, but it had an edge in it, and Caroline heard it the way she always heard it, immediately, and without requiring it to be said twice.
"I would ask you not to. Whatever she has done, she is still my sister, and I would rather not spend our first proper visit in days being angry on her behalf when I am not, currently, angry myself. "
Caroline made the face she always made when she was swallowing several things she wanted to say.
It was a very specific face, lips pressed together, brows slightly elevated, the look of a woman conducting a rapid internal negotiation with a part of herself that was considerably less diplomatic than the rest. Genevieve had been the beneficiary and occasionally the subject of it for years, and she found it, as always, both slightly trying and deeply familiar.
"Fine," Caroline said, with the brisk decisiveness of a retreat being framed as a strategic withdrawal. "Fine. We shall not talk about Clarissa." A pause, brief and pointed. "For now."
"Thank you."
"I reserve the right to revisit."
"Noted."
"At a time of my choosing."
"Also noted. Caroline."
"Yes, fine." She picked up her teacup again and took a composed sip and visibly, deliberately reset.
Then she set it back down and leaned forward and fixed Genevieve with the look that had, over the course of their long friendship, preceded most of the more interesting conversations they had ever had. "Tell me about him."
And there it was. Genevieve had known it was coming, had known it was coming since she had read Caroline's reply to her letter, which had contained three pages of barely controlled alarm, several underlined passages, and one very clear sentence at the end: I must know everything about this man, at once and without omission.
She had prepared herself for the conversation.
She had decided, with some care, exactly what she was and was not going to say.
And yet she felt the warmth rise in her face anyway, which was inconvenient, and she addressed it by reaching for her teacup.
"He is very kind," she said.
"Kind," Caroline repeated.
"Yes."
"That is what you are giving me."
"It is early days, Caroline. We have barely—"
"You have been living in the same house as this man for three days. You must have formed more of an impression than kind."
"He is also," Genevieve said, with the deliberate care of someone releasing information in measured quantities, "very easy to talk to.
When we talk. He listens properly, not in the way that people listen when they are waiting for their turn to speak, but actually properly, and he is thoughtful, and he is," she paused, and then said it because it was simply true and there was no use in being coy about what was plainly observable, "he is very good company. W
hen we find ourselves in company together. Which is not often, we are still finding the shape of things, really. We take most of our meals together and we have had a number of conversations that I have not found difficult. Though I had rather expected to."
She was aware that she had said considerably more than she had intended to.
She also became aware, a beat later, of Caroline's expression, which had shifted from interrogative to something much more knowing and was beginning to arrange itself into the small, satisfied smile that Genevieve found, in this particular moment, rather a lot to contend with.
"Do not…" Genevieve said.
"I have not said a word."
"You are thinking very loudly. I can hear it from here."
"I am thinking," Caroline said, with great serenity, "that you went into this marriage three days ago and have come out of the first week of it with warm cheeks and considerably more to say about your husband than you are currently choosing to say. That is all I am thinking."
Genevieve set down her teacup.
"It is very early days."
"So you have said."
"We barely know each other."
"Also noted."
"Caroline, I am quite serious. I am not, it is not, there is nothing to report. It is simply that he has been kinder than I had any particular reason to expect, and I am grateful for it, and I am glad that it is him and not someone else. That is the honest truth of it."
Caroline looked at her steadily.
"He makes you feel safe," she said.
Genevieve opened her mouth, and closed it, and felt the accuracy of it land somewhere in her chest.
"Yes," she said, after a moment. "I think that is… yes. He does."
The silence that followed was quieter than most silences. The sound of the shears in the garden had stopped, and the afternoon lay still and warm around them.
"I still have reservations," Caroline said. "I want that stated plainly."
"I would have expected nothing less of you, Miss Wentworth."