Chapter 29
Breaking routine was not something Thomas did naturally. Lateness notwithstanding. But a true break, abandoning his routines and duties for anything else? There were very few times he allowed that.
For once, however, he allowed it.
The silence in the house had become suffocating to him.
He was aware he was being foolish. Running away was the action a child took, not a grown man.
Still, he could not shake the image of Genevieve at dinner from his mind. That had not been the face of the woman he married.
He did not know what to do.
So he took his horse and let it guide him away.
That path had taken him to the Rutherford home.
A maid had opened the door, surprised to see him. It was much later than calling hours, after all. She let him in and led him toward the dining room where Samuel was eating dinner. Samuel, however, did not seem surprised to see him.
Samuel set down his cutlery.
"You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"I mean it as an observation, not a criticism." He leaned back in his chair, unhurried, in the manner of a man with no particular agenda who was nonetheless paying close attention. "How long has it been like this?"
“Like what?” Thomas asked.
“Speak plainly, I am deeply aware of the struggles that are happening in your home, and I dare say that Genevieve and your grandmother are suffering because of it. Now then, for how long have you and your wife been out of sorts?”
Thomas paused. Then, he pulled out a chair and sat across from Samuel.
"Some weeks." Thomas looked at the patterns in the table wood grain. "She is… she performs. That's the only word I have for it. She asks the right questions and makes the right remarks and is perfectly agreeable at dinner, and none of it is her. None of it is anything like her."
"And you have spoken to her about it?"
"I have tried," Thomas said. "She tells me she is quite well."
"Ah."
"With great pleasantness."
"Yes." Samuel turned his glass slowly. "I imagine she does."
Thomas looked at him. There was something in Samuel's tone that he did not care for, because it suggested Samuel understood something about the situation that Thomas perhaps ought to have understood himself by now.
"You know her better than I do, apparently."
"I know her differently than you do." Samuel said it without particular emphasis, which somehow made it worse. "What is it you do not understand? About what's happening to her, I mean."
"I understand what's happening to her perfectly well."
"Do you?"
"Yes." He said it with more force than he intended. "I know exactly what's been said, and who's been saying it, and what she has been walking into every time she leaves the house. I am not ignorant of it."
Samuel was quiet for a moment.
"That was not what I asked."
Thomas stopped.
"You said you understand what's happening to her," Samuel said, quite mildly. "I am asking whether that's actually true. Or whether you understand the circumstances and have mistaken that for understanding her."
Thomas did not answer immediately, because the answer that came to him first was defensive, and the one that came after was closer to honest, and the honest one was less comfortable.
"I do not know how to reach her," he said, finally.
"That's what I do not understand. I know what's wrong.
I know why it's wrong. I know, if we are being entirely plain about it, that I am a significant part of why it's wrong.
" He stopped. "What I cannot work out is how to dismantle whatever she has built.
Without making it worse. Without her retreating further because I have pushed when I should not have. "
Samuel looked at him for a moment.
"That," he said, "is a more honest answer than I expected."
"Do not make it a compliment."
"I was not going to." He picked up his cutlery again. "For what it's worth, I do not think it's a problem of approach. I do not think there is a method you are missing."
"Then what is it?"
Samuel considered this for longer than was comfortable.
"I think she needs to believe that reaching her is something you actually want. Not something you are attempting because the situation has become unmanageable." He met Thomas's eyes. "Those are different things. And she is very good at telling them apart."
Thomas said nothing.
He blamed himself. He was quite clear-eyed about it when he permitted himself to be, which was not as often as it should have been because clear-sightedness about his own failures was not a comfortable occupation.
He had allowed Clarissa to continue their arrangement.
The money, the meetings, the whole miserable business, for longer than he should have.
He would tell himself it was a necessity, it was honor, he told himself a great many things that had contained enough truth to be convincing and enough self-deception to be dangerous.
And meanwhile Genevieve had absorbed the consequences, had sat in drawing rooms while people said things about her, her husband, and her sister, and had done it alone, and had not told him directly.
Instead, it seemed, she was confiding in others.
That last part rankled. He was ashamed that it rankled, it seemed a rather small thing to feel wounded by, when she was the one who had been wounded, and the shame of that recognition did not make the feeling go away. She had chosen to confide in Samuel.
She received Samuel's letters with something that resembled relief and carried them away to her sitting room and did not tell Thomas what they contained, and he had told himself it was reasonable, it was her friendship and her business, and had not permitted himself to examine the tightness in his chest when he thought about it for too long.
“You should speak to her. Clear up this misunderstanding,” Samuel said and looked up at Thomas. “At least, I do hope it is a misunderstanding.”
“Of course,” Thomas nodded.
“Then, fix it,” Samuel said, taking a bite of his dinner. He looked up at Thomas and made a gesture that told the man to go. Thomas nodded, standing up quickly and practically racing outside to recapture his horse.
She was in the small sitting room, settled into the chair by the window with a book open across her lap. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway, and she smiled at him.
It was not her smile.
It was more like a mask that she had learned to wear.
His heart ached as he remembered her old smile. He needed that old smile to return.
"I wondered," he said, and tried to make it sound easy, "whether you might like to walk in the garden. It's a reasonable evening."
"That sounds very nice," she said.
She set the book down and rose and did not ask him what had prompted it, and he did not offer an answer, and they went out together into the mild air of the garden where he was going to have to find something to say.
The garden in the evening had a quality that Thomas had always found unexpectedly affecting. Something about the way the daylight clung to the edges of things, the way the shadows collected in the spaces between the hedgerows. He was planning to change a great deal of it.
He had been looking forward to discussing these plans with Genevieve for weeks, imagining her engagement with the project in some detail, the ideas she would contribute that he had not thought of, and the pleasure of building something together.
They had been walking for perhaps five minutes before he reached for her hand.
She was slightly ahead of him on the path, not by much, not dramatically, and he drew her back gently, tucking her arm through his.
She came without resistance. She walked beside him and her arm was in his and there was, nonetheless, a quality to it that he could not name and could not stop noticing.
"The southern border," he said, "is the part I want to start with. In the spring."
"Is it very overgrown?"
"Comprehensively. There is a wall underneath all of it that I did not even know existed until Mr. Dobson cleared some of the ivy last autumn.
" He looked out toward it, just a dark shape at that hour, the boundary between garden and field.
"I would like to put roses along it. The climbing variety, possibly, though Mr. Dobson thinks that's too ambitious for the first year. "
"What do you think?"
"I think ambition is precisely the point of a first year." He glanced at her. "What would you choose?"
She considered it. He watched her consider it and felt something lift, briefly, in his chest, the small hope of a question landing somewhere real.
"I am sure whatever you choose will be beautiful," she said. "You have such a clear sense of it already. I could not imagine improving on it."
He felt his face pale as she said that. He had watched her consider it, and yet she had not given him a thought or an opinion on the matter.
Thomas stopped walking.
Genevieve stopped a half-step later and turned to look at him with an expression of polite inquiry, pleasant and patient, and he looked at it, at the careful, finished surface of it.
It affected him deeply. He felt his mouth open before he had given it permission to, and before he could properly order his words, he found himself speaking.
"I do not want to talk about the garden," he said.
A pause.
"All right."
"I want to talk about—" He stopped. The things he wanted to talk about arranged themselves in his mind and he sorted through them and discarded most of them, because most of them were the wrong shape for that moment, too large or too direct or requiring a vulnerability from her that she had made very clear, without ever saying so, that she was not currently prepared to offer.
"I want to know how you are," he said. "Actually. "
"I am quite well," she said. "Thank you."
"Genevieve."
She met his eyes. Hers were very steady. Steadier than anything ought to be, he thought, that was actually fine.
"It's a lovely evening," she said, gently. "I am glad we came out."