"This will be your room, primarily," Thomas said from the doorway. "To use as you see fit. If you want it changed, redecorated, rearranged, you need only say."
She looked at him, her eyes wide and almost startled.
"I would not want to—"
"It has not been touched in some years," he said, with a tone that closed the subject gently but completely. "It could stand to be someone's room again."
She nodded and looked up at the room again. Breathing in the scent of a room that had been changed through use and appreciation, she could already see ways it could be changed. If she were Clarissa, she would have bounded in, making it more fashionable, demanding it be brought up to the standard Clarissa would have expected of her home.
Genevieve chewed the inside of her cheek slightly. This would be a problem she would have to sit with…
She would not have time for it yet, though, as Thomas took her arm and led her into a different area.
The dining room was long and formal. Long was, perhaps, too delicate a word. It would be entirely possible that the table could host to the population of a small nation. Perhaps whoever had designed it intended it to be used as a part of the feeding of the five thousand. She stopped at the head of it and looked down its considerable length and felt the faint, absurd urge to laugh.
"How many does it seat?" she asked.
"Thirty, at a full setting." He paused. "We need not use it every day."
"I should hope not," she said. "I would feel I was shouting across a field."
He made a sound at that, brief and quiet, not quite a laugh but adjacent to one. She smiled, mentally filing away the noise. It was good to know, at least, that there was some humor underneath his polished exterior.
“We could find a smaller table,” he insisted, his mouth still curled up at the edges.
“I see no need to just yet,” she replied. “But we shall see what happens in time.”
He nodded, his arm going to her lower back again to lead her out.
The music room she passed through more quickly, though not quickly enough to miss the pianoforte standing in the far corner, its lid down, a light film of dust on the keys suggesting it had not been played recently.
"Do you play?" she asked.
"Tolerably," Thomas said, which she suspected meant rather well but that he saw no reason to say so. "Do you?"
"Yes." She ran one finger lightly along the edge of the lid. "I play quite a lot, actually. I hope that will not be an inconvenience."
"On the contrary." He held the door to the corridor open for her. "I would be glad to hear it used."
And then the library.
She stopped in the doorway and forgot, for a moment, to be anything other than delighted.
It was a proper library, not the decorative sort that existed in houses to demonstrate that the family was the kind of family that owned books, but the lived-in kind, the kind where the shelves went from floor to ceiling on every wall, and the books on them looked as though they had been opened more than once.
There was a smell to it, that particular smell of old paper and leather binding and something else she had never been able to name but had always associated with the best kind of afternoon. Two armchairs sat beside the fireplace at a slight angle to each other, worn to exactly the right degree of comfort, with a low table between them.
"I thought you might like this room," he said, and she heard something in Thomas's voice when that might, under other circumstances, have been amusement.
"How could anyone not like this room?" She stepped inside and turned slowly, taking it in from the center of it. "How many volumes?"
"Several thousand. I have not counted recently." He had followed her in and stood near the doorway, watching her with that same unreadable expression. "My father added considerably to what his father had. I have added to it further."
"What do you read?"
The question came out before she had particularly decided to ask it, and she wondered for a moment if it was too much, too direct, too presumptuous, too soon. But he answered it without hesitation.
"History, mostly. Some natural philosophy. The occasional novel, though I would not admit it widely." A pause, and then, very dry: "My grandmother considers fiction a moral failing."