Chapter 15
The morning had started as their mornings usually did.
Thomas had arrived at the stables with no particular stated intention of company to find Genevieve already there, in conversation with the bay mare.
She was speaking in the confiding tone she used with animals and small children and, occasionally, the more approachable members of his staff.
She had looked up when he appeared and smiled at him with the uncomplicated pleasure of someone who was simply glad.
He had felt it land in his chest the way it always landed those days, warm and slightly inconvenient, and had said something about the weather being good for a ride and gone to saddle his horse.
This was, he was aware, a pattern. He was also aware that he had no particular intention of disrupting it, because the alternative was acknowledging what the pattern meant, and he was not quite ready to do that before breakfast.
They rode out through the eastern gate in the comfortable near-silence that had become their natural register on those mornings.
The kind of quiet that did not ask anything of either of them and was therefore the most honest thing between them, which was saying something given that a great deal between them had become honest recently in ways he had not anticipated and could not quite account for.
The frost was still on the grass in the shadowed places.
The sky was the pale clear blue of a cold morning that intended to become a good day.
Beside him, Genevieve had her face tipped up slightly, eyes half closed, simply feeling the air, and he looked at her for a moment in the way he had stopped pretending he did not look at her, and then returned his attention to the path.
They left the horses at the edge of the tree line and walked down to the stream, as they often did when the morning allowed it, the ground soft underfoot and the air in the trees carrying the particular cold clarity of running water nearby.
The stream was low that morning, winter-shallow, moving over its stones with a quiet persistence that he had always found, without ever having said so to anyone, genuinely restful.
He had been thinking about the old kitchen garden for several weeks.
He had been thinking about it in the way he thought about things he cared about, turning it over in his mind at odd moments, setting it aside and returning to it, testing the edges of the idea to see where it held and where it did not.
He had not mentioned it to anyone, because the ideas were not yet formed enough to survive the exposure of being spoken aloud.
And because there was something about half-formed ideas that required a particular quality of listener, someone who would receive them without requiring them to be more finished than they were.
He was not certain when he had begun to think of Genevieve as that kind of listener.
He suspected it had been gradual, one of the many things that had shifted between them by accumulation rather than declaration, small weight by small weight until the balance had tipped entirely without announcing itself.
"The old kitchen garden," he said, which was not how he had intended to begin, if he had intended to begin at all.
She looked at him with the attentiveness that was simply how she looked at things she was interested in.
"The walled one, near the east wing?"
"It has not been used properly in about fifteen years.
Before my father died." He looked at the stream rather than at her, because it was easier to think when he was not looking at her directly, which was a development he had also stopped pretending was not happening.
"The wall is still sound. The soil would need work, but the structure is there. "
He paused. "I have been thinking about restoring it. Not simply as a kitchen garden, something larger than that. An orchard along the southern wall, where the light is best. A cutting garden in the center. Perhaps a proper greenhouse along the north side, so that things could be grown year-round."
He stopped. The idea was coming out more fully formed than he had realized it was, which was what happened when you said things aloud to someone who was actually listening. "My grandmother used to grow things before her hip made it difficult. She would deny caring about it if asked."
"She would absolutely deny it," Genevieve agreed, with the warmth she always had when she spoke of her, which was constant and genuine and one of the things about her he had come to rely on.
"But she would spend every morning there," she continued, "and she would tell everyone she simply happened to be passing.
" She was quiet for a moment, looking at the water.
"Thomas, that is a genuinely lovely idea. "
"It may be impractical," he said, because he had learned that the first thing he did when someone received an idea well was immediately qualify it.
"The wall is sound, the soil can be improved, and you have the space," she said, with the calm, direct practicality she brought to things she was taking seriously. "None of those are impracticalities, they are simply tasks. What would you put along the western wall?"
He hesitated for a moment.
“Espalier fruit trees. Perhaps some climbing roses. Maybe even Violette apples…”
“Purple apples?” she asked.
“No,” he snorted. “Well, yes, they are a French variety my grandfather had his eye on but could never source. He said they made red or pink juice and were as delicious raw as they were baked.”
That sounds wonderful!” Genevieve gasped, clapping her hands. “We simply must get them!”
“We must,” he smiled warmly. “Samuel has friends in France; he could help us.”
“Of course he does,” Genevieve laughed. “Where does not that man have friends?”
Thomas laughed with her and shook his head. For a moment, he let the scene wash over him. The gentle, ordinary, domestic joy he found with his wife.
"You have gone quiet," Genevieve said, not with concern, simply with the noticing quality she had when she was paying attention, and something had changed.
He looked at her.
She was standing a foot away from him in her riding habit with her auburn hair catching the thin winter light and her cheeks faintly pink from the cold.
She was looking up at him with those clear, direct eyes that never seemed to require anything from him except honesty, and the observation he had been making, the comparison, the unwelcome clarity of it finished itself in a way he had not expected it to.
He had made the comparison, and she had won.
Not against her sister, not as a replacement for something lost, simply on her own terms, as herself, as the woman who had appeared in his life on an impossible morning and had quietly and completely and without apparent effort made it better in every way that mattered.
He was not over anything. He was somewhere entirely new.
"Thomas?" Her voice was quieter now, uncertain in a way she rarely was, some quality of the moment reaching her, and she looked up at him with an expression that was open and unguarded and faintly searching, as though she was trying to read something in his face and had found something she had not expected.
He reached up and brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, which was not a decision he made so much as something that simply happened, his hand gentle at her face, and he felt her go very still beneath the touch, her breath catching almost imperceptibly, her eyes holding his with an expression that was… that was…
He kissed her.
It was not dramatic. It was not the kind of kiss that announced itself or made demands.
It was quiet and warm and careful, his hand still at her cheek, and she was still for one suspended second and then she kissed him back with the same gentleness, her hand coming up to rest lightly against his chest, and the stream moved over its stones and the cold morning air held them both and everything was very quiet and very still and very clear.
He drew back slowly. She looked up at him, eyes open, color risen in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold, her expression something he did not have a name for and thought perhaps he did not need, because it was simply her.
Simply Genevieve, looking at him as though she had been patient for a very long time and had just discovered the patience had been worth it.
He thought he probably owed her an enormous apology for how long it had taken him to arrive there. He thought he would owe her that later, when he had the words for it.
"The climbing roses," she said, after a moment, her voice entirely steady in a way that made him fairly certain it had required some effort, "would be beautiful along the western wall."
He looked at her. Something in his chest, which had been wound tight for longer than he could accurately account for, released by a measure he had not known was possible.
"Yes," he said. "I think they would."
She smiled then—the private one, the real one, the one he had been cataloging for months without admitting to himself why—and turned back toward the horses.
He stood for a moment at the edge of the stream watching her go with the feeling of a man who has been standing in the same place for a very long time and has just, finally, taken a step.
Chapter 15
Samuel arrived early enough that the breakfast things had not yet been cleared and the morning was still doing the tentative, provisional thing it did before it had fully committed to being a day.
Genevieve was in the morning room with her second cup of tea and a letter she was composing to Caroline, which had been going well until she had tried to describe the kissing incident, at which point she had written three different sentences, crossed out all three, and decided that some things were better communicated in person and with a great deal more tea than she currently had access to.