She looked at Genevieve with an expression that was, for the stoic woman, remarkably warm. "My door is open. Whatever you need, whatever questions you have, whatever concerns arise that you are not yet ready to bring to Thomas, whatever aspect of this house or this family or this society you find yourself uncertain about. At any time. For anything at all."
She said it with the simple gravity of a woman who did not make offers she did not intend to honor, and Genevieve believed her entirely.
"Thank you," Genevieve said. She was aware that her eyes were doing something they were not supposed to be doing, which she addressed by looking briefly at the window and then back again. "I am… truly, Lady—Grandmamma. Thank you."
Lady Harrington gave a single nod, the decisive, settled kind, and then reached across and drew the October ledger toward herself, produced from her pocket a pair of spectacles that she put on with the air of a woman who had made her peace with their necessity, and examined the linen discrepancy.
"Ah. It seems we have been overcharged for the tablecloths," she said. "Mr. Smithe at the linen merchant's has been doing this for years. He relies on the fact that most households only notice the large expenditures, not a few shillings added to tablecloths. Write the correct figure here, and again here, and I will send him a note that will ensure he does not try it again."
She picked up Genevieve's quill without asking and made the corrections herself with the comfortable authority of a woman who had been managing such things since before Genevieve was born.
"Of course," Genevieve said, and reached for the next ledger, and they bent over the accounts together.
It was, Genevieve reflected, a slightly unlikely tableau. She had imagined a great many things about her life as a married woman, in the vague optimistic way she imagined most things, and none of them had featured her sitting sideways on a drawing room couch, she had resumed the sideways position approximately four minutes after the older woman had settled in, and Lady Harrington had looked at it once and said nothing, which Genevieve chose to interpret as tacit acceptance.
With a cup of tea balanced on the arm of the sofa in a way that was technically precarious, she was working through household accounts with her husband's grandmother while outside the window the gardener did something loud and inexplicable to a hedge.
She had knocked the teacup once. She had caught it. The older woman had not looked up.
She had also, at one point, turned two pages instead of one, spent several minutes confused by figures that refused to make any sense, and then discovered her error and said "oh," in a tone of such profound relief that it startled the cat, who had arrived at some point without Genevieve noticing and installed itself on the other end of the couch with the attitude of an animal who had assessed the situation and found it acceptable.
“Thomas owns a cat?” Genevieve asked.
“Not that I am aware of,” she replied. “He might belong to Mr. Dobson.”
"Is the cat meant to be in here?" Genevieve asked.
"No," she replied automatically without looking up.
"Shall I move him?"
Her new grandmother-in-law then looked at the cat. The cat looked back at her with the sublime indifference of a creature that had been managing this household considerably longer than either of them.
"Leave it," she said, and turned the page.
Genevieve felt a laugh rising and pressed her lips together to contain it, which worked imperfectly. Her companion glanced at her over her spectacles with an expression that was absolutely not amusement and returned to the ledger.
Genevieve had not expected to make friends over the ledgers, although perhaps friends was a strong term for it. Still, some part of her was relieved to be bonding with the older woman.
She thought of Clarissa, which she often did when she was doing something Clarissa would have found extraordinary. Clarissa had never understood the appeal of arithmetic. She had tolerated it, in the way one tolerated cold mornings, as a necessary unpleasantness with no particular reward at the end. Numbers were not, she had informed Genevieve on several occasions, beautiful. They simply were.
In the blue drawing room at home, they had a pianoforte and a small writing desk and a window that looked onto the street. It had been, Genevieve had always known, considerably less impressive than the drawing rooms of the families Clarissa intended to marry into. This had never been said directly. It had not needed to be.
It was present in the way their mother kept the good candles for company, in the careful management of which gowns were worn to which occasions, in the precise calculations that underlay the whole business of getting two daughters well settled with a modest income and no particular family connection to recommend them. Clarissa had understood all of this instinctively and had applied herself to it with the same focused passion she brought to the pianoforte.
She was going to be something, she had told Genevieve once, at the dressing table mirror in the particular bright certain way she had when she was not boasting but simply stating what she believed to be true.
She was going to have the house with the right proportions and the staff who did not need to be asked and the life that matched the version of herself she had always carried in her head. Genevieve had believed her entirely. She still did, in some persistent, inconvenient corner of herself that could not quite manage to stop.
It was only that Clarissa's plan had not, in the end, been the one that had placed Genevieve there, at the other end of the couch from a grandmother-in-law who corrected linen merchants and did not apologize for it. Life had a habit of producing outcomes that no one had designed. Genevieve, who had spent most of her life watching Clarissa design hers, found this alternately comforting and bewildering, depending on the morning.
Thomas asked her after dinner, in the particular quiet that descended over the dining room once the last dish had been cleared. The candles had burned down to their middle height and the evening stretched ahead with no particular obligation on it.
It was one of Genevieve's favorite times of day, that strange pocket of time between dinner and the natural dissolution of the evening, when the conversation could go anywhere or nowhere and neither outcome was wrong. At her home, her sister would be laughing loudly, and her parents would be attempting to take the conversation in a serious direction. Thomas never had to pull direction in their talks. Genevieve let him lead.
“We have not been to many social events as a married couple,” Thomas said.
“We have not,” Genevieve agreed. “None at all.”