Yet I must speak plainly, though plainness does not come easily to me in this moment: I am in love. Wholly, irrevocably, and without any prospect of amendment. Captain Richard Beaufort of His Majesty's regiment has shown me, in every word and every action, the conduct of a true gentleman.
He is steady where I am impulsive, patient where I am afraid, and it is to him alone that my affections have attached themselves, without my consent, I assure you, and entirely beyond my power to reclaim .I am sensible of the pain these words must inflict, most particularly upon dear Thomas, whose good opinion I have never ceased to value. I can only pray that time, and the natural generosity of his character, may in due course allow him to extend to me some measure of pardon.
Do not think harshly of Captain Beaufort. The fault, if fault there be, is mine alone.
I shall write again when circumstances permit, and shall not rest easy until I know you are well and that some degree of peace has been restored to our household.
Your ever devoted and most repentant daughter,
Clarissa Penrose
As she finished reading, the room seemed to fill with that ongoing, uncomfortable silence that feels as if the air has a physical weight to it, a presence that cannot be shifted or removed. Her mother covered her mouth and let out a choked sob. Her father slumped into a nearby chair, his head in his hands.
For a long moment, nobody spoke. The only sound was Mrs. Penrose's quiet, broken sobbing, and the distant, indifferent birdsong outside the window that seemed deeply wrong given the circumstances. Genevieve became acutely aware of the letter still in her hands and set it carefully upon Clarissa's desk, as though distance from it might lessen its contents.
Her mother sank into the chair beside her husband, her composure entirely undone. This was not the elegant weeping of a woman performing distress. This was something rawer and quieter, the grief of a mother who had not seen it coming and could not understand how she had missed it.
“How could she do this?” he whispered. “How could she do this to us… to Thomas?”
“I do not know,” Genevieve whispered.
"We must find her," Mrs. Penrose said suddenly, straightening. "We must send someone at once. She cannot have gone far."
"Gone where, precisely?" Mr. Penrose asked quietly. The words settled over the room like a cold cloth. He was right. Genevieve looked back down at the letter. Captain Richard Beaufort. The name meant nothing to her. She turned it over in her mind, searching for any memory of Clarissa mentioning him, any evening where her sister had returned home with brighter eyes than usual, any afternoon unaccounted for. There were some, she realized with a hollow feeling. There had been several. She simply had not known to look.
"I do not know this man," Genevieve said softly. "Do either of you?"
Her parents exchanged a look that told her everything. They did not.
"Then we cannot follow her," Mr. Penrose said. "And even if we could..." He trailed off, but the unspoken conclusion sat heavily between them all. Even if they found her, dragging Clarissa back to a marriage she had fled would solve nothing. The scandal of the pursuit alone would finish them.
They all knew what was to follow this. The humiliation Clarissa had invited into their lives would be all-consuming. Thomas Harrington was not a man of new money. His family tree had deep roots, his wealth was known to be closer to that of a landed earl than that of an untitled gentry, and his family had been able to make allies and enemies with a single look.
He had already been giving the Penroses a significant amount of social grace. Many argued that he was marrying beneath his standing. But when he looked at Clarissa, Genevieve had seen that mattered not to him. She thought of the last dinner they had shared, perhaps a fortnight past, when Clarissa had said something that made the whole table laugh. Genevieve had glanced at Thomas in that moment quite by accident and immediately wished she had not.
The expression on his face had been so unguarded, so entirely unaware of being observed, the look of a man who could not quite believe his good fortune. His blue eyes shimmered in the candlelight, his dark hair framing his face, the face of a man deeply in love. To him, Clarissa was his Eurydice, and he was Orpheus, willing to follow her even into the underworld and all that lay beyond.
Genevieve had admired him greatly in that regard, wishing for a man to look at her so, but would have never interfered with her sister’s courtship.
Looking back down at the letter, however, something else also stirred in her chest. She could imagine her sister sitting in her chambers, hurriedly writing with tears in her eyes. Clarissa was many things to many people, but Genevieve had always known that her sister’s inner world was complicated in a way that hers was not. Imagining poor Clarissa sitting here in the candlelight, alone with the weight of what she was about to do, made something in Genevieve soften despite herself.
She knew she ought to feel only the sharp edges of this. The betrayal, the recklessness, the profound selfishness of leaving without a word of warning to any of them. And she did feel those things. But she felt the other thing too, the ache of knowing her sister well enough to understand that Clarissa would not have done this lightly. Whatever else she was, Clarissa had never been cruel without cause. This had cost her something. Genevieve was certain of that much.
“Whatever shall we do about this situation?” Mr. Penrose asked with a sigh.
“There is nothing to do, is there?” Mrs. Penrose asked between tears. “Clarissa shall make us all pariahs by leaving like this. No one shall ever wish to associate with us! We had very little besides our good name, and now even that shall be gone.”
Genevieve wrapped her arms around her mother, and the older woman hugged her tightly in return.
“All is not lost yet,” Genevieve said softly. “Perhaps there is a way to salvage the situation. We should talk to Thomas. Surely he has a way to remedy this.”
“Your optimism knows no bounds,” Mr. Penrose sighed. “I do wish we could speak to him to find a solution, but there are precious few hours before the wedding. Indeed. Even if we were to summon him, he may expect us to have a plan already in place to salvage the situation, as it is our family who is doing his such a disservice.”
“Then we need to send someone to fetch him immediately,” Genevieve said, pulling back from her mother to look at her father. “The quicker we call him, the quicker we can all work together on a solution that is amenable to all parties.”
“Genevieve, he is to be married today, the banns have stated this for weeks. There are few ways that we have to mitigate such an impossible situation,” her father said, looking up at her.
“Well, there must be something we can do,” Genevieve implored. Her father sighed and ran a hand through his hair. His brow furrowed, and he focused on the floor. She had seen this expression on his face the many times he had been dealing with the “meat” of a problem. Difficult negotiations, suppliers that were unfit, demanding customers.