Chapter 21 #2
Clarissa reached for her tea, which had gone slightly cold, and looked out the window at the tidy street below. She had the beginning of something. Not the whole of it yet, the real shape of what she intended was still forming, the details still sharpening from instinct into strategy.
There would be a ball soon. There would be a public moment, of some kind, that could be made to serve her purposes.
She would think it through properly later.
For now: "I want people to remember what happened. The real story… or the version of it that does not make her look like the obvious, fortunate choice that fate conveniently provided when I was unavailable."
"That is quite carefully put," Lydia observed.
"I have had time to think," Clarissa said.
Lydia turned her cup in her hands.
"You know, I never quite understood why you left.
Not really. Richard Beaufort was handsome, I will grant you that, but—" She tilted her head.
"He was not this." A gesture at nothing in particular, but they both understood what it indicated.
The Harrington name. The estate. The particular ease of a life where the arithmetic was already done.
Clarissa was quiet for a moment.
She thought of Beaufort's lodgings. The way she had noticed, the third time she visited, that the rug by the window was wearing through at the corner.
A small thing. An absurd thing to remember.
But she had looked at that rug and felt something shift in her chest that she had been too proud to name for another six weeks, and by then she was already ruined for the return journey.
"He was very persuasive," she said finally. It was the version she had given everyone. It was even partially true.
"He was charming," Lydia agreed, with the diplomatic neutrality of someone who had always thought otherwise.
"He seemed like a man who would amount to something," she said instead.
"And did he?"
"He amounted," Clarissa said, "to considerably less than the rug in his front room suggested."
Lydia blinked. Then, reading something in Clarissa's expression, she did not laugh.
"So you came back."
"So I came back." Clarissa looked out the window. "And found that the world had very sensibly continued without me, and that my sister is apparently an authority on horse breeding, and that—" She stopped again. The sentence had somewhere she did not intend it to go.
And that I gave all of it up and there is nothing on the other side of the ledger.
She did not say that. She thought it, briefly and with a clarity that was almost physical, and then she set it aside with the same deliberate motion she used for everything she could not afford to examine too closely.
"I came back," she said, "because there was nowhere else to go. And because I am not finished." She met Lydia's eyes. "That is all."
Lydia studied her for a moment with the eyes she normally kept politely unfocused. "Clarissa. Can I ask you something plainly?"
"You may ask."
"Do you actually want him back? Or do you simply want—" She searched for it. "The other thing not to have worked out."
Clarissa did not answer immediately.
"I want," she said at last, carefully, "what I am owed."
It was not, precisely, an answer. Lydia accepted it as one.
As Lydia's maid brought fresh tea and the conversation shifted to safer ground.
Clarissa did not permit herself to examine the image she kept returning to against her will.
She could not allow herself to think about whether it was jealousy, specifically, or something more complicated.
Some combination of wanting Thomas for what he represented and the older, stranger feeling of wanting him because her sister had him first. She did not examine any of this.
She thought instead about what came next. It was considerably more useful.
The knock, when it came, was not the maid.
Clarissa heard the particular quality of it. Lighter than a servant's, less certain than Lydia's, and knew before the door opened.
Genevieve stood in the doorway. She had come from outside; there was still color in her cheeks from the air, and her bonnet was in her hand rather than on her head, which meant she had taken it off in the carriage and not thought to replace it.
She had always done that. Clarissa had teased her for it once, years ago, and Genevieve had laughed and agreed and continued doing it without the slightest amendment.
"I heard you were here," Genevieve said. "I hope that's all right. I asked Lydia's housekeeper and she said—"
"Of course," Clarissa said. She rose. "Come in."
Lydia, with the instincts of a woman who understood when a room had changed ownership, found a reason to be elsewhere. Even beside that, Lydia and Genevieve had never gotten on. The door closed behind her with a tact that was almost impressive.
They stood for a moment in that specific awkwardness of two people who know each other very well and are not entirely certain what version of that knowing applies now.
Then Genevieve crossed the room and embraced her.
It was not a tentative thing. That was the part Clarissa had not prepared for, the straightforwardness of it, the complete absence of performance.
Genevieve simply held her, the way she had when they were girls and Clarissa had once, in a moment she had subsequently never acknowledged, cried over something she could not even remember now.
Her sister had not said anything then either. She had just been there, warm and entirely reliable, in the specific way that Genevieve always was… and Clarissa had never known how to be.
She permitted herself to be held for three seconds before she stepped back.
"You look well," she said, because it was true and because it was easier than anything else.
"So do you." Genevieve looked at her steadily. Underneath it, though, Clarissa caught the tension. She did her best not to smile at the idea that just her presence had caused her sister some issue. "Are you? Actually."
"I am managing."
"That is not what I asked."
Clarissa looked at her sister. She thought of everything Lydia had reported. The horse race. The laughter. He spoke to her before he spoke to anyone else in the room. She thought of the plan still forming in the back of her mind, the shape of what came next.
"I am home," she said. "That is something."
Genevieve studied her for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she nodded, accepting it the way she accepted most things.
"I am glad you are back," she said. "I mean that, Clarissa. Whatever else, I am glad you are safe and I am glad you are home."
The simplicity of it was, in its way, the most difficult thing she had said.
"Thank you," Clarissa said.
It was the most honest thing she said all afternoon.