Thomas nodded, his shoulders sagging.
They sat together for another half hour, talking of other things: the progress on the eastern boundary fence, which Samuel had a view on, and a mutual acquaintance's new horse, which Samuel also had a view on, and the likelihood of the autumn being as wet as the previous one, on which Samuel reserved judgment.
Thomas rode home through the bright cold morning, feeling if not settled in the larger sense, then at least purposeful in the immediate one, which was the next best thing and would serve for the moment. He rode back at a slower pace, which was entirely the horse's doing and not a thing he would have chosen for himself. Thomas Harrington was not, by nature, a man given to contemplative ambling. Contemplative ambling was for poets and people with uncomplicated interior lives, and Thomas had always suspected he qualified as neither.
He was thinking about the ball. More specifically, he was thinking about Genevieve at the ball, which was a more complicated proposition than it had any right to be.
He had watched her, in the way one watched things that were unexpected and therefore faintly difficult to categorize. She was not what he had anticipated. He was not entirely certain what he had anticipated, something quieter, perhaps, something more carefully contained, but it had not been this.
It had not been someone who laughed at things that genuinely struck her as funny rather than things that were socially appropriate to find amusing. It had not been someone who asked the housekeeper about her sister's new baby with the focused enthusiasm of a person who actually wanted to know the answer.
It had not been someone who had, on one memorable occasion, nearly walked directly into a doorframe because she was attempting to carry a book, a cup of tea, and what appeared to be a small decorative cushion she had picked up for no reason he had ever been able to determine.
She was, in short, not particularly what he would have called polished. She was something considerably more disarming than that.
She did not deserve any of it. Not the whispers, not the sideways glances, not the particular social cruelty of being regarded as a replacement rather than a person. She had done nothing except exist in cheerful, slightly chaotic proximity to a situation that had gone entirely wrong, and the world was proposing to make that her problem indefinitely.
He found that he objected to that. Not with any great heat. More with the quiet, settled objection of someone who had encountered something that was simply and plainly unfair. He decided, without much drama, that he did not intend to let it stand if it was within his power to prevent it.
Samuel was right. He needed to take her to the ball, and he needed to do it properly. Which meant he needed to speak to her. Properly. Without the careful distance he had been maintaining, which had seemed polite at the time and now seemed, on reflection, rather more like cowardice.
He nudged the horse into a slightly brisker pace.
He was not, he told himself, looking forward to the conversation. He was simply prepared to have it. There was an entirely meaningful distinction between those two things.
He was almost certain of it.
Chapter 9
The household accounts of the Harrington estate were, Genevieve had discovered in the weeks since her marriage, a document of considerable complexity and quite extraordinary meticulousness.
She suspected Mr. Cavendish had been managing them in the absence of a mistress of the house, which was the sort of thing Mr. Cavendish did without being asked and without making any particular mention of it, and had done so with a precision that Genevieve found both reassuring and faintly intimidating.
Every expenditure was recorded. Every household decision was annotated. There was a logic to the filing system that had taken her the better part of a week to fully decode, and once decoded had turned out to be elegant in its simplicity.
She had been working through the October ledger that morning, when she found the discrepancy in the linen budget. It was minor, a matter of a few shillings—most likely an arithmetic error or an incorrectly recorded delivery—but she made a careful note of it anyway, because minor discrepancies left unattended had a way of becoming less minor over time.
And because the satisfaction she took in finding and resolving such things was something she had given up pretending she did not feel. She made the note in her neatest hand, which was considerably neater than her ordinary hand, which was in turn considerably less neat than her mother had spent fifteen years attempting to make it.
Her ordinary handwriting had been described, at various points, as spirited, enthusiastic, and, on one memorable occasion by a particularly blunt governess, as resembling the tracks of a moderately agitated hen. She had always felt that was somewhat uncharitable. The hen, in her view, had clearly known where it was going. It had simply been going there very quickly.
She soon went back to reading and, in fact, had been so absorbed that she had entirely failed to notice that she had been humming. She only became aware of this when she registered that she had been humming the same four bars of the same tune for what was, on reflection, probably quite a long time, and that the tune in question was one she had learned at the age of seven from a kitchen maid and which had absolutely no business being hummed in a drawing room by the mistress of an estate. She stopped.
She glanced at the door. There was no one there. She went back to the ledger and, after approximately forty seconds, began humming again.
She was also, she noticed, sitting in a manner that her mother would have had a great deal to say about. She had been perched sideways on the green couch with both feet tucked under her for the better part of an hour, which was comfortable, practical, and entirely indefensible from a posture standpoint.
She made a brief and genuine effort to sit correctly. Then she found the linen entry she had been looking for and tucked her feet back under her without noticing she had done it.
“Mrs. Harrington,” Mr. Cavendish said as he walked into the drawing room with a tray. Genevieve looked up, smiling at him. Then she quickly corrected her posture. Mr. Cavendish, thankfully, did not say anything. Whether he had not noticed or was being kind to her was unclear, but she minded neither situation over the other. Mr. Cavendish shifted two of the ledgers to one side of the table and placed his tray down. The tray contained a steaming teapot, a teacup, and a small plate with two Brighton biscuits on it.
“You have been reading those for some time,” he said.
“I have wanted to understand them thoroughly,” Genevieve replied.
“Not all young women in your situation would have done. The arithmetic can be quite dense,” he replied.
“I do not mind dense arithmetic,” she said with a slight giggle. “But, if you could, would you be able to explain this discrepancy?”