Chapter 13 #2
She wanted him. Not just in the vague, hopeful way she had wanted things in the abstract. She wanted him, in particular. The way he listened. The way he moved through his own estate with the ease of a man who understood the land he was responsible for and had made peace with that responsibility.
The quiet humor that appeared when he had stopped managing himself. The expression he wore when she said something that landed somewhere real within him, surprising him, and then his immediate attempt to look unsurprised.
She had cataloged these things the way she cataloged figures in the ledgers, because she was, at her core, a person who paid attention to what was in front of her and found comfort in the accumulation of known things.
She knew him. She had known him for months now in the way that mattered, in the small and unrepeatable way that was built from proximity and genuine attention and the shared texture of ordinary days.
And knowing him had not made her patient in the serene, self-contained way she liked to present to the world.
It had made her want. Steadily and completely and with the full weight of someone who knew precisely what she wanted and understood, with equal clarity, that she could not seem to make it happen.
That was, she thought, the particular difficulty of loving a careful man.
The caring was easy. She had always been good at caring about people.
But there was a version of her situation in which the care became a kind of waiting.
And waiting, which if you were not precise about it, could quietly become hoping, and hoping was a less reliable thing than she preferred to depend upon.
She did not, she told herself firmly, intend to depend upon it.
She intended to continue doing exactly what she was doing, which was being herself, as consistently and as genuinely as she could manage, and trusting that this was both the right thing to do and, eventually, sufficient.
She had not assembled their marriage from nothing through patience and warmth and the sheer accumulated goodwill of four hundred ordinary days simply to lose confidence in it because it had not yet arrived at its destination.
She knew where it was going. She could see it from there.
She needed to let him find his own way.
The carriage turned, and she felt the smile settle into something quieter, something that was not quite happiness and not quite longing but held both of them.
Looking out at the dark, she thought that she had always been, fundamentally, an optimist, and that it seemed, on the whole, like the better option.
Chapter 13
Lady Harrington did not ambush people. She considered ambushing to be the conversational equivalent of bad posture; the action of those who had not thought carefully enough about what they were doing and why.
When she wished to speak to someone about something significant, she chose her moment with the deliberateness of a woman who had been choosing her moments for sixty-three years and had developed considerable expertise in the selection.
She chose Thomas's moment on a Tuesday morning, when he came in from his ride to find her already installed in the breakfast room with her tea and her particular quality of settled intention that he had learned—at approximately age seven—meant that whatever he had planned for the next half hour was no longer his primary concern.
"Sit down," she said pleasantly.
Thomas sat down. He accepted the tea that appeared at his elbow and looked at his grandmother with the expression of a man who knew what was coming and had decided his best strategy was to appear as though he did not.
"You look well," she said, which was not what she had come to say and they both knew it.
"Thank you," Thomas said. "As do you."
"I rode out yesterday afternoon," she continued, in the unhurried way she built toward things. "Along the eastern path. I happened to see the two of you returning from the forest. Genevieve was laughing at something."
Thomas said nothing.
His grandmother looked at him for a moment with the expression she wore when she was deciding how much to say.
"Your father," she said, "was a cautious man.
A good man, but cautious in the particular way of someone who had been hurt early and decided that caution was the same thing as safety.
He managed this estate quite correctly for many years and kept everyone in it at a careful, considerate distance.
He died without, I think, having let anyone know him the way he deserved to be known. "
She paused. "Your mother tried. She had more patience than most women would have had and she loved him genuinely and she spent a good number of years waiting for him to believe that it was safe to love her back in full.
" Another pause, shorter. "He did, eventually.
Too late to be as useful as it might have been, but he did. "
She looked at her grandson with the steady, unsparing attention of a woman who had observed her family for sixty years and was not going to pretend she had not.
"I am telling you this not to wound you.
I am telling you because this house sounds different than it has in a very long time, and I know why it sounds different, and I would like very much not to watch history repeat itself. "
Thomas nodded. He had heard this before, of course, but it felt different now.
"She has a very good laugh," his grandmother said.
"The kind that sounds like she means it, which in my experience is considerably rarer than it ought to be.
" She set her cup down with the small precise movement she used when she was transitioning from the preamble to the point.
"She is also, Thomas, in case it has somehow escaped your attention, a remarkably beautiful young woman. "
"Grandmother," Thomas said, in the tone that was intended to close a subject.
"I am not finished," she continued, in a tone that did not acknowledge closed subjects.
"She is beautiful, and she is good, and she has made this house into something it has not been for quite some time, which is a home that feels as though someone in it is genuinely glad to be alive.
The staff are happier. The accounts are in better order than they have been in years.
There is, on occasion, the sound of someone humming in the drawing room, which is not something these walls have heard in rather too long.
" She looked at him steadily. "And you are treating her as though she is a very pleasant houseguest whose comfort you feel responsible for but whose presence you do not quite know what to do with. "
The accuracy of this landed somewhere Thomas did not particularly want it to land. He kept his expression level.
"I treat her very well," he said.
"You treat her with great consideration and enormous distance," she replied, "which is not the same thing.
I think you know it is not the same thing, and I think she knows it too, and I think the fact that she has not said so to you directly is a function of her own considerable grace and not an indication that she has not noticed. "
Thomas looked at the window. The grounds were bright that morning, frost still on the grass in the places the sun had not yet reached. "I am not," he said carefully, "going to discuss my marriage with you."
"You do not need to discuss it," she replied. "I am not asking for a discussion. I am telling you something I believe you need to hear, and then I shall have my breakfast, and you can do whatever you like with it." She folded her hands in her lap.
"You are punishing her for something that was not her fault, Thomas.
Not deliberately, not unkindly, but you are doing it, nonetheless.
You are keeping yourself at a remove because it feels safer than the alternative, and in the meantime there is a young woman in this house who deserves considerably better than safe. "
"I am not punishing her," Thomas said. The words came out with more edge than he intended.
"No," his grandmother agreed, without flinching from the edge. "I do not believe you mean to. I believe you are frightened, which is a different thing and considerably more forgivable, but which produces the same result if you allow it to continue unchecked."
She picked up her cup again, signaling, in the way he had learned to read over a lifetime, that she was coming to the end of what she had to say.
"She is not Clarissa. Whatever happened with Clarissa, and I have my views on that which I have kept largely to myself, Genevieve is not like her sister at all, and does not deserve to pay the debts of her sister's choices.
I think, if you examine yourself honestly, you know that. "
Thomas said nothing.
"That is all," his grandmother concluded, and reached for the toast with the serene finality of a woman who had said what she came to say and required nothing further from the conversation.
Thomas excused himself shortly afterward on the grounds of correspondence that did not, in truth, require his immediate attention.
He went to his study and stood at the window for a while without sitting down, which was not something he did, and looked at the grounds without particularly seeing them, which was also not something he did, and tried to do what his grandmother had suggested and examine himself honestly, which was something he had been avoiding with considerable dedication for several weeks.
The honest examination, it turned out, was not especially comfortable.
He cared about Genevieve. That was the first and plainest fact, and he had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the second week of their marriage, when she had appeared in the corridor with a book and walked into the doorframe and looked so thoroughly unbothered by it that he had laughed before he had made any decision to laugh, which was the sort of thing he had not done in some time. It had startled him.