Chapter 18
Thomas was late.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. He had a particular relationship with the hour that Genevieve had come to understand in the months of their marriage.
Which was to say that he always arrived eventually, and always with a slightly distracted expression that suggested the preceding quarter of an hour had not gone quite as he planned.
She had grown fond of that expression. It softened him in a way that his more careful, public face did not. At the same time, she did wish that he would not be late to their social events.
She was standing in front of the Petersons’ estate, having taken the carriage while Thomas was in town.
She had been spinning with nerves ever since she had heard of Clarissa’s return. The only one she wanted to speak to on the subject, was Thomas. She looked down the road that approached the Peterson’s house, and wrapped her arms around herself as way of protection.
She saw him coming up the gravel path just as she reached the bottom of the steps leading to the front entrance, and she paused, waiting.
He was walking quickly, hat in hand, his dark coat showing the signs of a man who had ridden rather than taken the carriage.
When he saw her waiting, something in his face shifted. Something like relief in his eyes.
"You are late," she said, by way of greeting.
"I am slightly late," he said. "There is a meaningful distinction."
She almost laughed. She would have, perhaps, on another morning.
But she had spent the carriage ride here arranging and rearranging the words she wished to say to him, and now that he was beside her, walking toward the door with his hand briefly, warmly at her back, she leaned close and kept her voice low.
"I need to speak with you. Properly. Before we are swallowed up by all of this."
He turned his head slightly toward her.
"As it happens," he said, equally quiet, "I need to speak with you as well."
There was something in his tone that she noticed but could not immediately decode. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could the doors swung open.
“Mr. and Mrs. Harrington. Welcome,” Mrs. Peterson said as she opened the door with both hands. It was certainly an enthusiastic welcome, and the moment was sealed away behind them like a letter slipped into an envelope and addressed to later.
“Thank you, Mrs. Peterson,” Genevieve said.
“Of course, of course,” the older woman replied. “Come in. The tea is still warm, and chef will be bringing out other refreshments shortly.”
“You are too kind,” Thomas said as they stepped in. “I apologize that I was not here sooner.”
“I am sure that there was a good reason for your lateness,” Mrs. Peterson said.
Genevieve felt Thomas tense next to her.
She looked up at his profile. His expression was tense, but only in the ways she knew to look for.
The front of his eyebrows were pushed down slightly, his eyes were hard, and his lips were fractionally pressed together.
The gathering was larger than Genevieve had anticipated.
The Petersons entertained generously, and the drawing room was bright with afternoon light and the layered sound of two dozen conversations being conducted simultaneously at varying degrees of discretion.
Genevieve smiled, accepted compliments, enquired after health and relatives and the outcomes of recent travels, and all the while she was aware, with the particular sensitivity that social discomfort tends to produce, of the currents moving beneath the surface of the room.
People were talking about something specific.
She could feel it before she could confirm it.
The slight adjustments in posture when she approached a group, the microsecond of calculation before a smile was offered, the conversations that altered their course like water redirecting around a stone.
She knew this particular texture of gathering very well.
It was the texture of a room that had recently received interesting news.
She suspected she knew what news it was.
Thomas was speaking with Mr. Peterson near the windows. Genevieve kept him in her peripheral vision without appearing to do so, a skill she had honed considerably in recent months, and accepted a cup of tea from a passing housemaid with a murmur of thanks.
Caroline appeared at her elbow with quiet efficiency.
"I need to tell you something," Caroline said, without preamble. Her voice was barely above a breath. "Everyone is saying Clarissa was seen in town. Last night, and again this morning."
Genevieve absorbed this with the smooth composure she had been practicing since girlhood.
"I know," she said simply.
Caroline blinked.
"You know?"
“Mr. Rutherford paid me a visit and informed me. It was very good of him to do so," she said softly. She looked up at Thomas, who appeared to have caught her eye.
She had expected Thomas to say something then.
He had been watching them, after all. To confirm it, perhaps, or to add some small detail.
He said nothing. But his eyes flickered with anxiety for a moment, his shoulders tensing.
That was not surprise. She was certain of it in the way she had become certain of many things about her husband.
If he had not been surprised then…
Had he known?
Her heart dropped as she considered the possibility that her husband had known the woman he loved had returned and he had neglected to inform her of this fact.
Caroline caught her eye and stepped back, giving them the particular gift of nearby distance.
Genevieve moved to stand beside Thomas as Mr. Peterson was claimed by his wife, and she kept her face pleasantly arranged. She was aware of every eye that was not quite looking at them, and asked, with only the faintest tautness in her voice, "Did you know that Clarissa was back?"
He turned to her. His own expression was measured. He was doing the same thing she was doing, she realized, and the shared effort of it was almost enough to make her sad.
"I saw her this morning," he said.
For just a moment, a fraction of a second that she immediately reclaimed, the composure slipped.
She felt it in the particular blankness that comes before a stronger feeling arrives.
She saw Thomas see it, and she smiled again and looked away toward the windows where the garden lay in tidy, indifferent order beyond the glass.
He had seen Clarissa. That very morning.
She was not angry. She told herself firmly that she was not angry.
No. Anger presumed that there was a party that had been wronged. As of now, all she knew was that the two of them had met. She did not know what could have been said or done. So she was not angry. She had no right to anger.
What she was, she admitted only to herself, standing very still in a bright room full of people who were watching her with various degrees of subtlety, was afraid. Afraid in a way that she found difficult to name precisely, because it was not fear of Clarissa exactly.
Nor even of what Clarissa's return might mean for the gossip that had only just begun to settle.
It was older than that. It was the fear of someone who knows that the person standing beside her once loved another woman completely.
She could only wonder, in the quietest, most private chamber of her heart, whether something that entire ever fully leaves.
Next to her, she could practically feel the tension radiating from Thomas. She could feel him watching her from her peripheral vision. He was waiting. Perhaps expecting a response. He was not the only one. She could feel others in the party had paused conversations to look at her.
They were waiting to see how she would react.
Would she cause a scene?
She took a slow, steadying breath. She would not give them that satisfaction.
“What was said?” Genevieve asked.
“She asked for forgiveness, I said there was nothing to forgive,” Thomas replied.
Genevieve caught her hands gripping into her skirts before she stopped herself.
“There is more that I need to tell you. Not here," Thomas finally said, breaking the silence.
"No," she agreed. She turned back to face him; a smile plastered on her face. "Not here."
The remainder of the party was a performance she delivered with precision and grace, and when the carriage door finally closed behind them, leaving the Petersons' lit windows receding into the afternoon, the silence between them had a different quality from the one that had accompanied their arrival.
She had smiled until her face ached with it.
She had admired Mrs. Peterson's new drapes, ivory damask, very fine, and she had said so with every appearance of genuine admiration.
She had agreed that the weather had been uncommonly fine for the season, and laughed at a remark she barely heard from a Mr. Somebody whose name she had collected at the door and immediately mislaid somewhere in the hour that followed.
She was very good at all of that. She had always been good at all of that. That day however, it had required a degree of active effort she was not going to think about until she was somewhere private enough to fall apart in, which she was not going to do. But the option was there if she needed it.
Thomas had been watching her. Not in the obvious way. It was quieter, more personal, and she had felt it at intervals throughout the afternoon like a hand briefly placed on her shoulder. She had not looked at him when she felt it. She had not trusted her face.
The carriage moved. The pale winter light was going. The bare hedgerows passed in silence.
"Genevieve."
She turned from the window with an expression she had assembled specifically for this purpose, the pleasant, open one, the one that said I am perfectly well and entirely receptive to whatever you have to say. She had been wearing versions of it all afternoon, and she was very tired of her own face.
He was looking at her with the expression that preceded something he had decided to say, despite finding it difficult. She had learned to recognize it.
"She came to find me," he said. "This morning. When I was riding from town to the Petersons’. I know I should have told you immediately," he said. "I did not know how to—" A pause. "But there simply was not the time between my meeting with her, and my meeting with you."
"What did she want?" Genevieve asked, in the pleasant, even voice she was apparently capable of producing under any circumstances whatsoever, which was a quality she had previously considered an asset.
"I am not entirely certain she knew." He looked at his hands. "She talked for a long time. About what happened. About the officer." He was quiet for a moment, choosing words with the care he brought to things that mattered. "She had believed they would marry.
She said he had told her they would, once his situation was settled, and she had gone with him on that understanding, and by the time she understood the understanding was not mutual, she was already—" He stopped. "She was in a situation she could not easily return from."
Genevieve nodded. She looked at the passing road and nodded and kept her hands folded very quietly in her lap, which was where hands went when one had to make a considerable effort not to do anything with them.
She thought about that morning. She thought about sitting in the morning room with Samuel's careful, kind voice delivering news that had rearranged the day and then having to put on a hat and go to a tea party and stand in a room full of people who knew and smile at all of them while the person she wanted to speak to was with somebody else.
"She did not ask me for anything," Thomas said. "I want you to know that. She came because… I think because she did not know where else to go, and because she knew I would not be unkind about it."
"No," Genevieve said. "You would not be."
She meant it. She did genuinely mean it. She was also aware, sitting in this carriage with her hands folded and her face doing exactly the right things, that meaning it and finding it straightforward were not presently the same experience.
That there was a version of her, a smaller and less generous version, who was having a considerably less composed afternoon than the one she was presenting. She was not going to let that version anywhere near their conversation. But she could feel her, distantly, pressing at the edges.
"I believe she went home. That she’s staying with your parents,” he explained.
"I see," Genevieve said.
He was watching her in the careful, particular way he had.
And she was aware of it with the specific quality of awareness she always had when he looked at her like that, which was warm and thorough and considerably inconvenient given that she was currently devoting a significant amount of interior resource to not feeling several things simultaneously.
"I am sorry," he said. "That you had to go through this afternoon not knowing. I should have found a way to speak to you."
She looked at him.
"You were trying to find the right words," she said.
"They took longer than I would have wished."
She nodded. She turned back to the window.
Outside, the last of the light was going, the fields gray and still and entirely unbothered by the contents of this carriage, which she found, in that moment, faintly offensive of them. She pressed her lips together.
She felt the complicated, jostling, thoroughly inconvenient collection of things she had been managing all afternoon arrange themselves into something that was not quite any single feeling, rather it contained most of them.
She held it there, carefully, the way you held something fragile, and breathed, and looked at the passing dark.
You know him, she told herself. You know who he is. You knew who he was before today and today has not changed it.
She believed that. She believed it with the stubborn, clear-eyed conviction she brought to things she had arrived at through genuine attention rather than hope, and that was not nothing. That was, in fact, considerable.
"I believe her," she said at last. And she did. She believed her sister's account, because she knew enough of the world and enough of Clarissa to know that even her sister's missteps tended to have their origins in want, in impulse. "Poor Clarissa."
“Indeed,” Thomas replied.
Once they were home, Thomas helped her out of the carriage and walked her inside. She kept her eyes straight ahead. He kissed the top of her head.
“I need to finish something in my study, go get some rest,” he said gently against her hair.
“Of course,” she said.
He stepped away from her, and she watched him go.
For once, she did not feel the usual fluttering in her chest when he was affectionate with her. Fighting back her own emotions, she ascended the stairs.
Perhaps she just needed sleep…