Chapter 24
The fire had burned low by the time Thomas found her.
He had gone to his study after dinner with every intention of reviewing the ledgers, but the columns of figures had blurred before him, and he had sat for the better part of an hour doing nothing at all.
His grandmother had retired early, pleading fatigue, though she had given him one of her long, considering looks on the way out that made him feel thoroughly seen and slightly irritated.
He did not know what the look was meant to convey. He never did.
He found Genevieve in the sitting room off the east corridor, the one she had quietly claimed as her own over the past several weeks without ever announcing that she had done so. A lamp burned on the table beside her, and the fireplace offered a low, steady warmth. She did not notice him at first.
She was embroidering. He stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment, the careful tilt of her head, the slight furrow of her brow as she guided the needle through the fabric.
The small, satisfied exhale when she completed a stitch she had apparently been worrying over.
Auburn hair caught the firelight and turned it copper.
She looked, he thought, as though she had always belonged here, in their house, in that chair, with the fire burning low and the whole estate quiet around her.
He knocked once on the open door, though it was already open.
She looked up. The furrow dissolved into a smile, quick and warm.
"You have escaped the ledgers."
"How did you know I was in with the ledgers?"
"Because you always go to the ledgers when you have something on your mind and want to convince yourself that you do not."
He came into the room, feeling the familiar slight wrong footing that her observations produced in him.
He had not expected, when he married her, to be known.
It was not a thing he had bargained for, and he was still not entirely certain how to conduct himself in the face of it.
He took the chair across from her, the one angled toward the fire, and stretched his legs out before him.
"What are you making?" he asked.
She turned the hoop toward him. It was a spray of blue-gray flowers against cream linen. Small, meticulous, more lovely than anything he would have thought to call lovely before.
"A cushion cover," she said. "For the window seat in the library. The existing ones have gone quite shabby, and I kept meaning to mention it, only then I thought it might be easier to simply replace them."
"You did not need to do that yourself."
"I know." She turned the hoop back and selected another length of thread. "I wanted to. I like having something to do with my hands in the evenings."
He watched her thread the needle, a process which required a brief, fierce squinting effort that made the corner of his mouth turn up. She caught him looking and laughed, a soft sound.
"I know," she said. "It's not dignified."
"I did not say anything."
"You were thinking it loudly."
He was not, in fact, thinking it. He was thinking that her laugh was one of the finest sounds he had heard in a very long time, and that he had grown quietly dependent on it.
On the particular quality of her presence in the evenings, the way she talked to him like a person who expected to be spoken to honestly in return.
He had not known he was lonely until she arrived.
He had not permitted himself to know it.
"Tell me about the garden," she said. She had returned to her embroidery, her voice easy and unhurried. "You mentioned yesterday you had been speaking with Mr. Dobson about the south beds."
"He thinks I am mad."
"Mr. Dobson thinks everyone who does not share his personal vision for the grounds is mad. He's been here longer than the oak trees, and he has strong opinions. What do you want to do?"
Thomas leaned back, watching the fire.
"Clear them. The south beds are half-dead anyway; there is nothing worth saving.
I would like to take the whole section back to bare earth and start again.
Formal planting closest to the house and then something wilder further out, where it meets the old orchard wall.
Your parents had something similar, no?"
She looked up again, genuinely pleased.
"You remembered that."
"It has been the only part of your parents’ home that I have ever heard you speak of in our entire marriage.”
She was quiet for a moment, needle suspended. The fire shifted and resettled.
"Yes," she said at last, softly. "I always felt like I belonged in that garden.”
"I want to build something like that. Something that feels—" He stopped. He was not a man much given to describing feelings. "Something that earns staying in," he finished.
The smile she gave him then was different from her usual ones. Quieter, more considered, as though she were turning something over behind it.
"Then you should build it," she said. "And you should tell Mr. Dobson that his opinion has been noted and you will be proceeding regardless, which I suspect is what you will need to do."
"I suspect you are right." He paused. "Will you help me choose what to plant?"
She looked at him steadily. Something passed across her face that he could not name, and that was gone before he could reach for it.
"I would like that very much," she said.
He nodded, and she returned to her work, and the fire burned between them, and the house was very quiet. He should have gone back to the ledgers. He did not move.
"What would you put in it?" he asked, after a while. "If it were entirely your decision."
She did not look up immediately. Her needle moved twice, three times.
"Roses, obviously. Old ones, not the stiff modern varieties.
Something that looks as though it seeded itself there a hundred years ago and simply stayed.
" She paused. "Lavender along the south-facing wall, where it would get the most sun.
Sweet peas, if there is anything to train them up.
And I would want something unexpected in the center.
Not a fountain, that's too obvious. Maybe a single old apple tree, if there is one to be had. Something with age to it."
"An apple tree in a formal garden."
"An apple tree in the middle, yes. With a bench beneath it." She glanced up briefly. "Do you object?"
"No," he said. "I think I like it."
"Good. Because Mr. Dobson is certainly going to hate it, and it will be useful to have established in advance that it was not my idea."
He laughed again. It came more easily this time.
"I will make a note. The apple tree was entirely my doing."
"And the lavender."
"And the lavender."
She smiled and returned to her work. He watched the fire for a while, and it occurred to him that he could not remember the last time he had sat in a room with another person and felt no particular pressure to account for the silence.
There had always been something required of him. Some performance of ease, some management of expectation. With Genevieve, there was only the fire and the soft sound of thread drawn through linen and the unhurried sense that the evening had nowhere else it needed to be.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You can ask me anything."
"Were you happy before? At your father's house." He was not certain why he asked it. It was not a careful question.
She was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable, he thought. She did not seem to have uncomfortable silences, only considered ones.
"In parts," she said at last. "I was fond of the house itself.” She paused. "But it was very quiet. And my father is not—" She stopped, chose again. "He is not a man who is very interested in the people around him."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be. I am not, particularly." She said it without hardness, simply as a fact.
"It made me good at being self-sufficient, which has its uses.
And it meant that when something was actually pleasant, I knew to recognize it.
" She glanced at him, briefly. "I have always thought it worse to have had something good and lost it than never to have had it at all. But perhaps that makes me unusual."
"I am not sure it does."
"No?" Her mouth curved slightly. "I had a governess who held very strongly to the opposite view. She felt that expectation was the root of all suffering and the only sensible approach was to want nothing."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It was, rather. She was also deeply unhappy, which she seemed not to notice was relevant." She tilted her head, considering the embroidery. "I decided quite early that I would rather want things and be disappointed than cultivate a thorough indifference and call it wisdom."
Thomas looked at her.
"I think," he said slowly, "that I may have been practicing something rather like her philosophy without knowing it."
Genevieve looked up at him then, with an expression that was careful and warm and not at all surprised.
"Yes," she said. "I know."
He did not have an answer for that. The fire shifted. He let the silence sit.
"I am not very good at this," he said at last.
"At what?"
He gestured vaguely at the space between them. She considered it.
"You are better than you think," she said. "And it's early yet."
He was not entirely sure whether she meant the evening or something larger.
He suspected she meant something larger.
He did not ask, because he thought asking might require him to have an answer ready, and he did not, yet.
But he stayed where he was, in the warm room with the dying fire, and she stayed across from him with her careful, half-finished flowers, and neither of them seemed in any particular hurry to move.