Chapter 21
Lydia Hargrove's drawing room had always struck Clarissa as slightly overreaching. The drapes were too heavy, the ornaments too numerous, the whole effect suggesting a family that had arrived at its current respectability with some effort and was not entirely finished congratulating itself.
Clarissa was fond of Lydia, insofar as she was fond of anyone. That was to say she found her useful, reliably so, and occasionally good company. A person whose opinion one does not particularly value, she believed, could sometimes be excellent company.
Lydia had been her closest confidante at sixteen and her most reliable social instrument at twenty-three, and the relationship had never been troubled by either of them mistaking it for something warmer than it was.
There was a comfort in that, Clarissa had always found.
Honest transactions were considerably easier to maintain than false ones.
Lydia herself was a narrow, quick-eyed young woman with an excellent memory and a gift for being present in rooms where things were being said.
She was the kind of person about whom other people spoke carelessly because they had decided, for reasons that were more instinct than observation, that she was not quite paying attention. Clarissa had always known better.
"You look well," Lydia said, with the warmth of someone who was examining her closely. "Considering."
"Thank you," Clarissa said, as if the qualifier had not been there. She settled into the better chair by the window and accepted tea she did not want. "Tell me what has been happening."
Lydia set down her own cup and folded her hands in the particular way that meant she had been waiting for precisely this question and had already organized her answer.
"Where would you like me to start?"
"Wherever is most interesting."
"Then I will start with your sister."
Clarissa smiled, though it did not reach anything deeper than her mouth.
"I supposed you might."
Lydia needed very little prompting.
"They were at the Petersons'," Lydia said . "Last Thursday. And the Chatworths' dinner the week before."
"Were they," Clarissa said.
"And I believe there was something at the Pembrokes, or was it the Carstairs? One of the two." Lydia helped herself to another biscuit with the unhurried ease of a woman who was enjoying herself. "They have been quite… out. Generally."
"How lovely for them," Clarissa said pleasantly.
"And in town. Mrs. Harrington was seen walking with him on the high street. Mrs. Forde mentioned it, she said they looked very… " Lydia paused, choosing her word with a care that suggested the first several options had been rejected for being too pointed. "Settled."
Clarissa turned her teacup slightly in her hand.
"Settled."
"And there was a horse race." Lydia said . "They went to the races together. Apparently she knows rather a lot about horses."
"A horse race," Clarissa repeated.
"Together. Apparently they stayed the entire afternoon." Lydia paused for effect. "She was laughing at something he said. Mr. Foster saw them and mentioned it."
Clarissa arranged her expression into something she decided was dispassionate interest. She had not expected that, precisely.
She had expected Thomas to maintain the polite, duty-driven distance of a man who had married practically and knew it.
The quiet, dignified indifference that she had always imagined would describe his marriage to her sister.
She had expected Genevieve to be grateful and slightly uncertain, as Genevieve had always tended to be in situations that exceeded what she had planned for.
She had not expected horse races. She had not expected laughter.
She had been at enough social gatherings in her life to understand what laughing at a man's words in public meant.
Not the polite, managed laughter of obligation.
Rather the real kind… the kind Mr. Foster had apparently found worth reporting.
It meant ease. It meant the particular comfort of two people who had stopped performing for each other and had not yet noticed the transition.
Genevieve had always been susceptible to kindness. Clarissa had understood that about her since they were girls. That her sister wanted, more than most things, to be genuinely considered by someone, and that whoever offered her that in good faith would have her whole attention in return.
She had simply not expected Thomas to be the one offering it.
"He does not care for her," she said. The conviction was so familiar that she did not notice it was partly argument rather than conclusion. "He has simply made the best of his situation. He is an honorable man."
"Of course," Lydia said, in the tone she used when she agreed with Clarissa for reasons of social ease rather than actual persuasion.
"You have seen them yourself?" Clarissa asked.
"At the Hurst's dinner, briefly. They arrived together and " Lydia paused with the instinct of someone who understood the value of the right pause, "they left together.
Which I realize sounds unremarkable for a married couple, but there was nothing obligatory in the manner of it.
He spoke to her before he spoke to anyone else in the room. "
Clarissa absorbed this without expression.
"He was always attentive," she said. "It is simply his character."
"Yes," Lydia agreed, with that same tone.
Clarissa set her teacup down rather more firmly than she intended. The small sound of it against the saucer was sharp in the quiet room.
It would not do. She had come home with a plan.
Not a plan precisely, more an arrangement of instincts and intentions, but the shape of it was clear enough.
Thomas had always loved her. That love did not simply dissolve because of time and ceremony.
She had the advantage of history with him, of a depth of feeling that her sister, however pleasant, could not replicate from a standing start.
She needed only to be present. To remind him of what they had been, what they might still be in some form that served her purposes.
She had rehearsed the logic often enough that it arrived smoothly, without the rougher edges that had characterized it in the first days after her return.
Thomas had not sought the marriage; she was certain of that much.
He had been maneuvered into it by circumstance and family pressure and the particular social arithmetic that punished men who failed to step forward at the required moment.
He was dutiful. He would have made the best of it. That was not the same as preference.
None of that, she was finding, addressed the horse race particularly well.
She moved past it.
She needed money. That was the fundamental reality, stripped of its more complicated layers.
Her parents were serious in their threats.
She had come home to a household that viewed her as a problem to be resolved.
Their resolution was likely to involve somewhere considerably less comfortable than her current room.
Somewhere remote and dull and full of people who would watch her with the particular attentiveness of those assigned to watch. She would not allow it.
Thomas was her most reliable resource. He had offered to help her. He had given her money already, quietly, without making her beg for it, and she had understood from the ease of it that there was more where that had come from. What she needed only to manage the situation with sufficient care.
But if he was falling in love with Genevieve, genuinely, not merely performing the obligation of a decent husband, then the nature of the situation changed considerably.
A man in love was a man with a fixed center of gravity.
He would not reach out toward her; he would maintain his careful, principled distances.
She had watched it happen to other men. She had seen the slow, unremarkable process by which a sensible person reorganized themselves entirely around another sensible person.
The often emerged from the reorganization apparently satisfied with the result.
She had always found it faintly incomprehensible.
She found it considerably less abstract now.
She thought of them at a horse race. Of Mr. Foster reporting Genevieve's laughter. Of the easy, afternoon quality of the image it produced.
"I need them to be less happy," she said.
The words landed in the room with a flatness that was almost practical.
Lydia's expression moved through several stages. Surprise, reassessment, and finally the particular quality of alertness that meant she had decided to find this interesting rather than alarming.
"That is a fairly direct thing to say."
"We have known each other too long for the indirect version." Clarissa looked at her steadily. "I am not asking you to be cruel to her. I am asking you to create a little… concern."
"Concern," Lydia repeated.
"Doubt. The kind that makes people look twice." She paused. "Genevieve has always been uncertain of her own standing in a room. A little well-placed uncertainty from outside would not require much effort to take hold."
Lydia blinked.
"Clari—"
"I am not asking you to do anything terrible." She waved a hand. "Gossip. That is all. The right word in the right ear at the right time. It is what society runs on, Lydia, and you know better than anyone how to move in it."
Lydia appeared to consider that. Balancing a moral scruple against the considerable pleasure of being considered essential. The pleasure won, as Clarissa had known it would.
"I will not be associated with anything that can be traced back," Lydia said, which was not a refusal.
"It never will be," Clarissa said, which was not quite a promise.
"What sort of thing did you have in mind?"