Chapter 20
It was a week after the tea party that Thomas insisted they visit Epsom Downs. Apparently a gathering was taking place. Preparations for the larger, later races were speeding along, and some wager had been set, and now it had become an event that they simply had to go to.
“Your father really never took you or Clarissa to see horse races?” Thomas asked as the carriage rattled along toward Epsom.
“No,” Genevieve shook his head.
“Well, I am glad to be changing that today,” Thomas nodded. “It would be good for us to be seen together, and…” he paused. “Perhaps a day like this is what is needed for me to make up for my foolish behavior.”
“Thomas,” she said softly, almost embarrassed that her annoyance at the tea party had made him think he needed to make reparations. “You do not need to do such a thing.”
“Oh, but I do,” he nodded, taking her hand in his. “What kind of a husband would I be if I acted in such a way and made no attempt to repair the damage or make it right?”
“Not a very good one, I suppose,” she sighed. “Although I cannot say that most husbands would think to take their wife to a trial derby.”
“Well…” he laughed as the carriage came to a stop. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
Genevieve had not expected the noise level.
She had imagined something approximately like a country fair.
A cheerful, slightly disorganized afternoon affair with moderate crowds and a general sense of goodwill.
What spread before her across the broad flat field was altogether livelier, louder, and considerably more vivid than that.
There were half a dozen horses being walked and assessed and argued over, the crowd three deep at the rail, the smell of grass and animals and something frying somewhere behind the rows of tents, and over all of it a continuous bright sound composed of shouts and laughter.
It was the particular note of human excitement that Genevieve had always found, to her own slight surprise, quite irresistible.
A groom cut directly across their path leading a gray stallion that had strong opinions about its direction of travel. Thomas had to pull Genevieve back so the animal did not step on her boots.
“And this is the practice day?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Thomas nodded. “It will be much more lively in the summer.”
“More!” she exclaimed. “How is that possible?”
“Well there are only six horses practicing here, there will be two dozen in the summer, at least, and people much more eager to place larger bets,” Thomas chuckled. “There will be a handful of races today.”
"How many are entered in the first race?" she asked.
"Four, I believe. Possibly five, if Danforth's chestnut has recovered and he arrives on time."
"Has it?"
"I have no idea," Thomas said. "I know very little about Danforth's chestnut."
She looked at him sideways.
"Then what do you know about?"
"I know that you have already identified a favorite and have not told me which one it is."
Her mouth curved.
"The bay mare," she said. "Third from the left."
Thomas followed her gaze. The mare in question was demonstrating her feelings about the proceedings with considerable energy.
"She looks as though she may have identified a favorite human and it is not her groom."
"She's bored," Genevieve said with authority. "She wants to run. I like her."
"She will probably throw her rider."
"I like her even more."
"You would get along terribly well," Thomas said. "You could both ignore instructions and go whichever direction seemed most interesting."
"I consider that a recommendation."
"I suspect the mare does as well."
He did laugh at that, a proper laugh—unhurried, the kind that arrived before the more considered version of himself could arrange it into something more restrained.
Genevieve turned at the sound of it with an expression that was briefly, unguardedly pleased, and then turned back to the horses as though she had not been watching him.
The first race was announced and the crowd pressed forward. Genevieve caught his arm without appearing to notice that she had done it, which was not entirely true. She noticed, and chose to continue not appearing to notice, which was a different thing entirely.
She leaned slightly toward the rail to see more of the track.
“There is your bay mare,” Thomas said, pointing toward the horse. Genevieve beamed.
“I do believe she will be extraordinary,” she giggled.
“Would you bet five shillings on it?” Thomas grinned.
“When have you ever known me to take a bet?” she laughed.
“Well, we are at a horse race,” he said.
“And whatever the setting we are in, I shall hold myself to the standard of being your wife,” she laughed. He smiled, but something flickered in his eyes that she did not know how to read. Before she could examine it, the race had already begun.
The race was close and she was willing to admit, rather more invested in the fortunes of her chosen horse than was strictly dignified.
The bay cut wide at the first turn and unsettled the runner beside it and she made a sharp involuntary sound that she would not be cataloging among her finer moments.
"She will recover," Thomas said.
"She will not. She's lost her rhythm entirely."
She tracked the field, felt the familiar quick pleasure of reading it, the pattern of it resolving itself as it always did when she was paying the right kind of attention.
"Watch the bay, there, on the outside. She's been rating herself this whole stretch.
" Thomas was pointing at the animal as it moved along.
The bay moved up with smooth, unhurried acceleration .
She did not take it. She took second, by a margin that Genevieve considered a miscarriage of justice.
"That," she said, "was not a fair result."
"It was a race result," Thomas said. "They are generally considered the same thing."
"The bay was impeded at the final turn! Anyone paying attention could see it."
"A great many people were paying attention."
"A great many people were wrong." She watched the winner's rider accept his congratulations with an air of satisfaction she found entirely unwarranted. "He was lucky. His horse was lucky. I want that noted."
"Noted," Thomas said gravely.
"You are humoring me."
"I would not dream of it."
She looked at him. He looked at the track.
"The bay was the better horse," she said, with finality.
"She was," he agreed.
"Then we are in agreement."
"We are entirely in agreement."
She turned back to the field and said nothing further on the subject, which she felt was a demonstration of considerable restraint.
"I am being ridiculous," she said.
"You are being yourself," he said. "I see no conflict."
She looked at him sideways and found him still looking at the track, his profile perfectly composed, and felt something warm settle in her chest that had nothing to do with the racing.
"Where did you learn about horses?" Thomas asked. Genevieve startled, her heart lurching up, as if he had found some deep secret that she was supposed to have kept hidden away. As if any corner of her heart could be hidden from her husband. She hesitated, then sighed as she let her mind drift back.
"My father had a mare when I was young. Before he sold her.
" She paused, watching a roan gelding being put through his paces at the far end of the field.
The memory had the particular quality of things that had been pleasant and were now simply over.
"I missed her very much. I have always thought… " She stopped.
"What?"
She weighed it for a moment. It was the kind of thing she did not generally say aloud, because it was the kind of thing that invited either pity or the brisk suggestion that she had perfectly adequate things to be getting on with.
"My mother thought it an unnecessary expense, once the mare was sold," she said.
It was not a complaint. It was simply the explanation for why she had not learned to take such things for granted, offered because he was the person she had decided was worth offering it to.
"She was probably right. There were other things. "
A small silence settled between them.
"It was a reasonable position," he eventually said. "And an entirely reversible one."
She turned to look at him again. He met her eyes this time.
"I have always thought that I should like to ride more than I do. But it is not… it is not considered especially…" She made a small gesture.
"I could arrange it," he said. "If you wanted to ride more."
She looked at the roan. She was aware that the offer was genuine, she had learned, over months of careful attention, to distinguish his genuine offers from his polite ones, and this was the former.
She was also aware of the particular way she felt when he made them, which was complicated by the fact that she was still, despite considerable practice, not entirely accustomed to being offered things and invited simply to want them.
"Could you?" she asked. "Genuinely?"
"Genevieve. Yes."
She looked back at the field. She let herself absorb it—not the material fact of it, though that was real enough, but the thing beneath it, the simple and still slightly startling experience of being known well enough that an offer required no negotiation.
"There is a gray at Ashworth's stable," she said, eventually. "I noticed her last month when we called. Very sensible-looking."
"I will speak to Ashworth."
"You do not have to do it immediately."
"I am aware."
She pressed her lips together against what might have been a smile.
"You are very…" She considered the word that had arrived first and decided it gave rather too much away. "Thorough," she settled on.
"It has been said."
"By people who meant it as a criticism?"
"Generally, yes."
"I do not," she said simply, and turned back to the horses, and did not look at him again for several minutes, which was a discipline she considered entirely necessary under the circumstances.
The carriage ride home was easy in a way that the past week had not been, and she was glad of it. It was the uncomplicated gladness of someone setting down something heavy.
She told him about a horse her neighbor's child had named something spectacularly inappropriate and he told her about a disastrous race he had attended with Samuel some years ago in which everything had gone wrong in an escalating sequence of improbabilities.
She laughed more than she had in days, and by the time the familiar gates came into view she felt something that she had not felt for a week. She felt simply herself, simply ordinary and present and at ease.
Clarissa was far from her mind, as if right then she did not matter. In truth, right at that moment, she did not. Perhaps she could even convince herself that her sister would cause no issue at all.
At the door she stopped on the step and turned back to him before she had fully decided to.
The evening light was doing something to his face that she observed and did not comment on.
She reached up and pressed her lips to his cheek, warm and deliberate, and felt him go very still in the way he went still when something had arrived that he had not prepared for.
"Thank you," she said. "For today."
She went inside before her face could do anything she would have to account for, standing for a moment in the entrance hall with her hands folded and her heart conducting itself in a manner she considered highly inconvenient, and smiling at the middle distance for slightly longer than was strictly necessary.
Then she went to find Lady Harrington and tell her about the gray.