Chapter 15 #2
She heard the knock at the door, and then voices in the hall, and then Mr. Cavendish appeared in the doorway with the particular expression he wore when something had arrived that required her attention.
"Mr. Rutherford, ma'am."
"Samuel?" She was already setting down her cup. "Yes, of course, show him in."
Samuel came in with his usual ease and his usual warmth and a quality underneath both of them that she clocked immediately, because she had known him long enough by now to know what he looked like when he was managing something carefully.
He looked like himself, which was to say pleasant and unhurried and entirely at ease, and underneath that he looked like a man who had something to say and was deciding how to say it.
"You are very early," she said, smiling at him. "Thomas has ridden out, he will not be back until luncheon at least. But sit down, please, and have some tea."
"Thank you." He sat, and accepted the tea, and looked at her with the directness that was one of the things she liked best about him, the quality he shared with Thomas of not making you wait longer than necessary for the thing they had actually come to say.
"I apologize for the hour. I wanted to catch you before the day got away from itself. "
"You do not need to apologize," she said. "You are always welcome here, Samuel, you know that." She studied his face. "What's happened?"
He set down his cup with the small, deliberate movement of a man organizing his words.
"Clarissa is back," he said.
The morning room was very quiet. Outside, one of the groundsmen was doing something distant and rhythmic somewhere near the east garden. Genevieve heard it with the strange, heightened clarity of someone whose attention had just been entirely arrested.
"Clarissa," she said.
"Yes."
She took a breath and arranged her face into the expression that felt correct, which was the expression of a woman receiving good news about a sister she loved, because she did love her sister, that was simply and plainly true regardless of anything else.
She was not going to sit in her morning room and feel anything other than glad about the return of a person she had been worried about.
"That's wonderful," she said, and it came out warmly enough that she thought she meant it, which she was fairly certain she did… mostly. "Where are they staying? Are they at my parents' house?"
His expression had changed. Not dramatically, Samuel did not do dramatic expressions, but she could see it, the slight tightening, the quality of attention that preceded something difficult.
"Samuel," she said quietly.
"She is not," he said carefully, "from what I am hearing, with a husband."
The sentence arrived and she heard it and processed it and then heard it again, and the morning room remained exactly where it was and the groundsman continued his distant rhythmic work and the tea in her cup cooled by a degree, and she sat very still and looked at Samuel with the feeling of someone for whom the floor has shifted slightly without actually moving.
"I beg your pardon?" she said, because she needed to hear it again.
"The understanding I had," Samuel said, in the measured, gentle way he spoke when he was being careful with someone he cared about, "was that she had left with a captain. That there was an attachment, a serious one, and that she had gone with him."
"Yes," Genevieve said. That had been her understanding too. That had been everyone's understanding.
"It appears," Samuel said, "that the attachment may have been rather more serious on one side than the other.
" He looked at her steadily, not flinching from it, because he was that kind of friend and she was grateful for it even as she felt the information landing with the slow, cold weight of something she was going to need time to properly receive.
"She is back, and she is apparently alone, and the story is beginning to move, Genevieve. It will be in every drawing room in the county within the week. I would estimate sooner."
She nodded. She was aware that she was nodding and that the nodding was something her body had decided to do while her mind was elsewhere, somewhere adjacent to the morning room, not quite present.
"The tea party," she said.
"This afternoon, yes." His voice was careful. "I thought you and Thomas should know before you walked into a room full of people who might already know and who would absolutely be watching to see how you received it."
"Yes." She nodded again. "Yes, of course. You are right. Thank you." She looked at him, and felt the warmth she had for him, genuine and considerable, sitting alongside everything else. "Samuel, thank you. Truly. You did not have to come all this way at this hour."
"I rather thought I did," he said simply.
“I suppose I am grateful you did,” she nodded, looking back down at her tea.
She thought about Clarissa.
She thought about her sister at seventeen, sitting at the pianoforte in the blue drawing room at home, playing something she had composed herself with a focus and a passion that had always been beautiful to watch, entirely absorbed, entirely unaware of being observed.
She thought about Clarissa at her dressing table the morning of some long-ago assembly, laughing at something Genevieve had said, her reflection bright in the mirror.
She thought about the particular quality of her sister's certainty, the way she had always moved through the world as though it had been arranged for her comfort.
It was a quality that had sometimes been maddening and had always, underneath the madness, been something Genevieve had quietly admired, because she had understood it came from a genuine and unshakeable confidence in herself that was, in its way, rather wonderful.
She hoped Clarissa was all right.
She hoped she was home. She hoped, despite everything, that the Penrose house was doing what houses were supposed to do, which was close around the person who needed it.
When it was Samuel’s turn to leave she thanked him again and led him toward the foyer.
“I do hope next time I will be coming with better news,” he said.
“My sister’s return is good news,” she assured him.
He studied her face for a moment.
“In one sense it is, in another, I do hope you are ready for the whispers that may come with her,” Samuel said gently before walking through the door.
Genevieve stood there for a moment, her hands held in front of her, her gloves hiding the way her knuckles went white. Then she turned.
She went back to the morning room and sat down and looked at the half-written letter to Caroline and the cooling tea and the crossed-out sentences about the kiss that seemed, now, to belong to a morning that was very far away.
And then, slowly and without quite meaning to, she felt the nervousness arrive.
It crept in at the edges, quiet and uninvited, settling in the way that fears settled when they were not the dramatic, named kind.
Rather they were the small, ambient kind that did not announce themselves clearly enough to be argued with.
She tried to identify it and found it slippery, refusing to resolve into a single specific thing she could look at directly and dismiss.
It was not, she thought, jealousy. She examined that carefully, because she owed herself the honesty of the examination, and she did not think it was jealousy. She did not want her sister's life or her sister's situation, which by all accounts was not a situation anyone would want.
It was not quite fear, either, though it had something of fear's texture.
It was the particular unease of someone who had been building something carefully and had just become aware that the ground beneath it was less certain than they had believed. She and Thomas had been moving toward something.
She had felt it; had been as certain of it as she had been certain of anything.
And the kiss had been… the kiss had been real, she knew it had been real, she had not imagined the way he had looked at her afterward or the warmth that had been present in him ever since, unhurried and quiet but absolutely there.
But Clarissa was back.
And Thomas had loved Clarissa, or had believed he had, which amounted to the same thing in terms of what it had cost him when she left.
And now she was back, and alone, and the story was moving, and this afternoon they were going to walk into a room full of people who would be watching both of them with the focused interest of people who had just been given a new and considerably more interesting version of a story they had thought was concluded.
She did not think Thomas would… she was not suggesting that he would…
She pressed her lips together and looked out the window.
She did not know why she was nervous. That was the honest answer.
She could not name the specific fear with enough precision to argue herself out of it, and the inability to name it was itself unsettling.
Genevieve was generally quite good at knowing what she felt and why, and this feeling was refusing to be known in that way.
She picked up her pen. She looked at the letter.
The thing about Thomas, she had written, before the crossing-out had begun, is that I believe he is trying.
She looked at that sentence for a long moment.
She believed it still. She believed it with the steady, warm conviction that was simply how she believed things she had arrived at through genuine attention and genuine care rather than through hope alone.
She believed it because she knew him, and knowing him was not the same as hoping, it was something considerably more solid than that.
But she was also, she understood, sitting in the morning room—with the cold tea and the crossed-out sentences and the news that had arrived with Samuel's careful, kind voice—afraid.
Not of Thomas, not of what he would do, not of anything she could point to with confidence. Simply afraid, in the small and human way of someone who wants something very much and has just been reminded that wanting something very much is not the same as having it secured.
She set the pen down. She straightened the letter against the table, a small, purposeless gesture, and then she straightened it again.
She thought about the stream. She thought about his hand at her cheek and the quality of the silence after, and the climbing roses, and the way he had said yes with something in his voice that was not about roses at all.
She thought about every morning at the stables and every evening by the fire, and every small, accumulated thing that had shifted the distance between them from something managed into something chosen.
She was going to hold onto those things.
Not desperately, nor with the white-knuckled grip of someone who was frightened, but with the quiet, deliberate steadiness of someone who had decided that what they had built was real and worth protecting, and who was not going to allow an uninvited morning to undo the work of all those careful months.
Clarissa being back changed things. She did not yet know what things, or how, or to what degree.
But she knew Thomas. She knew him in the way that mattered, in the small and real and unperformable way, and she was going to hold onto that too.
She picked up the pen. She drew a line through the remaining draft of the letter and turned to a fresh page.
Caroline,
Come as soon as you can. There is rather a lot to tell you, and I find I need someone to tell it to.
Mrs. Genevieve Harrington
She folded it, sealed it, and rang for it to be sent, and then sat for a moment in the quiet morning room with her hands in her lap and her heart doing something complicated and her face, for once, doing nothing in particular at all.
Outside, the day had committed to itself. The light was full, the frost gone from the grass, the grounds bright and ordinary and entirely unaware that anything had changed.
She took a breath. She straightened her spine. She reached for the teapot, found it cold, and rang for a fresh one.
There was, she decided, absolutely no value in falling apart before the tea party.
Even as she told herself that, she could not help but wonder how Thomas would react. Would he want to see Clarissa again? Would those moments in the garden be diminished?
She hoped not.
And right then, hope was all she had.