Chapter 17 #2
"You have nothing to be forgiven for," he said, his heart hammering in his chest.
He meant it, and he also knew, even as he said it, that it was not the whole truth.
That somewhere beneath the generosity of it was a man who had spent a very long time not being entirely all right, and who was now standing in the woods with the cause of it and finding that he still, still, could not be anything less than kind to her.
And then she was against him.
It happened quickly. The sound she made, something between a sob and his name, and then she had closed the distance and pressed herself into him and her arms were around him and he had a single suspended moment of sheer surprise before his arms came up around her, because what else could he do?
Because this was Clarissa, and she was weeping, and he had never in his life been capable of standing unmoved beside her distress.
He held her. He told himself that was all he was doing.
And yet what arrived, unbidden, in that same suspended moment, was not what he would have predicted. It was Genevieve's face. Not as accusation, simply as presence, the way a candle registers in peripheral vision even when you are looking somewhere else.
The particular quality of her attention when she was listening to him. The way she tucked her feet beneath her in the chair by the fire and did not notice she had done it. Ordinary things. Entirely ordinary things that had apparently been accumulating somewhere without his permission.
The ache in his chest was real. He did not try to deny it. He was simply no longer entirely certain what it was for. The way he wanted to hold her tighter but had to restrain himself from doing so in the name of propriety.
The weeping subsided eventually, the way the weather does. She pulled back and pressed his handkerchief to her eyes with the brisk efficiency of a woman reclaiming herself, and he was left with the sensation of her absence where she had been.
"I am sorry," she said. "I did not plan to—"
"It is all right."
"I am not usually—"
"Clarissa. It's all right."
She looked up at him. Her eyes were bright from the crying, and her expression, in that unguarded moment before she remembered to compose it, was something he had not seen on her before. It was something that looked almost like uncertainty. It suited her in a way that was deeply inconvenient.
He offered her his arm and walked her back to the carriage. The ordinary mechanics of it helped: the groom, the step, the adjustment of skirts, all the small practical furniture of the moment that gave his hands something to do and his mind somewhere to be.
At the door, she turned and looked down at him. The smile was back, but softer now, as though some of the architecture of it had been temporarily taken down.
"Will you see me again?" she asked. "I would like… When I am more settled. I would like us to talk properly."
He should have said something careful. He was aware, even in the moment that careful was the appropriate register, that a wiser version of himself might have expressed warm goodwill and left it at something vague.
"Yes," he said before his mind and his mouth could agree on a course of action. “I am sure Genevieve would like to see you again.” He added, hurriedly.
She pressed his hand briefly, warmly, and the carriage door closed, and the wheels began to turn on the packed earth of the trail, and he stood and watched it go.
He stood there for some time after it had disappeared from view.
The wood was very quiet. A bird moved in the canopy somewhere above him, rustling through leaves and then gone.
He had been so certain he was past those feelings.
He had built something new, had been building it, carefully and with genuine effort, in the months since the wedding.
Genevieve was good, and he was grateful for her, and there were moments, recently, that had surprised him with their warmth.
He had thought that was enough. He had thought perhaps it was even becoming something more than enough.
And then Clarissa had looked at him from a carriage door and smiled, saying his name the way only she said it, and he was standing on a woodland path in the middle of the afternoon feeling like a man who had just discovered that a wall he thought was solid had rather less behind it than he had assumed.
He walked back to his horse and stood with a hand on the animal's neck, and made himself think about what came next.
About the house ahead. About Genevieve, who was probably sitting somewhere in it right now reading something she had found quietly amusing or talking to his grandmother with that patient tact that always slightly impressed him.
Or doing any number of ordinary things that constituted a life they were in the early stages of building together.
She would be glad Clarissa was home. He was certain of that.
She never said anything against her sister.
Not a word, not even an inflection. Whatever complicated history existed between them, Genevieve's affection appeared undiminished by it.
She would want to see her. She would welcome her warmly and mean it.
Thomas mounted his horse and turned for home, and he thought about how to tell his wife that her sister had returned, and he did not let himself think about what he had felt standing in the woods, because he was not yet ready to look at it clearly.
He suspected that was going to become a problem.