She set aside her book entirely, removed her spectacles, and launched into a comprehensive discussion of the green silk, its merits relative to the blue, the precise social signal communicated by each, the question of which jewelry would complement without overwhelming, and the matter of how one's hair ought to be dressed for a ball at a notable estate when one was making what amounted to a first significant public appearance as a married woman.
She had opinions on all of it. Genevieve listened to every word and asked questions and listened to the answers, while outside the window the evening had gone fully dark and the wind was moving in the oaks, and by the time they said goodnight the tight anxious thing in Genevieve's chest had eased to a degree she was genuinely grateful for.
Chapter 10
The Hervey estate was everything its reputation suggested, which was to say it was large, it was well lit, and it was absolutely full of people who were paying attention to everything while appearing to pay attention to nothing. Thomas had attended a great many evenings just like it. He knew precisely how they worked and had long since made his peace with the performance of them.
He had not, before tonight, attended one with Genevieve.
She had come downstairs in the green silk and he had said something about it being a good choice, which was the most inadequate possible response to the situation and the only one he had been capable of producing in the moment. He had offered her his arm at the carriage and she had taken it, and they had been announced at the door, and he had felt the precise moment when the room became aware of them.
He had expected that. What he had not expected was the way she had responded to it, the barely perceptible lift of her chin, the steadying of her smile into something easy and untroubled, the grip on his arm that remained perfectly light. As though she had taken a quiet breath and decided, in the space of a single second, that the room was not going to be a problem.
He had found that, unexpectedly, rather difficult to look away from.
She was extraordinary at this. That was the plain fact of it, and he watched it happen with the focused attention of someone who had spent years learning to read rooms and was now watching someone else do it instinctively and considerably more gracefully than he ever had. She committed names to memory within seconds.
She gave Lady Hervey's pointed questions pleasant, uninformative answers that deflected without appearing to deflect. She listened to Sir Edmund's horse discourse for a duration that would have tested a saint and contributed something at the end that made the old man's face light up with respect.
She navigated the loaded questions, and there were several, because there always were, with a lightness that made the navigation look effortless, as though the edges beneath the pleasantries were simply not there.
Each time she did it, he found his hand moving to cover hers on his arm. A small pressure, brief, instinctive. He was not entirely certain when he had started doing it. He did not stop.
"You have not flinched once," he said, during a lull, low enough for only her.
She looked at him sideways with the slight smile that he had come to understand meant she found something genuinely amusing. "I was raised to be polite. It turns out politeness, applied with sufficient consistency, functions rather like armor."
He looked at her. He was aware of looking at her for a moment longer than was strictly conversational, and was also aware that he did not particularly want to stop. "Come," he said. "There is someone I particularly want you to meet."
Samuel, to his credit, behaved himself. Mostly. The comment about Thomas speaking of her with frequency and warmth was delivered with the exact degree of innocence that meant it was entirely deliberate, and Thomas elected to look at the middle distance and allow the moment to pass, because the alternative was giving Samuel the satisfaction of a reaction, which he was not prepared to do.
He was aware, without looking at her, that Genevieve found it amusing. He was becoming rather familiar with the particular quality of her attention when she was finding something amusing and choosing not to say so. It was, he had decided, one of her more dangerous qualities.
They danced. Two dances, the appropriate and unremarkable number, yet there was nothing unremarkable about either of them. He had danced with a great many women over the years, and he was competent at it in the efficient, practiced way he was competent at most social requirements. He was not prepared for how different it was to dance with someone he was actually paying attention to.
The warmth of her hand in his. The easy way she followed his lead without being passive about it, as though she was participating in rather than simply tolerating the thing.
She was looking at his face for most of it and he was looking at hers, and there was a moment, somewhere in the middle of the second dance, when they turned and her shoulder came briefly close to his and her eyes met his and held them for just a second longer than the movement required, when something passed between them that he did not have a word for and did not, in that moment, attempt to find one.
He was aware, with an acuity that was entirely inconvenient and not particularly deniable, of every physical specific of the moment. The warmth of her hand in his gloved one. The fraction of distance between them that the form of the dance required and that felt like rather more than a dance’s worth of distance.
The candlelight doing something to the color of her hair that he was not, he decided firmly, going to think about. She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her in quite that form before—not the warm, easy openness she wore with his grandmother, not the composed brightness she had been deploying on the room all evening, but something quieter and more particular, something that was for him and not for the room, and the awareness of being looked at in that way, by her, in that moment, produced in him a feeling he did not have satisfactory language for and suspected he was not going to be able to put down easily.
He did not attempt to put it down. He held her gaze, and turned with the music, and let the feeling exist, which was not something he did as a general practice, and found that it was not, on that occasion, a mistake.
Neither of them named it. The music continued. They finished the dance.
The carriage home was the best part of the evening, which was not a thing he would have predicted. They talked with a freedom he had not anticipated, about Lady Hervey, about Samuel, about a magnificently backhanded remark from a Mrs. Ashby that they had both overheard and could now agree was objectively extraordinary in its construction. Genevieve was funny about it, sharp and warm at the same time in the particular way she was funny about things when she had stopped moderating herself, and he laughed more than he had in some months. He was peripherally aware of its significance and chose, for the moment, not to examine it.
She turned to look out the window at some point, the dark countryside passing behind her, her profile lit faintly by the carriage lamp, and he looked at her in the way he had been increasingly finding himself looking at her. Causing the slightly unsettled feeling of a man who has been operating on one set of assumptions and has begun, quietly and with growing conviction, to suspect they required revision.
She had a small smile on her face. Not the social one, not the one she had deployed with such elegant precision all evening. The private one. The one he had come to understand meant she was simply content, in the uncomplicated, unguarded way she was content when she was not thinking about being anything at all.
He had the sudden, very clear thought that he would like to be the reason for that smile. Not the evening, not the dancing, not the wine. Him, specifically.
The thought arrived with a certainty that was not particularly comfortable and showed no immediate signs of leaving.
"Thomas," she said, still looking out the window.