Chapter 29 #2
He looked at her for a moment longer. She looked back at him with that expression, warm, unreadable, perfectly composed, and he understood that she was not going to give him anything that evening.
"Yes," he said. "So am I."
They walked on. He did not try again with the garden.
He did not try again with anything, because there was nothing left that was safe to try, and the unsafe things required a conversation that neither of them was ready for and he would not force on her out there in the mild dark, however much he wanted to.
After a while she said she was rather tired.
"Of course," he said.
"It's been a long week."
"It has."
She unthreaded her arm from his with a care that was somehow worse than abruptness would have been, and said good night, and crossed the garden toward the house. He watched her go, the shape of her against the lit windows, and then through the door, and then gone.
The garden settled around him.
He stood in it for a long time, long after the light in her window had gone dark, long after there was any reasonable purpose in standing there.
The night was mild and the stars were out and his garden was full of plans he had been looking forward to and he felt, standing alone in the middle of it, like a man in an empty house.
He had not the first idea what to do next.
He knew, with a certainty that had arrived somewhere during the walk without announcing itself, that doing nothing was finished.
That particular option had closed, quietly, somewhere between the fountain and her good night, and he had felt it close and had not stopped it, because he was not sure he wanted to.
He went inside. He did not sleep for some time.
Chapter 29
Something had not sat right with Genevieve that day.
Yet, she could not find anything out of place.
That was the thing she would return to, afterward, in the way one returns to the last ordinary moment before something breaks.
She looked across her letters that she had just finished writing.
Nothing was amiss in the ink, the parchment, or her phrasing.
She sighed. Perhaps she had just needed air. She had remained inside all day.
She had even been in a reasonable humor. That was the particular cruelty of it. Just the day before she had written to Caroline and received a reply that had made her laugh, genuinely laugh, the way she had not laughed in some weeks.
She had sat at her writing desk in the thin morning light and thought that perhaps the worst of it was passing, that perhaps she had been giving the gossip and the doubt and all of it more power than it deserved.
Perhaps things were not as irreparably damaged as they had felt at two in the morning on the nights when she could not sleep.
Then it happened. At that same writing desk, she felt a dread that would not ease. She stood abruptly, perhaps too abruptly, and went to find Thomas.
Except…
He was not in his study. She could not see him through the windows over the gardens. The maid who usually brought him tea had not seen him in some time.
Genevieve stood in the hallway and thought. All the while, the unease in her gut rose.
“You are being ridiculous,” she whispered to herself as she made her way to the morning room.
His grandmother was in the morning room, reading.
"I am sorry to interrupt," Genevieve said. "Do you know where Thomas has gone?"
Lady Harrington looked up. And there it was, that fractional thing, gone almost before it arrived, the very slight recomposition of an expression that had been, for just a heartbeat, something other than composed. Genevieve had become, over these past weeks, extremely attentive to small things.
She saw it. She understood immediately that the older woman knew something and had decided, in that fraction of an instant, not to tell her. Genevieve frowned. It was not like her to hold back information.
"I expect he will be back shortly," she said. "He mentioned something about the grounds this morning."
"The grounds… I did not see him in the garden."
"Or thereabouts." The older woman returned her eyes to her book with the air of someone concluding a subject. "I would not worry."
The surface of that was perfectly reasonable.
The surface of everything was perfectly reasonable.
That was the quality that had been driving Genevieve quietly to the edges of herself for weeks, the way the surface of everything held, clean and unblemished, while something entirely different moved underneath. She had grown so tired of surfaces.
"Grandmamma."
The older woman looked up again.
Genevieve had not raised her voice. She was not a woman who expressed the deepest things she felt through raised voices, it was not in her nature, and besides, she had been managing her expressions so carefully for so many weeks that she had become rather accomplished at it by now.
But she was aware that the quality of her pleasantness had changed, had taken on a precision and a stillness that was not, she thought, difficult to read, if one was paying attention.
And Lady Harrington was always paying attention.
"I am not asking idly," she said. "And I would rather not be managed."
A silence. Lady Harrington looked at her, really looked at her, the way she rarely permitted herself to do directly, and something moved across her face.
Regret. Resignation. And something else that looked, remarkably, like relief.
The relief of a woman who has been holding a door shut for some time and has finally decided to let it open.
"The forest," she said. "To the east. He rides there sometimes."
"Thank you."
"Genevieve." She paused in the doorway. Lady Harrington had set her book down entirely now, both hands flat on her lap, and she looked at her with an expression that Genevieve had not seen on her before, something unguarded, something almost maternal, the look of a woman who wanted to say something and understood it was not hers to say. "Whatever you find—"
"I will be perfectly fine," Genevieve said. "Thank you."
She was not sure that was true. She went to find her horse before she could think about it too carefully.
The ride was not long. It just felt long.
The day, which had seemed pleasant when she stood at her writing desk, now struck her as a peculiarly insufficient sort of brightness, thin and cold at the edges, the sunlight landing on the fields without any real warmth, the kind of light that looked like spring from a distance and felt like the end of winter up close.
She rode quickly and tried to keep her mind still, which was not something she had ever been particularly gifted at and which she was less gifted at now, with the fields opening around her and nothing to attend to except the sound of hooves and the wind and the thoughts she was trying not to finish.
She had spent weeks not finishing them. It had become a kind of discipline, the careful truncation of every thought that moved toward something she did not want to arrive at, the practiced art of diversion, the way she had learned to redirect her own mind the moment it pointed toward the harder questions.
She had told herself this was self-preservation.
She understood now, with the cold fields going by on either side and Lady Harrington’s expression still sitting somewhere behind her sternum, that it had been something else.
It had been cowardice dressed as composure, and she had worn it for so long it had started to feel like her own skin.
She was done with that. That much she knew. Whatever was at the end of her ride, she was done.
The forest came up on her left, a dark line of trees thickening as she approached, the early spring canopy still thin enough to let the grey light through in patches. She slowed without meaning to.
Her horse felt the change in her and shifted beneath her, and she made herself urge it forward, made herself ride into the shade of the trees and along the path she had taken before in better weather, in better times, when the forest had been simply a pleasant place to ride and not a destination she was approaching with her heart somewhere in the region of her throat.
She heard voices before she saw them.
Low voices, indistinct at first. Harsh whispers.
Tense tones. Voices not wishing to be heard but desperate to communicate in a soft, intimate space.
People who believed themselves unobserved.
She knew Thomas's voice as she knew all the sounds of a house she had lived in for months, knew it without needing to hear words, knew the cadence of it. She knew the other voice too.
She slowed her horse without meaning to. The voices were louder now, and she caught fragments, just fragments, the quality of the conversation before she had words for it. Then words came.
Thomas's voice, low and clipped: "— not what I promised you. What I gave you was more than enough—"
And Clarissa's, soft and intimate in the way that voices were soft when they were trying to reach someone: "— you cannot simply walk away from what we—"
"— it is finished, Clarissa—"
She stopped.
She had not understood the words. No, she had understood them completely.
The fragments had landed in her chest with the particular weight of things that are out of context and therefore worse than anything in context could be.
The intimacy of the tone, the use of each other's names, the rawness of two people who had not needed to lower their voices because they had not believed anyone would come.
The forest opened into the clearing.