"No," he said quietly. "It is not."
He closed the door behind him.
His study was at the far end of the east wing, which was one of the reasons he had always preferred it. Far enough from the main rooms that it carried none of their sounds, no movement, no voices, no suggestion of the house going about its ordinary business.
Just the quiet, and the smell of old paper and woodsmoke even in summer, and the familiar arrangement of the desk and the bookshelves and the single window looking out over the side garden, where the light was now the low gold of early evening.
He closed the door, and stood in the silence, and allowed himself, for the first time all day, to put nothing on his face at all.
It was a strange sensation. He had been wearing something all day, the careful blankness, or the composed attention, or the social smile, or the version of himself that was functional and reliable and getting on with things, the version that had been getting on with things since the moment he had read the letter that morning and understood what it contained.
He had held that version in place through the study and the chapel and the staff and his grandmother and all the small, necessary, ongoing business of a day that had required him to be entirely present and entirely steady.
Right then however, he was not required to be steady.
He moved to the window and stood at it and looked out at the side garden without particularly seeing it. The light was very beautiful. He noted it distantly and it meant nothing in particular.
Clarissa.
He allowed himself to think it, properly, for the first time. Not the fact of it; he had been thinking the fact of it all day, the bare logistical reality, the chain of consequences, but the rest of it. The part he had been putting away. He had loved her. That was simply true.
He had loved her with the specific, somewhat helpless quality of a man who had known, somewhere underneath everything, that he was not seeing the thing clearly, and had loved her anyway, and told himself that it would be alright, and it had not been alright, and there he was.
He wondered where she was now.
He found that the wondering had a quality he had not expected.Not the sharp ache he had been braced for, but something more bewildering than that. Something that felt less like grief and more like standing in a room where a piece of furniture had always been and finding it absent, and realizing, with a disorienting clarity, that the room was not actually smaller without it. That was not a feeling he had anticipated. He did not entirely know what to do with it.
And then, because he was who he was, his thoughts moved—not by force, but of their own quiet volition, the way thoughts did when they had somewhere else to be—to Genevieve.
He did not try to stop them.
She was somewhere in the house right now. In her rooms, perhaps, or in the library, he had seen the way she had looked at it, that completely unguarded delight, the laugh it had startled out of her, and it had stayed with him in the way that honest things sometimes stayed with him.
She was somewhere in the house that was hers now, navigating the strangeness of a life she had not chosen and had nonetheless walked into with her chin level and her hands steady and her smile given freely to every member of his staff as though she had been doing it for years.
She was kind. He had seen that plainly, and quickly. The real kind, not the performed kind, not the social kind that was essentially a form of management, but the kind that came from actually noticing people and finding them worth noticing. It was not a small thing. He had been around enough people who lacked it to understand its precise value.
He thought about her laugh for a moment. Then made himself stop.
She was his wife. She was in his house. She was, by every measure he had been able to take in the course of a single bewildering day, a person of genuine quality. And she was navigating an enormous upheaval with a grace that he found, in his more honest moments, considerably more impressive than his own.
He owed her a great deal. Not in the transactional sense, he had not forgotten that she had done him a considerable service that morning, and that it had cost her something, whatever she said, but in the simpler sense. She was there, and she was his responsibility, and he was going to take that seriously.
He would not let her be touched by scandal.
The light was nearly gone from the garden. The first of the evening stars was visible above the tree line, faint and early.
Thomas stood at the window for another moment, and then he straightened.
It was almost seven o’clock.
Chapter 7
Three days was, Genevieve reflected, not very long at all in which to become accustomed to an entirely new life. And yet there she was, sitting in her drawing room, feeling almost recognizably like herself. Whatever had caused that feeling?
One Miss Caroline Wentworth. She was sitting on the edge of the settee, her large, brown eyes fixed on Genevieve, her fingers twitching slightly on the fabric as if wanting to grasp at something, and her hair neatly piled under a hat that Genevieve knew all too well that Caroline did not own before that day. Mrs. Wentworth had likely insisted upon it. Caroline had the expression of a person physically restraining themselves from asking a question, as if storing them up would make them disappear.
The tea setting was between them. The afternoon light lay warm and unhurried across the carpet, picking out the pattern of it in golds and creams that Genevieve was only just beginning to learn. Outside, somewhere in the gardens, she could hear the distant, rhythmic sound of someone doing something purposeful with what she suspected was a pair of shears. The ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon, in a house that was,improbably and irrevocably, hers.