Chapter 24 #2
He had been telling himself, with some regularity, that the situation with Clarissa would resolve itself.
That it was simply a matter of being decent.
A man did not abandon a woman who had once been in his care, regardless of how things had ended between them, and Clarissa was, beneath all the rest of it, a woman in difficulty.
Genevieve's sister. His honor required that he do what he could.
He had said this to himself often enough that it had become a kind of internal refrain, reliable and well-worn.
But sitting there, watching his wife's hands move over her embroidery with that precise and careful attention she brought to everything she did, he noticed the thread with something like discomfort.
The argument was not wrong, exactly. It was just…
incomplete. And he did not want to look too closely at what it left out.
"Did Samuel call on you today?" he asked, because the house had been quiet when he came in and he had not been certain.
"This morning, yes. He brought news of the Hatfield race next month. He thought you would like to enter the gray." She did not look up. "He also mentioned that there has been some talk."
The word sat in the room. Thomas looked at her. Her needle moved, unhurried.
"I know," he said.
"I know you do." A pause. "I am not worried about it."
He was not certain he believed her. He was not certain she believed herself. But there was something in her voice that made him think she was choosing, consciously, not to worry about it. That she was granting him something, whether he deserved it or not.
"Genevieve."
She looked up.
He had not planned to say anything in particular.
He had some half-formed idea that he would say something reassuring and she would smile, and he would go to bed feeling that he had discharged some vague obligation.
But she was looking at him with those clear green eyes, the firelight moving over her face, and what came out was: "You deserve better than uncertainty. "
The words fell strangely in the quiet room.
She held his gaze for a long moment. He could not read her expression precisely. There was something in it that was close to sorrow and close to hope and perhaps not entirely either one. Then she shook her head, very slightly, and looked back at her work.
"I have a good deal more than uncertainty," she said.
"I have this house. I have your grandmother, who terrifies and delights me in equal measure.
I have a husband who says what he wants and then actually does it.
" She glanced up briefly, a faint curve to her mouth.
"And I shall have a very fine garden one day, I think. "
He laughed, a short sound, surprised out of him. She smiled at the embroidery. The fire crackled and settled.
He stayed until the lamp began to gutter and the fire had burned to coals.
He did not go back to the ledgers. When she finally rose to retire, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes with that particular exhaustion that came from fine work in low light, he stood as well, and she paused by the door.
"Good night, Thomas."
"Good night."
She left. He stood in the warm and dimming room a moment longer than was necessary, looking at the chair she had occupied, the abandoned embroidery hoop left on the side table with its small blue-gray flowers half-finished.
I should do something about Clarissa.
And then, underneath that thought, quieter and more honest. I do not want to lose this.
He did not yet understand that these two things were incompatible. But the knowledge was gathering at the edges of him, patient as winter, waiting for him to sit still long enough to let it arrive.
Chapter 24
It was a week after the ball when Thomas was to have his first meeting with Clarissa to hand over the money. He had woken up that day, his stomach in knots, but he smiled through the morning until it was time to go.
Thomas had chosen the location, which meant the location was in the open air, in the middle of the morning, near the edge of the woodland path that wound along the eastern boundary of his land. The one where he rode most mornings.
The one that Genevieve had recently begun to ride with him now that he had arranged the horse he had promised her.
He was not unaware of the slight irony. He chose it nonetheless because he wanted no ambiguity about the meeting and because a location with no walls and no privacy was its own kind of statement.
He had told Genevieve he was going out for his usual ride. This was true, as far as it went. Genevieve had elected to stay at home on account of the chill in the air and the need to fix her wool coat. It had been caught on a branch.
The morning was sharp and clear, the kind that arrived in autumn without apology and made everything look slightly more consequential than it was.
He arrived at the agreed point of the path and dismounted, looping his reins over a low branch, and waited with the patience he had cultivated over years of situations that required it.
Clarissa arrived a few minutes after him, which he suspected was deliberate, and was wearing something the color of autumn leaves that he noticed because he was a human being and not because it had any particular effect on him.
She looked, when she came close enough to read, less certain than she had in the drawing room. There was something different in her expression. Some quality of tension underneath the composure that she was managing with slightly less ease than usual.
He supposed it must be difficult, her situation. He did not allow himself to dismiss the reality of her difficulty simply because her behavior at the ball had disappointed him. She stopped a few feet from him and looked at the path, and then at him.
"It is strange," she said. "Being here. On your land."
"Is it?"
"I used to imagine it. When we were—" She stopped. "That is not what I came to say."
"No," he agreed.
"I want you to know that I did not come here to make things difficult for you. I want you to believe that."
He looked at her steadily. "I believe that you believe it," he said.
Something flickered in her expression.
"That is not the same thing.""
No," he said. "It is not."
He reached into his saddle bag and produced a bag of coins. He had counted them carefully the night before. Enough for a month of lodgings and perhaps more if she was sensible. It was enough to address the immediate situation, or to give her options, but not enough to consider herself affluent.
She took it. There was a moment where she looked at it, and something passed through her face that he could not entirely read.
"You are very good," she said. "You have always been very good, Thomas."
He kept his voice even.
"Clarissa."
"I mean it—"
"I know you mean something by it," he interjected. "I am less certain it is exactly what you are saying."
The silence was brief and specific. She looked at him with an expression that was recalibrating.
"I have been thinking about what I want," she said.
It came out differently than he suspected she intended.
Less composed, more real. "I have been thinking about it very carefully.
And I know that what I am doing, some of what I have been doing is not…
" She stopped. Started again. "I do not think myself a villain, not in the way my parents seem to think me, Thomas.
I want you to understand that. I am a woman in a very constrained situation making choices with very limited options, and some of those choices have not been… they have not been kind."
He regarded her steadily. It was, he thought, the most honest thing she had said to him in a long time. He did not say this.
"I understand that your situation is genuinely difficult," he said. "That has never been in question."
"But," she said.
He held up his hand to give himself the space to talk.
"But Genevieve did not create your situation. And she should not be made to pay for it."
Clarissa was quiet for a moment. A bird moved somewhere in the upper branches and the sound of it dissolved into the general quiet of the morning. Something flickered across her expression. He had seen that heat in her eyes before. Never once had it been in his direction, though.
“What does Genevieve have to do with our situation?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.
“She has everything to do with our situation,” he replied. “She is my wife.”
“Does your wife dictate the things you say to me? I scarce say she is unaware of our meeting,” she said.
He had to bite the inside of his cheek at that. She was right. Not for the reasons he thought she might think, but none that would help him if Genevieve knew the truth.
“That is beside the point,” he said.
“Then what is the point?”
"I want to speak to you about the ball," he said.
"The ball was—"
"My wife was upset." He said it without particular emphasis, without raising his voice.
He was not, by temperament, a man who raised his voice to make a point.
He had found that a point made quietly tended to be heard more clearly.
"She was upset, and I watched her handle a room full of people saying unkind things about her with more grace than most people are capable of, and then we went home and she did not speak of it again.
She does not complain. That is not a virtue I intend to take advantage of. "
Clarissa was very still.
"What was said," she began, "I did not instruct anyone—"
"Clarissa. Do not delude yourself. I saw the way you were speaking to Lydia. I know she has been your fondest friend for some time" He kept his voice even. "I am not here to assign precise culpability. I am here to ask you to stop."
"It is not so simple as stopping. Lydia has her own—"
"Then manage Lydia." He kept his voice even. "You have always been very capable of managing the people around you when you chose to. I am asking you to choose to."