Epilogue
The house sat on one of those streets that had decided, collectively, to be impressive, and had succeeded in the way that things succeed when they are trying very hard: completely, and without subtlety. Every door was freshly painted. Every railing was without rust.
The window boxes were symmetrical in a manner that suggested someone had measured them, and the overall effect was of a neighborhood that would have been offended by the suggestion that it had anything to prove.
Genevieve had been inside Lydia Hargrove’s particular house once before, at the beginning of the season. She remembered the wallpaper.
It was a gold-and-ivory damask with a pattern of repeating medallions that covered every wall of the front sitting room floor to ceiling, and she had spent the better part of that afternoon visit trying to determine whether it was the sort of wallpaper that rewarded closer inspection or whether it simply became more insistent the longer you looked at it.
She had concluded it was the latter. She still concluded the same, as she was shown in by a maid who took her card with an expression of careful neutrality and left her to wait.
She sat in the chair nearest the window, Lydia's best chair, she suspected.
Upholstered in something that matched the wallpaper in the way that indicated a decorator had been given a very clear brief and had executed it without mercy.
She folded her hands in her lap and looked at the medallions and felt, for the first time since the whole of it had begun, entirely calm.
Things had changed in the past three days.
That was the precise and somewhat remarkable fact of it.
Three days since she and Thomas had returned to Harrington Estate, and she was a different person sitting in that chair than she had been sitting in any chair for the past several weeks.
Not different in any way she could have fully articulated to anyone who asked. The same opinions.
The same habits. The same tendency to form strong views about wallpaper. But underneath all of that, something had rearranged itself into a configuration that felt, for the first time in longer than she wanted to examine, like her actual self rather than a managed approximation of it.
She heard footsteps in the hall. Quick ones, not the maid's measured pace, but the footsteps of someone who had been told she had a visitor and had come immediately, which meant she had not been warned and was arriving without preparation.
Genevieve recognized that. She had become, over the course of recent months, quite good at recognizing the difference between Clarissa prepared and Clarissa caught off guard, and the distinction mattered, because prepared Clarissa was a different thing to deal with entirely.
The door opened.
Clarissa appeared in it, and she was beautiful and she was composed, and she took in the whole of Genevieve in one quick, assessing look before her expression settled into something pleasantly neutral.
"Genevieve." She came in and closed the door behind her. "This is unexpected."
"I was passing," Genevieve said. "Loosely speaking."
Clarissa sat down across from her, unhurried, with the ease of a woman on her own ground.
"You were not passing. We are nowhere near anything you would have occasion to pass." She settled back in her chair. "You look well."
"I am well." Genevieve held her gaze comfortably. "Very well, actually. Thomas and I returned to Harrington Estate three days ago."
A pause. Something moved behind Clarissa's eyes and was managed before it became visible.
"I see."
"I thought you should know. Since you have apparently taken some trouble to suggest otherwise to people.
" She said it in the same pleasant, even tone she had been cultivating for weeks now.
"Lydia Hargrove made a remark at the Carstairs' last Tuesday that was attributed to you.
I will not repeat it. I think you know what it was. "
Clarissa looked at her and said nothing. This was one of her techniques, the composed silence that invited the other person to fill it, to over-explain, to reveal more than they had intended. Genevieve was familiar with it. She let the silence sit without touching it.
After a moment, Clarissa spoke.
"Why are you here, Genevieve? Not to repeat remarks you say you will not repeat, I imagine."
"No." Genevieve looked at her steadily. "I came to tell you something. Two things, actually."
"How organized."
"I have been making an effort." She folded her hands. "The first thing is that I know what you intended. You came back and you wanted my marriage, my confidence, my place in a life you felt you had some prior claim to, even though you walked away from it."
She watched her sister's face. "You succeeded for a time. I want you to know I am not unaware of the effort it took. The gossip, the appearances, that afternoon in the forest. It was a considerable campaign, and parts of it were very effective."
Clarissa's chin had risen fractionally.
"If you have come here to accuse me of—"
"I have not come to accuse you of anything.
" Genevieve kept her voice level. "I came to tell you the second thing, which is that it did not work.
Not ultimately. What you did drove Thomas and me apart for a few days, and then it drove us back together, and what we have now is—" She paused, not for effect but because she was choosing the word carefully.
"It is considerably more than what we had before you arrived. "
The silence this time was a different quality.
Clarissa was looking at her with an expression she could not entirely read, which was unusual.
She had been reading Clarissa's expressions since childhood.
This one was new. Perhaps not new exactly but rarely seen.
It had the quality of a woman looking at something she had not expected to find and was not sure what to do with.
"That," Clarissa said, "is a deeply irritating thing to say."
"Yes, I thought it might be."
"You have changed."
"I have been paying more attention." Genevieve looked at her.
"I spent rather a lot of time over the past weeks being quiet and careful and hoping that if I managed everything precisely enough it would all resolve itself without my having to do anything uncomfortable.
And then I stopped doing that, and things became considerably clearer. "
She paused. "I think you know what I mean. I think you are quite good at managing things and quite practiced at not looking at what the managing is for."
Clarissa's expression sharpened.
"Be careful," Clarissa almost growled.
"I am not trying to wound you. I am trying to be honest with you, possibly for the first time in our acquaintance, because I think we have spent our entire lives being very careful with each other in ways that have not served either of us particularly well."
"We are sisters. Not acquaintances."
"Yes." Genevieve looked at her. "We are.
And I love you. I want to be very clear about that, because nothing I am about to say is going to sound like it, and I need you to know that it is true regardless.
You are my sister and you will be my sister regardless of what either of us does about it.
" She stood, and smoothed her skirt, and reached for her gloves on the arm of the chair.
"What I am going to tell you is that my marriage is not territory you can reach from where you are standing. Thomas and I are—we are very well, Clarissa. We are genuinely, actually well, in a way that I do not think we were before, and I know that is not what you intended. Having said that, you are not to write to us. You are not to visit us. You are to stay away as much as one feasibly can.”
“You cannot be serious, Genevieve!” Clarissa argued, standing up.
“I am,” Genevieve said, her voice freezing over. “And I would ask that you respect my wishes.”
"And why," Clarissa said, to the window, "would I do that?"
“Because if you do not stop, the rest of society will see quite quickly that you are fixated on a married man. That you cannot keep away from a man who is not yours. I do not believe your reputation could take such a thing. Do you?”
Clarissa said nothing. Her eyes flickered over Genevieve, as if she had not understood the opponent she had walked into battle with.
A pause. Then something shifted. The composure thinned, though did not break.
Clarissa did not break. It thinned enough that what was underneath it became visible, and what was underneath it was not triumph.
Not any longer. It was something rawer than that.
Something that looked, to Genevieve's experienced eye, less like satisfaction and more like a woman who had finally stopped performing for an audience of one.
"You have no idea," Clarissa said. "What it was like. To come back and find that everything had—" She stopped. Her jaw set. She looked away and then back. "I did not plan all of it. Not from the beginning. I want you to know that, for whatever it's worth."
Genevieve was quiet. She let it sit.
"I came back because I had nowhere better to go," Clarissa said. The words came out in a tone she did not often use: stripped of performance, blunter than her usual register, with the flat quality of a thing finally admitted rather than constructed.
"That is not a thing I find easy to say.
But it is the truth, and you are… you have always been the one person who responds better to the truth than to anything else, which is very inconvenient for everyone around you, but there it is.
" She looked at the window. "I saw you happy and I could not bear it.
Not because I wanted Thomas. Or not only.
" She paused again. "Because I wanted something that looked like that.
And I did not know how to want it without… without reaching for yours."