Chapter 31
The carriage was in the drive when Genevieve arrived.
Not Thomas's carriage. Not her parents'.
She saw it from the gate and registered it without understanding it for a moment, piled improbably high with luggage, a hatbox roped precariously to the top, a maid directing a footman with the harried authority of someone who had been directing footmen all morning and had not found them equal to the task.
A trunk was being secured to the back with a length of rope that did not appear equal to the task either. The whole arrangement had the slightly chaotic quality of a departure that had been decided on quickly and was being executed before anyone changed their mind.
The carriage she had been in pulled up next to it.
She had not anticipated finding the carriage in the drive.
Then she looked at the figure descending the front steps.
Clarissa was dressed for travel, which on Clarissa meant she was dressed beautifully, because Clarissa was always dressed beautifully.
Because beauty was one of the instruments she had learned to wield early and had never seen reason to set down.
She was pulling on her gloves with the focused efficiency of a woman in the middle of a departure, and she had not yet seen Genevieve, and for a moment Genevieve simply looked at her.
Clarissa looked up.
The surprise on her face was genuine. That was something, at least, a crack in the composure that was real rather than performed, the involuntary quality of an expression that had not been arranged in advance.
"Genevieve." She recovered quickly. She always recovered quickly. "I did not know you were coming back today."
"Evidently." Genevieve said as she stepped down and looked at the carriage, at the quantity of luggage strapped to its roof. "Are you leaving?"
"Mother and I have had a difference of opinion." Clarissa's tone was pleasant in the way that her tones were always pleasant when she was being careful, smooth and uninflected, giving nothing away. "I thought it better to remove myself before the difference became a scene."
"Where will you go?"
"I have friends." She returned to her gloves. "I always have somewhere to go."
This was true. It had always been true. Clarissa had always had somewhere to go, had always had a circle arranged around herself with the unconscious competence of a woman who understood that social currency was its own variety of security, and had invested in it accordingly.
Genevieve had found this admirable once. She was not sure now what she found it.
Her mother had appeared at the top of the front steps, wisely remaining there, wearing the expression of a woman who has done everything she could and was prepared to observe what happened next.
The footman had stopped pretending to arrange luggage and was examining the middle distance with dedicated concentration.
"Come inside for a moment," Genevieve said.
"I was rather on my way—"
"Clarissa." She said it quietly, without addition. Just the name, with everything she meant underneath it.
Something moved in her sister's face. Then Clarissa handed her second glove to her maid with the air of a woman making a concession she has decided to frame as grace, and followed her in.
Her mother offered the morning room. Genevieve thanked her and closed the door.
Clarissa looked at her with an expression of patient inquiry.
Genevieve sat in it for a moment.
She looked at her sister across the pleasant, familiar room, and she thought about what she intended to say, and she took her time about beginning, because she was not going to rush this, was not going to let urgency make it imprecise.
"I owe you an apology," she said.
Clarissa blinked. It was, Genevieve thought, possibly the most genuine expression she had seen on her sister's face in years. The unguarded surprise of someone who had prepared for several possible openings, and this had not been among them.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I have been defending you for years." Genevieve kept her voice even and unhurried.
"To people who turned out not to be wrong about you.
I told myself it was loyalty. I think it was closer to vanity.
I did not want to revise my opinion, because revising it would have meant admitting I had been wrong to hold it in the first place, and I have always found that particular admission difficult. "
She paused. "I apologize for doing so. For the people I argued with on your behalf who did not deserve to be argued with, and for you, because being defended by someone who is defending a fiction of you rather than the reality is not something I imagine has ever actually served you."
Clarissa looked at her for a long moment.
"That," she said, "is a very strange apology."
"It is the only honest one I have."
"Most people who come to apologize want something from me in return."
"I do not want anything from you." Genevieve looked at her steadily. "I want to have this conversation and then I want you to go wherever you are going, and I want to go back to my life. That's all."
"All right," she said. "Say what you came to say."
"I know what you have been doing," Genevieve said.
"The gossip. Lydia Hargrove. What you said and to whom and the general campaign of it.
And the forest." She held her sister's gaze.
"I want you to understand that I know, and that I have known for longer than you probably assumed, because you have always underestimated how much I was paying attention. "
"And what do you intend to do about it?"
"That is what I came to tell you." Genevieve sat forward slightly. "I am not going to do anything about it in the sense you mean. I am not going to issue ultimatums or involve anyone else or make it into a larger drama than it needs to be." She paused.
"What I am going to do is tell you plainly that it is finished. The allowances. The defending. The habit I have had my entire life of extending you more grace than the evidence supported, because you were my sister and I loved you and I believed that had to count for something."
Clarissa's chin had come up.
"I see you have developed opinions."
"I have always had opinions. I kept them to myself where you were concerned because I thought that was what love required." Genevieve looked at her. "I have revised that position."
"How very modern of you."
"Clarissa." She said the name with patience rather than sharpness.
"Why? That's the question I keep returning to.
You left. Not under any compulsion, not because anything was done to you, you left because you chose to, because you decided there was something you wanted more than what you had, and you went after it.
And then you came back and found that the life you left had continued without you, and you decided that was intolerable. "
She held her sister's gaze. "I have tried very hard to understand it.
I have spent weeks trying to construct a version of it that is fair to you, because that is what I have always done.
I construct fair versions of things involving you.
But I cannot make this one work. Because what you have done has not made you happy.
I am looking at you now and you are not a happy woman, Clarissa.
Whatever you thought you were going to get from all of this, I do not think you received it. "
The silence that followed was different from the previous ones.
The composed patience of it had changed quality.
It was thinner, somehow, less complete. Something had moved in Clarissa's face when Genevieve said ‘happy,’ something that was there, and then was not, controlled back into place with the speed and precision of long practice.
But Genevieve had seen it. She had been seeing things clearly for some time now.
"My happiness," Clarissa said, "is my own affair."
"Yes. It is." Genevieve stood. "And my marriage is mine.”
Clarissa looked at her from the chair. Her posture was perfect. Her expression was composed. But something underneath all of it was very still in a way that was different from her usual stillness.
"I am not your enemy," Genevieve said. "I have never been your enemy, despite the sustained effort you have made to cast me as one." She paused. "I think you know that. I think somewhere underneath it all you do know it, and I think that knowledge is not entirely comfortable."
She stood and moved to the door. "I hope you find somewhere satisfactory to go. I mean that sincerely. I hope wherever you end up is somewhere you can be less at war with everything. Because you are exhausting yourself, Clarissa. Just as you have exhausted me. Anyone with eyes can see it."
She turned and opened the door.
"Goodbye, Clarissa," she said. And she meant it the way it needed to be meant. Not as a door slamming, but as a door closing, gently and finally, the latch settling into place.
She left the room.
She heard the carriage leave twenty minutes later.
She was at the window of her old chambers. It was not that she had gone there to watch, but because she had gone there to sit somewhere quiet for a few minutes, somewhere that did not require anything of her, and the window happened to face the drive.
She watched the carriage appear from around the side of the house, the hatbox swaying with considerable drama at the top, the maid sitting very straight beside the footman. She watched it go down the drive, slow and slightly overloaded, and turn out of the gate.
Genevieve stood at the window a little while longer.
The lime trees moved faintly in the afternoon air, the new leaves catching the light, and the drive remained empty and quiet and entirely ordinary, the way things looked after something significant had passed through them and the significance had receded and what was left was simply the place, going about its business.