The staff had withdrawn with the quiet efficiency she was already beginning to recognize as characteristic of the Harrington household, the door pulling shut behind them with a soft, definitive click. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Genevieve looked at her dearest friend, at the familiar sharp face and the bright brown eyes and the particular quality of Caroline's stillness, which had never in fifteen years of acquaintance been the stillness of a person with nothing to say, and felt something loosen in her chest that she had not entirely realized was tight.
It was, she thought, the specific relief of being in the presence of someone who had known you long enough that you did not have to perform anything. She had been performing, in one register or another, for three days. She had not fully appreciated the cumulative weight of it until this moment.
"Right," said Caroline, sounding like a general about to conduct troops.
Genevieve laughed. A real one, unguarded and involuntary, the first she thought she had properly produced in several days, and it felt like setting something down that she had been carrying without noticing the weight of it.
"Right," she agreed.
Caroline set her teacup down with the decisive click of a woman done with pleasantries.
"Your letter," she said, leaning forward. "It said, and I am quoting directly, because I have read it no fewer than eleven times, there have been some unexpected developments."
"That is accurate."
"Genevieve."
"Yes?"
"Your sister," Caroline said, and her voice had taken on the particular precision of someone choosing their words carefully in order to be as clear as possible. "Eloped with an officer on what was supposed to be her own wedding morning, and you married the man she left behind, on the same day!"
"Yes."
"In her dress!"
"The alterations were really remarkably good, considering the timeframe—"
"Genevieve!"
Genevieve folded her hands in her lap.
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like something that happens in a novel," Caroline said, with feeling. "It sounds like something that happens to a character, not to an actual person, not to you—" she stopped. Something shifted in her expression, the sharpness of it softening into something more careful and considerably more serious.
She had known Genevieve since they were four years old, and there were certain things she could always find in Genevieve's face when she looked for them, and she was looking for them now. "Are you alright? Truly, I mean. Not the version of alright that you tell people because it's easier than the alternative."
"Truly," Genevieve said. "I am, yes. It has been a very strange few days. But I am alright. I promise you."
Caroline looked at her for a long moment with those sharp brown eyes, searching for the truth of it with the efficiency of long practice. Whatever she found appeared to satisfy her, because after a moment she gave a small, tight nod.
"And Clarissa," she said, with the careful neutrality of someone trying very hard to be neutral about something they were not at all neutral about. She had never been neutral about Clarissa. Genevieve had long since made her peace with this.
"Is making her own choices," Genevieve said. "As she always has."
Caroline pursed her lips, and Genevieve could not tell if her friend was stopping herself from speaking, or from laughing.
I am not going to be kind about it, Genevieve, I am sorry for what she has done to you, what she has done to your family, the position she has put everyone in without so much as a—"
"Caroline." Genevieve's voice was gentle, but it had an edge in it, and Caroline heard it the way she always heard it, immediately, and without requiring it to be said twice. "I would ask you not to. Whatever she has done, she is still my sister, and I would rather not spend our first proper visit in days being angry on her behalf when I am not, currently, angry myself."
Caroline made the face she always made when she was swallowing several things she wanted to say. It was a very specific face, lips pressed together, brows slightly elevated, the look of a woman conducting a rapid internal negotiation with a part of herself that was considerably less diplomatic than the rest. Genevieve had been the beneficiary and occasionally the subject of it for years, and she found it, as always, both slightly trying and deeply familiar.
"Fine," Caroline said, with the brisk decisiveness of a retreat being framed as a strategic withdrawal. "Fine. We shall not talk about Clarissa." A pause, brief and pointed. "For now."
"Thank you."