Chapter 22 #2
Measured.
Courteous.
Genevieve, watching from the particular vantage of a woman who knew her husband fairly well by now, heard the careful register of his words.
Genevieve slipped her hand into Thomas's arm—easily, as though it were simply where her hand happened to rest—and looked at her sister cheerfully. "We are so glad you are home. I have been hoping to call on you, but you always seem to be out when I come by."
Something moved through Clarissa's expression at that. Genevieve filed it away.
“Is that so?” Clarissa asked, almost stiffly. “We shall have to arrange a time for a proper reunion.”
“We shall,” Genevieve nodded.
She had developed, over the course of the past months, a habit of noticing things.
Small observations, small inconsistencies, the particular weight of a silence in the wrong place.
It was not suspicion exactly. It was simply that she had stopped assuming goodwill was the correct default setting for every interaction, which was perhaps a development that was overdue.
Thomas had said something to that effect once, gently, framed as a compliment rather than a criticism. She had found she agreed with him.
The group dispersed as groups at balls tend to do, called in various directions by music and acquaintance and the general momentum of the evening. Genevieve found herself eventually in the company of Caroline and a small cluster of women near the refreshments, pleasantly settled.
She noticed Lydia Hargrove on the periphery of the group perhaps a moment before Lydia made her presence felt.
Lydia Hargrove had a quality that Genevieve associated with a particular type of social operator.
The type that had learned very young that visibility was a resource to be managed carefully.
She was never quite in the center of things.
She was always close enough though that the center was aware of her.
Genevieve had seen the type before, though rarely as accomplished a practitioner as this.
She watched Lydia for a moment without appearing to watch her.
She is waiting for something.
The thing that Lydia was waiting for soon made itself very apparent .
She could not have said what alerted her. Perhaps it was the way Lydia positioned herself—not joining the conversation exactly, but adjacent to it, like a person waiting for a particular note to be struck. Perhaps it was simply that she had been watching more carefully than usual tonight.
When it came, it arrived sideways, as these things always did.
"I must say," Lydia said, to no one in particular and therefore to everyone, "it is lovely to see Mr. Harrington so much in society again. After everything." She paused just long enough. "He was quite withdrawn, for a time. Understandably so."
"Understandably," someone agreed. Mrs. Forde, Genevieve thought, without looking.
"Well." Lydia smiled the smile of a woman building something. "When one has formed such a decided attachment, and everyone knew how decided it was, and then events take such an unexpected turn, one can hardly be surprised if it takes some time to—" she gestured delicately, "—readjust."
"He has readjusted remarkably well," Caroline said, in a tone with an edge to it.
"He has," Lydia agreed warmly. "That is exactly what I mean. He is such an honorable man. Such a thoroughly decent, honorable man." She let this sit for a moment. "One does admire how he has simply—made the best of things."
Genevieve went still.
"I beg your pardon?" Caroline said, sharply.
But Lydia was already well into the architecture of it, her voice never losing its pleasant, wondering quality, as though she were simply thinking aloud among friends.
"It is only that we all knew, did not we, how things stood. Before. He was devoted to Clarissa, absolutely devoted, anyone with eyes could see it. And then of course Clarissa—" a small, sympathetic sigh.
"Well. And so here we are." She looked directly at Genevieve for the first time, with an expression of such warm, melting sympathy that Genevieve felt it like a hand closing around her throat.
"It must be a comfort," Lydia said, "knowing that he is such a good man.
That he would never make you feel…" another delicate pause, "second. "
"What a remarkably peculiar thing to say," Caroline said.
"I only mean that the circumstances were so…
particular." Lydia addressed the group again, widening her audience with the ease of practice.
"He had made his choice and then events simply intervened.
And one does not like to say it, but there is rather a difference between the marriage a man intends and the marriage he finds himself in, is there not?
Through no fault of anyone's." She smiled again. "Least of all Genevieve's, of course."
"Of course," Mrs. Forde murmured.
"She has handled the whole thing beautifully," Lydia continued, warmly, generously, each word a small and perfectly placed weight.
"Really with remarkable composure. It cannot be easy, knowing what everyone knows.
That he loved her sister. That he loves her sister, I suppose one ought to say, these things do not simply—"
"They do, actually," Genevieve said.
Her own voice surprised her slightly. It had come out very clearly, and very pleasantly, and with a quality of certainty that she had not entirely planned but was not sorry for.
Lydia looked at her.
"I am sorry?" Lydia said.
"These things do simply," Genevieve said. "Stop, I mean. People recover. People move forward." She held Lydia's gaze with the same pleasant, open expression she had been wearing all evening and had never, until that moment, needed to deploy as anything other than what it appeared.
"I find in my experience that the people most interested in what a man once felt are generally the people with the least knowledge of what he feels now. Which is quite understandable. They have had fewer opportunities to observe it directly."
There was a silence.
It was, Genevieve thought with a distant, almost clinical clarity, rather well done of Lydia.
Nothing stated that could be directly contradicted.
Nothing so crude as an accusation. Simply a version of events assembled from facts that were technically true and arranged to produce a conclusion that served a specific purpose.
The conclusion being that Genevieve's marriage was a consolation prize, and that Thomas was a decent man making the best of a situation he had not chosen, and that anyone who looked closely could see the shape of the real story beneath the polished surface of the official one.
It was well done. Genevieve's response had been better.
She could feel Caroline beside her, very still, as if she were deciding whether to say something devastating, and being restrained only by the calculation that Genevieve had already handled it.
"More champagne, I think," Caroline said finally, and turned away. Genevieve turned with her, and they left Lydia amid the silence, the audience, and the ruins of her architecture, and did not look back.
She got Caroline out of the room and into the cooler air of the corridor before Caroline could say anything, and then she found the French doors that led to the terrace and went through them into the dark and the much more comfortable noise of the wind.
"That was," Caroline began.
"I know."
"Genevieve—"
"Would you find Thomas for me? Please. I should like him to know, if he does not already." She was holding herself very carefully. The particular quality of the evening air was helpful, cold enough to require attention. "I am perfectly all right. I simply think he should know."
Caro line hesitated. She knew her friend better than anyone, and Genevieve was quite sure that Caroline was aware Genevieve was hiding her true feelings.
Still, Caroline squeezed her hand and went inside.
The tears that Genevieve permitted herself were brief and private, and she had dealt with them and replaced them with composure.
By the time she heard footsteps on the terrace stones and turned to find not Thomas but Samuel, whose expression when he saw her face did something complicated.
"I was coming to tell you—" he started.
"I know," she said again. "I already know."
He crossed the space between them and put a brief, firm arm around her shoulders in the unceremonious way of a man who has known someone long enough to skip the formalities of comfort. She allowed it, briefly, because she needed something solid to press against for just a moment.
"Samuel." She stepped back. "Do you know how it started? Specifically?"
He looked at her steadily.
"I think," he said, "that Clarissa started it."
Genevieve looked at him for a moment. Samuel was not a man who said things imprecisely.
She had understood that about him early and had come to trust it in the way she trusted Thomas's particular form of careful honesty.
If Samuel said he thought it, he meant he was reasonably certain but was giving her the grace of the qualifier.
"How much has it spread?" she asked.
"Enough that Caroline heard it in two separate conversations before she found me." He paused. "It has been moving through the room with some purpose."
With some purpose. Not idle gossip drifting randomly. Directed. Genevieve looked at the dark garden beyond the terrace railing and thought of Clarissa at the window in her blue gown and felt something harden quietly in her chest. Not rage, nothing so hot as that. Something colder and more durable.
"All right," she said. "Thank you for telling me plainly."
The terrace door opened. Thomas came through it quickly, too quickly for someone who had simply been asked to step outside, and his eyes moved from Genevieve to Samuel with an expression that was not, quite, the concern she expected. His jaw was slightly set.
Samuel moved back.
"The gossip has escalated," he said to Thomas, low and direct. "You need to hear it, and you need to take care of your wife."
Thomas looked at Genevieve. She met his eyes and felt something shift in her chest at the expression in them. The concern, yes, genuine and immediate, and beneath it something fiercer.
He came and put his arm around her, and it was not like Samuel's arm— it was different in a way she did not try to name precisely. He turned her gently toward the door.
"We are leaving," he said.
"Thomas, if we leave it will look as though—"
"I know what it will look like," he said. "I do not care."
She was grateful. She was so grateful that it was difficult, for a moment, to breathe through it properly.
And even as he guided her away from the terrace and through the house and out to where the carriage could be called, she carried in the other hand the thing Samuel had told her, and the image of Clarissa, laughing.