Chapter 11 #2
"Tomorrow morning," he said. He said it with a settled quality, an almost-immediate settlement, as though the decision had organized itself with less difficulty than usual, as though the having-decided felt more natural than the deliberating.
She filed that away carefully, the quality of that ‘tomorrow morning,’ for later examination.
"Tomorrow morning," she agreed.
She left.
She did not allow her smile to become unreasonable until she had turned the corner of the corridor and was entirely certain she was alone, at which point she permitted herself a moment of what could only be described as quiet, private triumph, contained within a single, thoroughly undignified exhale.
Then she straightened, and composed herself, and went to find his grandmother to ask what one wore to an early morning ride in cold weather, because there was, she had decided, no version of tomorrow in which she was not wearing exactly the right thing.
The morning arrived clear and cold, with the particular quality of autumn light that made everything look freshly rendered, the grounds bright and still and smelling of damp earth and wood smoke from somewhere distant.
Genevieve was at the stables before Thomas, which had not been her intention but also, on reflection, she was not sorry about.
It gave her time to make friends with the mare, who was a dark bay with a white star and a deeply sensible expression, and who accepted Genevieve's immediate and enthusiastic approval with dignified equanimity.
Thomas appeared around the corner of the stable block in riding clothes, and she had the brief thought that he looked considerably more at ease than he did in his study or across a dining table, some quality of relaxation that the outdoors produced in him that four walls did not.
"You are already here," he said.
"I am an early riser," she said. "We have introduced ourselves. I think we are going to get on very well,” she replied, indicating the mare. Thomas looked at the horse and then at Genevieve with an expression that was attempting to be neutral and was not entirely succeeding.
"Good," he said, and went to his own horse with the ease of long familiarity.
They rode out through the eastern gate and across the open ground that ran along the edge of the formal gardens, and then onto the longer grass of the fields beyond, and Genevieve felt the particular pleasure she always felt on horseback, the sense of occupying exactly the right amount of space in exactly the right way.
She let the mare find her pace and settled into it, and after a while became aware that Thomas was watching her.
"You ride well," he said, with the slight quality of someone who had been not-saying something and had decided to say it.
"Thank you," she said. "I have been riding since I was four. My father put me on a horse before I could reliably walk in a straight line, which my mother never quite forgave him for."
There was a brief pause.
"Your sister," he began, and then stopped.
Genevieve glanced at him. He had gone carefully still in the way he went still when he had said something he wished he could take back, and she felt a quick, clear sympathy for him that had no room in it for anything complicated.
"Was absolutely terrified of horses," she said cheerfully, completing the sentence as though he had always intended to give it to her.
"Which was a shame, because they are so very likable.
But Clarissa's passions were really more of the indoor variety, she played the pianoforte beautifully.
Genuinely beautifully, not in the way that everyone's daughters play beautifully if you ask the parents.
She had a real gift for it. And her embroidery was extraordinary.
She made this cushion cover once with these tiny flowers along the edge, each petal no bigger than my thumbnail, and it was…
" She shook her head. "Really remarkable.
She and I were always very different in that way, she was always better indoors than out.
I was always better out than in. We used to say we were opposite halves of the same person, which sounds a great deal more poetic than it was in practice, mostly it meant we argued about whether to open the windows. "
She had been talking at her usual pace without watching him, but she watched him now. The careful stillness had eased. He was looking at the middle distance with an expression she could not entirely read, but the worst of the tension had gone from it, and that was enough.
"She was," he said, after a moment, "genuinely talented."
"She was," Genevieve said simply. "She is.
Whatever else, she was always genuinely talented, and I was always genuinely proud of her.
" She looked ahead at the tree line, which was getting closer.
"Now. Tell me about this forest. Is it as beautiful as it looks from the upstairs window, or is that simply the distance flattering it? "
It worked. She felt the moment it worked, the way he let out a breath that was almost a laugh, the way his shoulders shifted, the way he looked at the trees with an expression that was suddenly, quietly, something she had not yet seen on him in full, which was simple uncomplicated pleasure.
"It is better," he said.
And it was. The path wound through birch and old oak, the light coming through in long angled shafts, the ground soft underfoot and the air smelling of cold water and autumn leaves and something older underneath that was just the smell of old woodland being itself.
She understood immediately why he belonged there.
It had the same quality as his study, the same sense of a place that had absorbed the character of the person who loved it.
They dismounted at the edge of a shallow stream to let the horses drink, and he helped her down with his hands at her waist, and the contact lasted slightly longer than it was strictly necessary for the purposes of dismounting, and she was aware of it in a way that she was certain he was also aware of it, and then she was on the ground and they were standing quite close together and looking at the stream.
"The flooding is along here," he said, after a moment. "About half a mile north. The ground looks solid but it is not."
"I will remember," she said. Her voice came out slightly more quietly than she had intended.
He did not immediately step back, and neither did she.
"This part of the estate," he said, in the tone of someone choosing to talk about something because talking about something was easier than the alternative, "was the part my grandfather planted.
Most of the oaks are his. He apparently spent the last twenty years of his life planting things he would never see fully grown, which I always thought was either very wise or very optimistic and I have never quite decided which. "
"Both," Genevieve said. "Wisdom and optimism are not opposites." She looked up at the canopy, the light coming through in moving pieces. "He planted them for you, even though he did not know it was you yet."
There was a silence. She looked back at him to find him watching her with an expression she had not seen before, open and undefended in a way that her chest did something immediately and without consulting her.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I suppose he did."
The horses shifted on the bank. The stream moved over its stones with the small persistent sound of water doing what water does, and the light moved in the trees, and Genevieve thought that she was standing in the right place, for the first time in a long time, and that the distance between parallel lines was perhaps not as fixed as she had believed.
She did not say any of that aloud. She smiled at him instead, and he smiled back, and they stood there a moment longer before turning back to the horses.
It was, she thought, a beginning.