Chapter 8 #3
“Yes, yes, you need not loom. I am aware that half the ton now hangs upon a card tray.”
They crossed at once to the small writing table.
Genny laid out the announcement cards in their corrected order while Harrison checked the sequence against the printed order draft.
The room narrowed around the task. Outside, faint through the open corridor, she could hear movement gathering near the garden steps and the distant tuning of violins preparing for the benefactors’ procession.
Her fingers moved quickly. Not carelessly.
Not with the frantic blundering people so often seemed to expect of her.
They moved quickly because she was good at this, because memory and instinct and attention all worked together when given leave, and because somewhere over the last two days she had finally stopped apologizing to herself for that truth.
“Lady Castlemain,” Harrison said.
She slid the card into place.
“Mrs. Vale.”
Done.
“Lady Dorring.”
Genny paused over that one only long enough to contemplate the pleasure of placing it under the tea urn instead. Then she set it where it belonged.
When the last card lay in order, Harrison looked at the stack, then at her.
“You were not exaggerating.”
“About what?”
“That you could do this better than most.”
The praise landed with surprising force.
No, that was not honest. It did not surprise her at all anymore. It simply mattered. Her throat tightened around it, and she had to look down at the cards before her expression gave too much away.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He held her gaze for a moment longer than was safe. Then he took up the cards. “Come. We may yet preserve Lady Penworth from martyrdom.”
They returned to the terrace just as the procession was being called.
The benefactors assembled in correct order, their names announced without error, their vanities soothed, their precedence preserved.
Lady Castlemain glowed with satisfaction.
Mrs. Vale looked gratified enough to forgive the world its mediocrity for another hour.
Lady Dorring, though stiff as a poker, could do no more than accept her place in the line and her floral triumph beyond it.
The presentation passed without catastrophe. No one shouted, no one fainted, and no one was publicly disgraced.
And when the musicians struck up the first lively strains for the afternoon promenade, the tension that had held Lady Penworth’s house taut for two days finally eased.
Lady Penworth, who had clearly reached the last edge of her nerves, burst quietly into tears against Lord Penworth’s sleeve while still smiling at her guests.
Mrs. Wexley sat down very suddenly on the nearest garden chair and began fanning herself with the corrected printed order.
Even Niall, who had returned with Louisa for the public part of the fête, looked faintly disappointed that no one had attempted murder with a flower stand.
Genny ought to have felt triumphant. Instead what she felt first was relief, deep, warm, nearly dizzying relief.
Not only because the day had been saved, though it had, but because she had done something that mattered and no one could now pretend otherwise.
She had seen clearly, acted decisively, helped preserve the fête from women far too old to behave like rival debutantes, and protected the charity Lady Penworth had so nearly lost beneath vanity and spite. No one could laugh that away.
Well, they might try.
But she would know better.
The realization steadied some part of her she had not known was shaking.
She slipped away from the crowd at last and made her way toward the far end of the rose walk, where the clipped hedges gave way to a small marble basin and a bench half hidden behind climbing white roses.
The sounds of the fête followed only faintly there, the music softened by distance, the murmur of voices reduced to a civil blur.
Bees moved lazily among the blossoms. The late sun turned the gravel pale as sugar.
For the first time in two days, she seemed to be alone.
The relief of it nearly buckled her knees. She had held herself bright and upright for so long that solitude felt like permission to breathe.
Or so she thought.
“I had some hope,” Harrison said behind her, “that I might find you here.”
She turned.
He was no longer carrying printed orders or cards.
He had shed the last visible signs of management, though not, perhaps, the authority that seemed to live in his bones.
Yet there was something looser in him now.
The strain had not vanished, but it had altered.
He looked, Genny thought, like a man who had set down one burden only to pick up another of his own choosing.
A ridiculous thought, perhaps, but a revealing one.
“I begin to suspect,” she said, “that you have become alarmingly good at finding me when my composure is in danger of returning.”
His eyes warmed. “I should be sorry to lose all your honesty at once.”
She sat on the bench before her knees could betray how greatly that answer affected her. Harrison remained standing for a moment, then came to sit beside her, leaving a proper distance that felt to Genny both gentlemanly and unbearably inadequate.
For a little while neither spoke. The breeze carried the scent of roses between them. Somewhere beyond the hedge Lady Castlemain laughed, victorious and entirely unaware that her public peace had hung by a thread no thicker than a calling card.
At last Harrison said, “You were splendid today.”
Genny looked down at her hands. “You have become distressingly generous in your opinions of me.”
“I am attempting accuracy.”
She laughed softly. “That is even worse.”
He did not laugh at once. When he spoke again, his voice had lowered.
“I told you last night that after the fête we must have a conversation not chiefly concerned with flowers.”
“So you did.”
“And because I have spent the last day discovering that delay improves nothing where you are concerned, I mean to have it now.”
Her heart gave one painful, glorious beat. Then another, harder. The air seemed to catch in her lungs.
She turned toward him fully.
He was watching her with an expression she had not yet seen on his face, though perhaps it had been gathering there in fragments since yesterday morning.
Desire was certainly present, and admiration too, but neither was quite the right word for it.
It was a kind of gravity, as though the man before her had considered his own mind, found it uselessly disobedient where she was concerned, and had decided at last to speak anyway.
“Harrison,” she said, because his silence was beginning to feel like a precipice, “if you leave me long enough with that expression, I shall be forced to say something foolish merely to survive it.”
His mouth moved slightly. “Then let me spare us both.”
He drew breath, then seemed to lose whatever formal sentence he had prepared. His hand flexed once against his knee.
“Genny,” he said.
The single word stripped the air from her lungs.
“Yes?”
“I was wrong about you,” he said. “At first. Not in thinking you lively, or impulsive, or capable of rearranging a room into immediate distress. All that is true.”
Genny gasped in mock offense.
He ignored it.
“What I failed to see was that beneath all that brightness there is more steadiness, more intelligence, and more courage than most people possess in an entire lifetime. You notice what others miss. You go where others hesitate. And when the world is unkind, which it has been to you more often than I can comfortably bear thinking of, you still choose not to become cruel in return.”
Genny’s throat tightened. He had seen her, not in fragments, not in flattering pieces, but entirely.
“I do not know at what exact moment admiration became something more difficult,” he continued, his voice quieter now, “only that by the time I understood the change, it was far too late to prevent it. I think of you when I ought to be thinking of accounts. I look for you in every room before I have even admitted to myself that I am doing so. And I have spent the better part of two days pretending my wish to protect you was purely practical, when in truth it is personal in every way that matters.”
The world had gone very still. Genny could hear the fountain, the bees, and her own pulse with startling clarity.
Harrison went on, and because he was Harrison, he did not soften or decorate the thing. He simply gave it to her plain.
“I love you.”
The words settled through her.
They should have shocked her. Instead they settled at once into some place that had been waiting for them, though she had not dared name it.
She laughed, perilously close to tears. “That is very inconvenient.”
“It is appallingly inconvenient.”
“I am glad,” she whispered.
That reached him. She saw it in the sudden warmth that broke through the restraint of his face.
“Are you?” he asked.
Genny shook her head once, smiling through the bright blur gathering in her eyes. “No. That was absurd. I am not glad because it is inconvenient. I am glad because it is you.”
Something in him gave way then, not composure entirely, for he would always be himself, but the distance he had held between feeling and declaration. His shoulders lowered a fraction, as though he had set down a weight he had carried too long, and he turned more fully toward her.
“I had hoped,” he said, “that might be your answer.”
“My poor lord, I have been half in love with you since you began scolding lemon cakes and calling it order.”
This time he laughed properly, and because the sound no longer startled her, only delighted, Genny laughed too.
Then the laughter faded, leaving only the look in his eyes.
The world narrowed. “Harrison,” she said.
He touched her cheek with such care that for one trembling instant she could do nothing but close her eyes and lean into it. His hand was warm and steady, reverent in a way that undid her more thoroughly than urgency might have.
“May I?” he asked.