The silence that followed was quieter than most silences. The sound of the shears in the garden had stopped, and the afternoon lay still and warm around them.
"I still have reservations," Caroline said. "I want that stated plainly."
"I would have expected nothing less of you, Miss Wentworth."
"This whole thing has happened so quickly, and I was not there, and I could not…" She paused, and the feeling behind the words was so entirely, so characteristically Caroline, that fierce and unsentimental love, the kind that had shown up at Genevieve's door practically at sunrise more than once over the years with no explanation required, that Genevieve felt her throat tighten in a way she had not anticipated.
"You are here now," Genevieve said softly.
"I am here now." Caroline's voice was gruff in the way it got when she was feeling things she did not intend to perform. "And I am watching him. I want that absolutely understood."
"Understood."
"If he gives me any reason whatsoever…"
"Caroline. He is a good man. I am quite certain of it."
"You were certain Clarissa was a good person."
The words landed, and Genevieve felt them, and Caroline had the expression of someone who had gone slightly further than intended.
"That was unkind," Genevieve said.
"I know. I am sorry," she said it immediately, without equivocation, in the way she always apologized, quickly and completely and without padding it. "That was unfair."
"It was. But I take your point." Genevieve was quiet for a moment and then looked at her friend directly. "He is not Clarissa. He is not. The way he conducts himself, the things he says and the way that he says them, the way he has handled all of this… he is genuinely good. I believe that. I have been paying very close attention and I believe it." She held Caroline's gaze. "Trust me. Please."
Caroline looked at her for a long moment. Then she exhaled, and her shoulders came down from wherever they had been, and she reached across the tea things and briefly, firmly, squeezed Genevieve's hand.
"I always trust you," she said. "It's everyone else I have difficulty with."
They moved on to lighter things after that, to Caroline's account of her mother's reaction upon receiving Genevieve's letter, which had apparently required the better part of an afternoon and strong tea to recover from; to a mutual acquaintance's recent and spectacularly ill-advised choice of hat; to the novel they had both been reading before the world had rearranged itself, and what Caroline thought of the ending, which was damning and entertaining in equal measure.
The room warmed around them, and the tea cooled in its pot, and Genevieve felt, by degrees, the thing that three days in a new house among new people had been quietly doing to her begin to ease.
She had not realized how much she had needed it. The particular ease of someone who required nothing from her. No composure, no performance, no careful and considered presentation of herself as a woman who had everything in hand. Just Caroline, who had seen her at her worst and her best and found both of them acceptable, sitting on the other side of the tea setting and talking about a hat.
She was, she thought, going to have to write to Caroline considerably more often.
They were in the middle of an analysis of the novel's secondary characters when the drawing room door opened.
She heard him before she properly saw him, his voice in the hallway, low and easy, a brief exchange with one of the footmen, and then the door. Thomas. He paused very slightly when he registered that they were not alone, just a fraction of a beat, smoothed over almost immediately by the easy composure she was learning to recognize as characteristic of him, and looked from Genevieve to Caroline with a pleasantness that gave nothing away.
On the settee, Caroline went still in the particular way of a person conducting a thorough rapid assessment.
"I beg your pardon," Thomas said. "I did not intend to interrupt."
"Not at all." Genevieve rose. "Thomas, may I introduce Miss Caroline Wentworth, my dearest friend. Caroline, my husband."
My husband. The words still had that faint quality of novelty, like a room seen in a different light. She was not certain Caroline missed it. Caroline missed very little.
"Mr. Harrington." Caroline stood, and everything about her was entirely correct, her tone, her manner, the precise degree of her smile. If you did not know her, Genevieve thought, you would have seen only a perfectly pleasant young woman exchanging a greeting with her friend's husband. But Genevieve knew her, and she could see the assessment running in real time behind those sharp brown eyes, quick and comprehensive and thoroughly without mercy.
"Miss Wentworth," Thomas inclined his head with equal pleasantness. "I hope you have had a good visit."
"Very good, thank you." A pause. One beat, precisely, longer than strictly necessary. "It's a relief to see Genevieve so comfortably settled."
Comfortably settled. Genevieve heard the precision of it, an entirely innocent arrangement of words with a question folded neatly inside. She also noted that Thomas received it without any visible sign of having registered the question, which was either genuine obliviousness or exceptional composure, and she was becoming increasingly confident it was the latter.