Chapter 11
Caroline Wentworth arrived in the way she always arrived, which was to say without particular ceremony and with the immediate impression that whatever room she had just entered had been waiting for her to make it more interesting.
She was shown into the drawing room where Genevieve was attempting to write a letter, had taken one look at her expression, and said, "Put the letter down and tell me what's wrong. "
"Nothing is wrong," Genevieve said.
Caroline sat down and looked at her with the patient, careful attention of a woman who had known her for eleven years and was not remotely fooled.
Genevieve put the letter down.
"The ball was wonderful," she said, because it had been, and it seemed important to establish that first. "Truly wonderful.
Thomas was… well, he was attentive, and kind, and he made me feel as though I was precisely where I was supposed to be, and we danced, and the carriage home was—" She stopped. "It was a lovely evening."
"But," Caroline said.
"But we came home," Genevieve said, "and the next morning he was at breakfast and he was perfectly pleasant and he asked how I had slept and made sure my tea was correct and then he went to his study, and I went to the accounts, and it was…" She searched for the word. "Fine. It was entirely fine."
"Fine," Caroline repeated, in the tone that indicated she understood completely and found it inadequate.
"We are like," Genevieve paused, looking for the right comparison and finding it uncomfortable when she did.
"We are like very fond friends who happen to share a house.
He is kind to me. He is genuinely, consistently, thoroughly kind to me, and I am grateful for it, truly, but it is the kindness of—" She stopped again.
"Of?" Caroline prompted gently.
"Of a brother," Genevieve said, and the word sat between them with more weight than she had intended.
"He looks out for me the way a brother looks out for a younger sister he is fond of but not particularly worried about.
He makes sure I am comfortable and well provided for and not troubled by anything, and then he goes back to his own life, which runs parallel to mine in every way and connects to it at mealtimes and occasionally in the evenings, while I… "
She looked at her hands. "I want more than parallel, Caroline. I want to actually know him. And I do not quite know how to go about it when he is so thoroughly, kindly, immovably at a distance."
Caroline was quiet for a moment. Outside, something was happening in the garden that involved the gardener and what sounded like a disagreement with a wheelbarrow. Genevieve ignored it.
"Can I tell you what I observe?" Caroline said.
"Please."
Caroline was quiet for a moment, in the way she was quiet when she was being honest rather than kind. "He laughed in the carriage?" she asked.
Genevieve blinked.
"Yes."
"You said he laughed more than he had in months. That he was, what was the word you used?"
"Free," Genevieve said, and then wished she had not, because hearing it back was different from having thought it.
"Free," Caroline repeated. "And then the next morning he asked how you slept and whether your tea was correct." She looked at her steadily. "Those are not the mornings of a man who felt nothing the night before."
Genevieve looked at her hands.
"I am not saying it's simple," Caroline said, more gently. "I am saying the distance is not indifference. Those are very different problems." She paused. "One of them does not have a solution. The other one just needs time and the right conditions."
"And how does one produce the right conditions," Genevieve said, "for a man who is doing his absolute best not to need them."
Caroline considered this.
"You do not produce them," she said. "You just make sure you are not in the way of them when they arrive."
Genevieve absorbed that idea. It was, she thought, either very astute or very wishful, and she trusted Caroline's judgment enough to believe it was probably the former.
"So what do I do?" she asked.
"You give him an opening," Caroline said simply.
"Not a large one. Not a declaration or a confrontation or anything that requires him to make a decision he is not ready to make.
Just a small, natural opening that allows him to choose to be closer to you if he wants to, without any pressure attached to the choice.
" She paused. "He needs to feel safe enough to move first, Genevieve.
Your job is simply to make the direction clear. "
"That sounds," Genevieve said, "considerably more subtle than I naturally am."
"I know," Caroline said, with great fondness and no apology. "Try anyway."
She left an hour later, and Genevieve stood at the window and watched the carriage go and felt, if not entirely certain, then at least pointed in a direction, which was more than she had managed on her own.
She allowed herself approximately three minutes of standing at the window feeling purposeful, and then she went to find her husband.
***
Thomas's study was the room in the house that most clearly belonged to him, in the way that some rooms absorbed the character of the person who spent the most time in them.
It was ordered but not sterile, lined with books that had evidently been read rather than arranged, with papers on the desk that were organized in the particular way of someone who knew exactly where everything was and would not thank anyone for tidying it.
There was a window that looked out over the eastern grounds, and the light that came through it in the afternoon was warm and direct without being oppressive.
He looked up when she knocked at the open door, and his expression did the thing it occasionally did, a brief, unguarded openness, before he set down his quill.
"Genevieve. Come in."
She entered his study, and did not sit down, because she was aiming for the particular quality of lightness that suggested she had simply stopped by in passing, which was Caroline's advice rendered into posture, and she was fairly certain she was managing it.
"I will not keep you," she said. "I only wanted to ask…
I have been meaning to explore the grounds more properly, and I noticed from the upstairs window that there is a forest at the eastern edge of the property.
" She kept her voice easy, conversational, the tone of someone reporting a mild and natural curiosity.
"I thought I might take a ride out that way, perhaps tomorrow morning, if the weather holds.
I only wanted to make sure you had no objections. "
There was a pause. Thomas leaned back in his chair, and she could see him considering it in the attentive way he considered things she said.
Not quickly. Not as a formality. He was actually thinking about her request, which was, she had decided, one of his better qualities, even when the thoroughness of his consideration made her want to say it's only a ride, Thomas, I am not proposing to purchase France.
"None at all," he said. "I will speak to the stable hand this afternoon, there is a mare that would suit you well, I think. Very good temperament."
"Thank you," Genevieve said.
She smiled at him, then turned to go.
She ignored the small, particular deflation that had occurred somewhere in her chest, the one that arrived reliably at the end of conversations that had gone exactly as they should and yet somehow not quite far enough, and she was nearly at the door, and she was going to leave, and that was fine.
It was entirely fine. It was precisely the kind of small sensible opening that Caroline had described—
"Genevieve."
She turned back.
He had a slight frown on his face. Not displeasure. The other kind, the one she had catalogued as consideration, the expression he wore when he was working through something that had not been fully formed when he opened his mouth. She waited. She had learned to wait for that expression to resolve.
"The forested area," he said. "It's quite secluded in parts.
" He seemed to be choosing his words with some care, which was not unusual for him, though the care seemed, this morning, to be directed at something she could not quite see yet.
"There are a few places where the ground is unreliable, it floods in autumn and the drainage is not what it should be.
There is also a stretch along the northern edge where the path is not obvious unless you know it. "
He paused.
She waited.
She kept her expression pleasant and open and said nothing at all, which was the hardest thing she had done in recent memory.
"You should not go alone," he said.
There was a silence. It lasted perhaps three seconds and contained, on her side of it, a quantity of feeling that she was managing with what she considered considerable discipline.
"I could come with you," he said, and it came out in the tone of a man proposing something practical, something sensible, something that had simply occurred to him as the obvious and logical solution to a logistical problem.
She recognized that tone. She had heard it deployed by a certain kind of person over a certain kind of feeling for as long as she had been in society.
She found it, on this particular occasion, deeply endearing.
"Show you the areas to avoid. It would only take a morning. "
"That would be lovely," she said.
She meant it with a sincerity that she was fairly confident she was keeping to a reasonable volume, which was an act of considerable self-control that she felt she deserved some credit for.
"If you can spare the time," she added, because she was also a woman of some composure, and she was not going to make it easy for him to change his mind.