Chapter 7 #2
"This whole thing has happened so quickly, and I was not there, and I could not…
" She paused, and the feeling behind the words was so entirely, so characteristically Caroline, that fierce and unsentimental love, the kind that had shown up at Genevieve's door practically at sunrise more than once over the years with no explanation required, that Genevieve felt her throat tighten in a way she had not anticipated.
"You are here now," Genevieve said softly.
"I am here now." Caroline's voice was gruff in the way it got when she was feeling things she did not intend to perform. "And I am watching him. I want that absolutely understood."
"Understood."
"If he gives me any reason whatsoever…"
"Caroline. He is a good man. I am quite certain of it."
"You were certain Clarissa was a good person."
The words landed, and Genevieve felt them, and Caroline had the expression of someone who had gone slightly further than intended.
"That was unkind," Genevieve said.
"I know. I am sorry," she said it immediately, without equivocation, in the way she always apologized, quickly and completely and without padding it. "That was unfair."
"It was. But I take your point." Genevieve was quiet for a moment and then looked at her friend directly.
"He is not Clarissa. He is not. The way he conducts himself, the things he says and the way that he says them, the way he has handled all of this…
he is genuinely good. I believe that. I have been paying very close attention and I believe it.
" She held Caroline's gaze. "Trust me. Please. "
Caroline looked at her for a long moment. Then she exhaled, and her shoulders came down from wherever they had been, and she reached across the tea things and briefly, firmly, squeezed Genevieve's hand.
"I always trust you," she said. "It's everyone else I have difficulty with."
They moved on to lighter things after that, to Caroline's account of her mother's reaction upon receiving Genevieve's letter, which had apparently required the better part of an afternoon and strong tea to recover from; to a mutual acquaintance's recent and spectacularly ill-advised choice of hat; to the novel they had both been reading before the world had rearranged itself, and what Caroline thought of the ending, which was damning and entertaining in equal measure.
The room warmed around them, and the tea cooled in its pot, and Genevieve felt, by degrees, the thing that three days in a new house among new people had been quietly doing to her begin to ease.
She had not realized how much she had needed it.
The particular ease of someone who required nothing from her.
No composure, no performance, no careful and considered presentation of herself as a woman who had everything in hand.
Just Caroline, who had seen her at her worst and her best and found both of them acceptable, sitting on the other side of the tea setting and talking about a hat.
She was, she thought, going to have to write to Caroline considerably more often.
They were in the middle of an analysis of the novel's secondary characters when the drawing room door opened.
She heard him before she properly saw him, his voice in the hallway, low and easy, a brief exchange with one of the footmen, and then the door.
Thomas. He paused very slightly when he registered that they were not alone, just a fraction of a beat, smoothed over almost immediately by the easy composure she was learning to recognize as characteristic of him, and looked from Genevieve to Caroline with a pleasantness that gave nothing away.
On the settee, Caroline went still in the particular way of a person conducting a thorough rapid assessment.
"I beg your pardon," Thomas said. "I did not intend to interrupt."
"Not at all." Genevieve rose. "Thomas, may I introduce Miss Caroline Wentworth, my dearest friend. Caroline, my husband."
My husband. The words still had that faint quality of novelty, like a room seen in a different light. She was not certain Caroline missed it. Caroline missed very little.
"Mr. Harrington." Caroline stood, and everything about her was entirely correct, her tone, her manner, the precise degree of her smile.
If you did not know her, Genevieve thought, you would have seen only a perfectly pleasant young woman exchanging a greeting with her friend's husband.
But Genevieve knew her, and she could see the assessment running in real time behind those sharp brown eyes, quick and comprehensive and thoroughly without mercy.
"Miss Wentworth," Thomas inclined his head with equal pleasantness. "I hope you have had a good visit."
"Very good, thank you." A pause. One beat, precisely, longer than strictly necessary. "It's a relief to see Genevieve so comfortably settled."
Comfortably settled. Genevieve heard the precision of it, an entirely innocent arrangement of words with a question folded neatly inside.
She also noted that Thomas received it without any visible sign of having registered the question, which was either genuine obliviousness or exceptional composure, and she was becoming increasingly confident it was the latter.
"I am very glad to hear it," he said, simply and without elaboration, and there was something in the simplicity of it that made Genevieve want to smile.
Caroline's eyes moved to her, briefly, and communicated several things in rapid succession.
Genevieve returned a look that communicated, with the efficiency of long practice: I can see your expression, and I am asking you to behave yourself, and we will discuss all of this later at length, I promise.
"I was just leaving," Caroline said graciously, turning to collect her gloves from the arm of the settee with the manner of a woman who had made a decision and was at peace with it.
Genevieve walked her out, and in the brief privacy of the hallway Caroline took both her hands and held them for a moment, and the look she gave her said everything that could not be said in earshot.
"Write to me," she said.
"Constantly," Genevieve promised.
Caroline pressed her hands once, hard, released them, and went.
She was almost to the front door when she turned back, and the look she gave Genevieve was so thoroughly, so transparently I am watching all of this very closely and I will want a full report, that Genevieve had to press her lips together firmly to keep the laugh from escaping.
The door closed.
She turned. Thomas was standing at a polite distance with the expression of a man making a genuine effort at neutrality and not entirely succeeding. There was something at the edges of it, warm and faint and not quite hidden, that looked very much like amusement.
"I apologize," Genevieve said. "She is… Caroline is very…
" she paused. "She has been protective of me since we were children.
She does not extend her trust quickly and she will not pretend to have done so, which I have always rather admired about her, though I recognize it is not always entirely comfortable for the person on the receiving end. "
"She loves you," Thomas said. Plainly, as though it were simply the most relevant fact and required no further embellishment.
"Yes." Genevieve looked at him. "She does. Rather ferociously." A pause. "She'll come around. In time. Once she's… once she's satisfied herself."
She stopped, aware that finishing the sentence would require saying that you are not going to hurt me, which was more candid than the moment called for. Thomas appeared to follow the thought regardless. He had a habit of that which she was not yet sure how to account for.
"She is welcome here whenever she likes," he said. "I mean that. Anyone who matters to you matters to this house." He held her gaze in that steady, unhurried way of his. "I hope she'll come often."
Genevieve looked at him, at the quiet plainness of him, the absence of performance in it, and felt that thing again, the thing she had been carefully not examining, settle somewhere in her chest with a warmth she was not entirely prepared for.
"Thank you," she said softly.
He smiled then. A real one, unhurried and genuine, the kind that reached his eyes and altered the whole quality of his face. She looked away before she could think about it too carefully and turned back toward the drawing room.
"I will leave you to your afternoon," he said from behind her, and she heard him withdraw, and the hallway settled back into its quiet, and Genevieve went back to the drawing room and poured herself the cold remains of the tea and stood at the window and looked out at the gardens and thought that Caroline had, as usual, seen rather more than Genevieve had intended to show her.
She also thought, looking out at the roses in their beds and the afternoon light lying long and golden across the lawn, that everything was going to be alright.
More than alright, perhaps.
She drank her cold tea and did not think about his smile, and was quite successful at it…
For a short while.