"I am very glad to hear it," he said, simply and without elaboration, and there was something in the simplicity of it that made Genevieve want to smile.
Caroline's eyes moved to her, briefly, and communicated several things in rapid succession. Genevieve returned a look that communicated, with the efficiency of long practice: I can see your expression, and I am asking you to behave yourself, and we will discuss all of this later at length, I promise.
"I was just leaving," Caroline said graciously, turning to collect her gloves from the arm of the settee with the manner of a woman who had made a decision and was at peace with it.
Genevieve walked her out, and in the brief privacy of the hallway Caroline took both her hands and held them for a moment, and the look she gave her said everything that could not be said in earshot.
"Write to me," she said.
"Constantly," Genevieve promised.
Caroline pressed her hands once, hard, released them, and went. She was almost to the front door when she turned back, and the look she gave Genevieve was so thoroughly, so transparently I am watching all of this very closely and I will want a full report, that Genevieve had to press her lips together firmly to keep the laugh from escaping.
The door closed.
She turned. Thomas was standing at a polite distance with the expression of a man making a genuine effort at neutrality and not entirely succeeding. There was something at the edges of it, warm and faint and not quite hidden, that looked very much like amusement.
"I apologize," Genevieve said. "She is… Caroline is very…" she paused. "She has been protective of me since we were children. She does not extend her trust quickly and she will not pretend to have done so, which I have always rather admired about her, though I recognize it is not always entirely comfortable for the person on the receiving end."
"She loves you," Thomas said. Plainly, as though it were simply the most relevant fact and required no further embellishment.
"Yes." Genevieve looked at him. "She does. Rather ferociously." A pause. "She'll come around. In time. Once she's… once she's satisfied herself."
She stopped, aware that finishing the sentence would require saying that you are not going to hurt me, which was more candid than the moment called for. Thomas appeared to follow the thought regardless. He had a habit of that which she was not yet sure how to account for.
"She is welcome here whenever she likes," he said. "I mean that. Anyone who matters to you matters to this house." He held her gaze in that steady, unhurried way of his. "I hope she'll come often."
Genevieve looked at him, at the quiet plainness of him, the absence of performance in it, and felt that thing again, the thing she had been carefully not examining, settle somewhere in her chest with a warmth she was not entirely prepared for.
"Thank you," she said softly.
He smiled then. A real one, unhurried and genuine, the kind that reached his eyes and altered the whole quality of his face. She looked away before she could think about it too carefully and turned back toward the drawing room.
"I will leave you to your afternoon," he said from behind her, and she heard him withdraw, and the hallway settled back into its quiet, and Genevieve went back to the drawing room and poured herself the cold remains of the tea and stood at the window and looked out at the gardens and thought that Caroline had, as usual, seen rather more than Genevieve had intended to show her.
She also thought, looking out at the roses in their beds and the afternoon light lying long and golden across the lawn, that everything was going to be alright.
More than alright, perhaps.
She drank her cold tea and did not think about his smile, and was quite successful at it…
For a short while.
Chapter 8
Samuel Rutherford's estate was, in Thomas Harrington's considered opinion, one of the more honestly proportioned houses in the whole of the county. It was not the grandest, it could not compete with the Harrington estate in terms of scale, nor with several of the older families in terms of lineage, but it had a quality of rightness about it that Thomas had always found difficult to articulate and impossible to dismiss.
The rooms were the correct size. The proportions were considered. The grounds were maintained with evident care and no particular interest in impressing anyone. It was the home of a man who knew precisely who he was and had made a comfortable peace with it, and Thomas had always found it an easy place to breathe.
Despite not being titled, Samuel had always been the gregarious type. Thomas had once watched him enter a room, look at a man, and apparently decide they were to be friends for life. As such, Samuel was the man Thomas went to when he needed to know the social climate. What was being said. Who said it. Why and where it was said.
Thomas rode up on the path, his horse familiar with the area and not at all worried as a horse was normally wont to be. The servants greeted him warmly, helping him down from the animal, and escorting him inside for what they assumed would be a normal morning call.
Samuel was in the breakfast room, which is to say he was sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a broadsheet and a look of profound contentment, doing nothing that could not have been interrupted at any point without loss.
He was, Thomas had long observed, extraordinarily good at occupying time without being occupied by it. He looked up when Thomas came in and took in his expression with the particular perceptiveness that was Samuel's most significant quality; quiet, thorough, and never deployed unkindly.
"You look," Samuel said, setting down the broadsheet, "as though you have not slept especially well."