Chapter 31 #3
"I am sure she would appreciate being acknowledged by someone who cares about her well-being.
" He looked up from the fire and met Thomas's eyes, and his expression was entirely, infuriatingly composed.
"I think she would find it a comfort, under the circumstances.
A visit from a friend who is not…" a fractional pause, the most deliberate fractional pause Thomas had ever witnessed, "complicated. "
Something happened in Thomas's chest that was not comfortable.
"I could go tomorrow morning," Samuel continued, with the air of someone working through a practical problem. "It's not a long journey. I could be there by noon if I left early, which would give us the afternoon, and she has always been good company for an afternoon, very—"
"Samuel." Thomas's voice had taken on a quality he recognized as dangerous. Samuel also recognized it and showed no signs of being deterred by it whatsoever.
"She writes quite good letters," Samuel said, almost to himself. "I have always thought so. There is a quality to her observations that is—"
Thomas stood up.
He was on his feet before he had fully decided to be on his feet, the decision having apparently been made by some part of him that was tired of waiting for the rest to catch up.
He stood in the firelight and looked at Samuel and understood, with a clarity that five hours of whiskey had not managed to obscure, exactly what his friend had been doing for the past ten minutes.
He had never had his own jealousy weaponized against him before.
"You complete—"
"There is a horse saddled," Samuel said. "Your grandmother saw to it before I came in. She is an extraordinarily organized woman."
Thomas stared at him.
"It's not a long ride," Samuel said. "An hour, perhaps.
Less if you go at a reasonable pace, less than that if you go at the pace you are currently suggesting by your expression.
" He reached for the decanter and refilled his own glass with the composure of a man settling in for the portion of the evening that did not require him to go anywhere. "I will wait here."
"She asked me to give her time."
"She asked you to give her time. It has been five days.
" Samuel looked up at him over the rim of the glass.
"Five days is not time, Thomas. Five days is you being frightened, which I understand, but frightened and patient are not the same thing.
Hiding in here serving them to yourself as though they were doing either of you any good.
" His voice was still mild. It was somehow worse when it was mild.
"She told you she was in love with you. She told you this while she was leaving.
She has had five days to sit with the fact that she said that and received, in return, a letter. "
He set the glass down. "Go and tell her what she is worth. Tonight, not when it's convenient, not when you have decided you are ready, not when you have composed yourself sufficiently. Tonight, as you are, because that is what she deserves. Not the managed version. The real one."
A silence. The fire settled. Outside, the spring night pressed against the windows with its cold indifferent clarity.
Thomas picked up his coat.
"If you touch that decanter again before I am back," he said, "I will know."
"I would not dream of it," Samuel said, and reached for the decanter.
Thomas went out. In the hallway, his grandmother was coming from the direction of the kitchen.
Her expression was one of someone who had certainly not been eavesdropping.
Not at all. Whatever she said as he passed was quiet enough that he could not be entirely certain of the word, though it sounded very much like finally, and when he turned to look back her expression was perfectly neutral and she was studying the ceiling with great interest.
He went to find his horse.
***
The drawing room at her parents' house had never felt so small.
Genevieve sat with her embroidery in her lap and did not embroider.
The fire was good and the candles were lit and her mother had kissed her forehead after dinner with a particular gentleness.
She understood that her daughter was not ready to talk about any of it yet and had left her to the quiet.
The quiet was less useful than she had hoped.
It mostly gave her thoughts room to move around in, which they were doing with considerable energy.
She had done the right thing. She was nearly certain she had done the right thing.
The certainty wavered, periodically, between approximately eight in the evening and whenever she finally managed to sleep, but during the daylight hours she could hold it steadily enough. She had not been able to stay.
Whatever the truth of the forest was, and she believed Thomas—which was its own complicated problem—she would not have been able to remain in that house and perform composure for another week, another month, the rest of her life.
She had needed to breathe somewhere that was not managed and watchful and full of things she was not being told.
She had breathed. She had confronted Clarissa. She had drunk a great deal of her mother's tea and taken long walks and written three letters to Caroline and received three back that were warm and practical and asked no questions she was not ready to answer.
She was better. She was not well, exactly, but she was better.
She heard the horse on the drive.
She did not move immediately. Horses arrive; it was not necessarily anything. Her father had been expecting correspondence from his solicitor. It could be—
She heard his voice in the hallway.
She set the embroidery aside with a precision that was almost comical, the absolute steadiness of hands that were compensating for something, and stood.
She could hear her mother murmuring something, and then a pause, and then footsteps, and then the door opened and Thomas was in it, and she understood immediately why her mother had let him come in: he looked terrible.
Her mother had always been susceptible to people who looked like they were suffering.
She was, it turned out, also susceptible. She hated that about herself, a little.
"I know you asked me to wait," he said. He stayed in the doorway, which she appreciated. He had given her the choice of the distance between them. "I tried. Five days was the best I could manage. I am sorry if it is not enough."
"Come in," she said. "Sit down."
He came in. He did not sit down. He stood in the middle of the room with his hat in his hands and looked at her.
The thing that struck her was how unguarded he was.
She had grown accustomed, over the months of their marriage, to reading the small signals: the slight tension at his jaw when something mattered, the way he looked at a fixed point somewhere above her head when he was thinking about how to say something.
The layered quality of him, the management of it.
There was none of that now. He looked at her with everything simply present, and it was so unfamiliar that for a moment she did not know what to do with it.
"I need to tell you the truth," he said. "All of it. I should have told you weeks ago, and I did not, and I am not going to explain why because none of the reasons are good enough." He stopped. "May I?"
She sat down in the chair by the fire and folded her hands and said: "Tell me."
He told her.
The money had been his own sense of obligation.
His stupid, misplaced, tenacious obligation, the obligation of a man who had believed himself responsible for a woman's circumstances because he had once been attached to her and the attachment had ended badly.
He had told himself it was honor. He had told himself that assisting her was the decent thing, the right thing, and he had continued to tell himself this long after he had begun to suspect that Clarissa's intentions were not what she represented them to be.
"When did you suspect?" Genevieve asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
"Earlier than I should have admitted." He said it without flinching, which she gave him credit for.
"The flirtations. She was… Clarissa is very skilled at making things seem like something other than what they are, and I had a long history of being willing to believe her version of events.
But I knew. Somewhere underneath the convenient not-knowing, I knew. "
He looked at her steadily. "When you came through those trees I had already told her. That the money was finished. That I would not meet with her again. What you saw was the end of it, not the continuation. I need you to believe that."
"I do believe it."
Something moved across his face.
"You do?"
"I told you on the stairs that I believed you." She looked at him. "I left because I could not stay, not because I thought you were lying."
He was quiet for a moment, absorbing this.
Then he crossed the room and sat down across from her, close enough that she could see the firelight on his face, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at her with that same unmanaged openness that she still had not entirely adjusted to.
"There is something else," he said.
"All right."
"I have been telling myself for a long time that what I felt for Clarissa was love.
I treated it as the defining experience of my emotional life.
I was very attached to it. To the version of events in which I had loved her and lost her and that was the significant thing, the real thing, and everything afterward was somehow less. "
He said it with the expression of a man who is not enjoying what he is saying and intends to say it anyway. "I was wrong. I know that with a certainty I do not think I can adequately explain, except to say that I know it because I have something to compare it to."
The fire shifted. She waited.