"I know."
"It is a real thing, what has happened to you today. It is permitted to be a real thing."
"Yes," he said, and heard in his own voice the slight tightening that told him he had reached the limit of what he was going to allow this conversation to be. "And I am aware of that. But I would ask that we not," he paused, choosing the words carefully, "that we not dwell on it at length. It does not help."
She studied him for a moment with those sharp, steady eyes. Then she gave the small, accepting nod of a woman who knew when to press and when to leave a door closed.
"Very well," she said. "What would you like to talk about instead?"
"Genevieve," he said, without hesitation.
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his grandmother's expression. Not surprise, she was rarely surprised, but a kind of quiet attention, a recalibration.
"I do not wish for her to suffer for her sister’s actions," Thomas said. He leaned forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, and found that speaking about this, specifically, was easier, that it had the quality of solid ground after an uncertain morning. Something he could actually do something about.
"The talk will begin within the week. It may already have begun. She is going to find herself the subject of a great deal of scrutiny that she has done nothing whatsoever to deserve, in a house she does not yet know, among people who are strangers to her." He paused. "She does not know anyone here."
"She knows you."
"She has known me for approximately one day." He said it without bitterness. It was simply the truth of it, and he had always found it more useful to look at the truth of things directly rather than approaching them sideways. "We are essentially strangers to each other. Which is manageable, at least I think we shall manage it well enough, but she should not have to manage the rest of it without support. She should not have to walk into every drawing room in the county alone."
His grandmother was quiet for a moment, and he could see her thinking, that particular, efficient quality of her thought, the way she assembled things.
"She conducted herself very well today," she said. "With the staff."
"Yes." He had seen it. Had watched her move down the line of them and say the right thing to each face, and absorb the surprise in their eyes without flinching, and gradually, visibly, settle the temperature of the room by the simple force of behaving as though there was nothing unusual to remark upon. It had been, he had not expected it. He was not certain what he had expected, but it had not been that particular, quiet competence. "She did."
"She has sense," his grandmother said. "And composure. They are underrated qualities in a young woman." A pause. "Considerably more useful than beauty alone, though I see no reason one cannot have both."
Thomas looked at her steadily and said nothing.
"I will call on her, when the circumstances have settled," his grandmother continued, in the tone of a woman whose decisions, once made, required no further discussion. "And I will introduce her to the right people at the right time, in the right way. Anyone in this county who wishes to remain on good terms with me will extend her every courtesy."
This was not an idle claim. His grandmother had been a social force in that part of the world for fifty years. The particular combination of her age, her position, and her sheer implacable will had produced a local influence that Thomas had occasionally found useful and always found impressive. There were families in a twenty-mile radius who had been behaving themselves in various respects for decades on the strength of her regard.
"Thank you," he said. "That is a considerable relief to me."
She looked at him with a slight softening around the eyes that she would never have permitted on any other part of her face.
"She is your wife, Thomas. She is family now. It is not a kindness. It is simply what is done."
He nodded. Then stood, because there was nothing more to say, and because if he remained much longer in that particular chair in that particular room with that particular woman looking at him with that expression, he was going to come to the end of his composure.
"Dinner at seven," he said.
"I am more than aware," she said. "I have been eating dinner at seven in this house for forty years."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"Goodnight, Grandmama."
"Goodnight," she said. And then, as he reached the door: "Thomas."
He turned.
She was looking at him with that steady, clear regard. "You have done right by her today. Whatever else this morning was, you have done right by her, and by your family, and by yourself. That is not nothing."
He held her gaze for a moment.