She held it up for him to see. His eyes scanned over it, and she noticed his eyebrows slightly furrowing.
“Let me investigate that for you, ma’am,” he said, before standing and leaving her. Leaning back against the green couch she took a gentle breath, glad that she had found something worth seeing, however small. She put the ledger onto the table, still open, and took the teapot and carefully poured herself a drink.
She had always liked numbers. They were one of the few things in the world that behaved exactly as advertised. They could be trusted to mean precisely what they said, and responded to careful attention with correct answers rather than with the variable results that human situations tended to produce.
She found them restful in a way she had never bothered to explain to anyone because she had always suspected it was not the sort of thing one admitted to without inviting odd looks. It was an opinion much at odds with Clarissa’s, who only saw the value of arithmetic when it came to purchasing dresses and hats.
She had been so lost in the numbers that she had not noticed a presence approaching the doorway, nor the smile that had grown on her face as she worked through the ledger.
"You are smiling again," said a voice from the doorway, making her startle.
Genevieve looked up. Lady Harrington stood at the entrance to the drawing room with the unhurried air of a woman who went where she chose, when she chose, and had reached an age where announcing herself beforehand was a courtesy she extended selectively. She was dressed with the impeccable precision that Genevieve had come to understand was not vanity but principle.
"I am enjoying myself," Genevieve said honestly, setting down her quill. "Numbers that behave correctly are one of the more reliable pleasures in life."
"Hm." The older woman came into the room in the careful, deliberate way she moved everywhere, economical and unhurried, and settled herself in the chair by the window. She arranged herself with the same precision she applied to everything, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Genevieve with the direct, thorough attention that had initially been rather alarming and had since revealed itself to be simply the way Lady Harrington looked at everything she considered worth looking at.
"I have been meaning to come and speak with you," she said. "I have been putting it off for reasons I intend to explain, and I have decided this morning that the putting off has gone on long enough."
Genevieve set the ledger aside entirely and gave her full attention. When Lady Harrington announced an intention to explain something, one gave one's full attention. It was simply the correct response.
"You will have noticed," Lady Harrington said, "that I have kept something of a distance from you since your arrival."
"I had noticed," Genevieve agreed carefully. “Not at the church, but since we came back to the estate. I simply assumed you were allowing Thomas and I to adjust to life as newlyweds.”
"That was… part of it,” she replied. “I want you to understand the full reason for that, because I would not have you mistake it for indifference or coldness, and I would not have it become the kind of unspoken thing that sits between two people and accumulates into something it was never intended to be."
She looked at Genevieve steadily. "I have known a great many women who were married quickly and into unfamiliar households under circumstances that were not of their choosing. It is not an uncommon situation, whatever the particular details of any individual case. And I have observed, over a great many years, the damage that is done to such women by the well-meaning interference of the people around them."
"Interference?" Genevieve repeated, curious.
"Advice that was not requested," she clarified. "Opinions offered on decisions that were not being invited. The constant sensation of being watched and assessed and found either adequate or wanting, when what is actually needed in such a situation is simply space.
Space to find one's feet. Space to make one's own mistakes and correct them. Space to become the mistress of one's own household in one's own way, rather than in the way that the previous mistress, or the grandmother of one's husband, or anyone else with opinions and the proximity to share them, would have chosen." She paused. "I am not that kind of woman. Or rather… I try not to be. I have not always succeeded, but I try."
Genevieve looked at her. She was aware of something shifting in her chest, a warmth, unexpected and considerable, for this sharp-eyed formidable woman who had kept her distance not out of disapproval but out of a deliberate and considered kindness.
"You were giving me room," Genevieve said softly.
"I was giving you room," Lady Harrington confirmed. "To be yourself in this house. To establish yourself without someone standing at your shoulder deciding whether you were doing it correctly." The faintest suggestion of something wry moved across her face. "I will admit that watching you do it has also been rather instructive. You are better at this than you appear to know."
"I am not certain that is true, my lady," Genevieve said, because it seemed the honest response.
"It is true," came the reply, in the flat certain way she said things she meant absolutely. "And I wish for you to call me Grandmamma.” She paused and smiled, before continuing. “The staff respect you. I have watched it happen, the shift from the wary courtesy they extended in the first days to something considerably more genuine.
The household runs more smoothly than it has in some years. You have handled the social dimensions of your situation, and they have been considerable, with a composure and grace that a great many women twice your age would have struggled to maintain." She held Genevieve's gaze. "And you have been patient with my foppish grandson, who has needed patience rather more than he would ever voluntarily admit."
Genevieve snorted and shook her head. "He is not difficult to be patient with," she said. "When one understands the reason for it."
"No," Lady Harrington agreed. "He is not a difficult man. He is simply a man who was hurt and who does not yet quite believe that the hurting is over." She said it without sentiment, as a fact rather than a complaint, and Genevieve appreciated the directness of it.
"That will change. I want you to know that I believe it will change, because I know him better than almost anyone and I know what he is capable of when he allows himself to be." A pause. "He simply needs to remember that he is allowed."
There was a silence. Not an uncomfortable one, the silence of two people who have said something real and are allowing it to settle.
"What I came to tell you," she said at last, "is that my distance is at an end. You have found your feet, which I expected, and you have found them rather more quickly and rather more gracefully than I dared hope. You do not need a matriarch standing over you telling you how to run your household.
What you might benefit from, on occasion, is someone who has been navigating this particular world for sixty-three years and has accumulated a certain amount of knowledge that is not available in any book. Some marriages develop slowly and are allowed to breathe, others… like yours, and like mine was before you, are decisive, and that can be unnerving. I made mistakes, and I can help you to avoid doing the same."