Chapter 17
The morning had been unremarkable, which was precisely what Thomas had wanted from it.
He had ridden into town with no particular urgency.
Accounts to settle with the tailor, a letter to collect, a brief and ultimately inconclusive conversation with his solicitor about a boundary matter that had been slowly failing to resolve itself for the better part of a season.
The kind of errands that kept a man occupied without requiring much of him. He had been grateful for that.
He had found lately that his thoughts required a certain management, that if he gave them too much open ground, they tended to wander, though not always in the directions he expected.
That morning, Genevieve had said something at breakfast, something small and dry about the state of the east garden wall, and he had laughed before he had meant to, and she had looked at him with that brief, pleased surprise she had when she did not expect to land something, and he had thought about it twice more before he had reached town and had not entirely noticed that he was doing it.
That was the thing he had not accounted for. Not the difficulty of the marriage. The other thing.
He looked at his pocket watch.
Ah.
If he was not quick, he would be late for the tea party they were attending that afternoon at the Petersons’. Their friend’s estate was not so far away that lateness was a guarantee. Still, he would not embarrass Genevieve by being unfashionably late.
A shortcut.
He should take a shortcut if he was to keep his horse from exhausting.
He turned onto the woodland trail that cut through the eastern edge of the property. The trees were in full summer weight, the air cooler beneath the canopy, and it gave him time to settle before he arrived back at the house. He needed, more than he would have admitted to anyone, the settling.
Marriage was not what he had expected. He had entered into it with good intentions and a clear enough understanding of what was required of him, and he believed he was fulfilling those requirements adequately.
Genevieve was… she was very good. She was kind and composed and managed the household with a quiet competence, even if that competence was occasionally overshadowed by a dropped teacup or spilled wine.
He liked Genevieve.
He respected her.
He was aware, in some not entirely comfortable corner of his mind, that she deserved a husband who felt more than liking and respect. He loved her, and he thought himself affectionate, but he was accustomed to a love that felt different. Passionate, fast, unpredictable.
Like Clarissa.
And yet, he was beginning to feel that passion was perhaps not what he was designed for. Steadiness and calm had done him wonders in recent weeks. He was not constantly bracing for anything with Genevieve. Well, that was not strictly true.
But bracing to catch your wife when she is known to trip over the cat, the rug, or simply open air, has a different feeling to bracing for your lover to rediscover her temper. He was still thinking about this when he heard the carriage.
It came around the curve in the trail and slowed, and then stopped, and Thomas brought his horse to a halt and looked at the Penrose crest on the door panel and felt the bottom drop very quietly out of the afternoon.
The door opened.
Clarissa looked out at him.
He had imagined this moment. Not in a form of preparedness, but as fantasy.
His heart had still wanted the moment that his lady love would return to him.
He had thought that this would stay as fantasy.
That enough time had passed. That he was a married man now and his life had taken its shape, and he had made his peace with the version of it he had been given.
He had been lying to himself, and he understood that now with a clarity that was not entirely welcome.
She looked extraordinary. That was the first thought, arriving before he could stop it.
The simple, unmediated fact of her face, which he had spent the better part of a year trying to think about less.
She was smiling at him with the full warmth of that smile, the one he had once thought was his, and the sight of it did something to the careful structure he had been quietly assembling inside himself since the morning he had understood she was not coming back.
He removed his hat.
"Miss Penrose." Then, because formality seemed almost absurd: "Clarissa."
"Thomas." She said his name the way she always had.
As though it were a small pleasure to say it.
He had forgotten that, or had told himself he had forgotten it.
"I could not believe it when I saw you. I had hoped…
I had thought I might have a chance to speak with you, but I did not know how to—" She shook her head, still smiling, and he watched her groom move to assist her and understood that she was getting out of the carriage.
He dismounted.
She crossed the track toward him, and he was struck, not for the first time and not comfortably, by how natural it felt to watch her move.
She had always carried herself as though she were entirely certain of her welcome, and he had always given it to her, and here they were again on a quiet woodland path with nothing resolved and everything changed.
He kept his face even. He was very good at keeping his face even. It was perhaps one of the more useful things he had ever learned.
"I am glad I ran into you," she said, stopping a few feet away. Her eyes were moving over his face with an attention that he felt acutely. "I have been thinking, there is so much I wanted to say, and I did not know where to begin, and now here you are."
"There is truly no need," he said. He felt his voice gentle in the way it only ever seemed to for Clarissa.
"There is," she said. Firmly, but gently. "For my sake, if not yours."
A pause. He glanced back at his horse, who was entirely unbothered, and wished briefly that he possessed a similar temperament.
"How are you?" he asked. "Since your return."
"Difficult," she said, with an honesty that caught him slightly off guard. He had expected the charming deflection. "My parents are well. I am sure you know that, though." She glanced down for just a moment. "But I am home. I keep telling myself that."
He nodded slowly.
"And your sister—?"
He was not entirely certain why he said it.
The question had been somewhere in the back of his mind since the moment the carriage door opened, whether Genevieve knew, whether she had been told, what it meant for the household he was still learning how to inhabit.
It was the sensible thing to think about. The appropriate thing.
Something moved across Clarissa's face. He caught it, just barely, just for a second, before the smile returned, warm and seamless.
He was left holding the impression of it.
Not hurt. Not quite. Something more complicated, and more interesting, and he told himself firmly that it was not his business.
"Genevieve," she said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. "She must be so happy. With everything."
"She is well," he said.
He left it there. He was aware of the brevity of it and chose it anyway. Some instinct that he could not fully explain kept him from saying more, from offering Genevieve up to this conversation the way he might discuss any other subject. It felt wrong in a way that made his stomach twist.
Clarissa looked at him for a moment. Then she moved, a small, decisive step, toward the edge of the track, further from the carriage, and he found himself moving with her.
They stood in the dappled shadow of the tree line, close enough that he was aware of the warmth of the afternoon on her and the familiar scent of her perfume, which had not changed, which he found himself noticing with the particular unhappiness of a man who would very much rather not.
"I need to say this properly," she said.
Her voice had lost its brightness. What was underneath it was quieter and cost her more, or seemed to.
"I was foolish. I was vain and impulsive, and I let myself believe something that I should have questioned.
There was an officer." She met his eyes. "I think you know some version of it."
"Only what you wrote in the letter," he said carefully.
"He was—" She stopped. Seemed to gather herself.
"He was very persuasive. The sort of man who makes you feel as though you are the center of the world, and I…
I had never felt quite like that before, and I did not think clearly, and I believed that what he felt was real.
" A pause. "It was not. He did not love me.
I do not think he was capable of it. But I did not understand that until it was… until I had already—"
She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
“I was a fool,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
Thomas looked at her. He was not certain he believed every part of it.
He was not, despite the way Clarissa had always made him feel, entirely without judgment.
But he did not disbelieve it either. He knew she was not a simple person, had always known that, and the story as she told it had an uncomfortable plausibility.
More than that: he felt, looking at her now, that there was real pain in her. That whatever the full accounting of it, she had not emerged from the experience without cost.
And that was the problem, he thought distantly. He had always found it very difficult to encounter Clarissa's pain and do nothing about it.
"I was wrong to leave," she said. Her voice was very quiet now. "I have thought about it every day since. That is the truth, Thomas, whatever you choose to do with it."
He should have said something measured here. Something kind but bounded, the sort of response a man gives when he has his feelings at a reliable distance. He had the words prepared, more or less. He had been preparing them for months.