He paused.
She waited.
She kept her expression pleasant and open and said nothing at all, which was the hardest thing she had done in recent memory.
"You should not go alone," he said.
There was a silence. It lasted perhaps three seconds and contained, on her side of it, a quantity of feeling that she was managing with what she considered considerable discipline.
"I could come with you," he said, and it came out in the tone of a man proposing something practical, something sensible, something that had simply occurred to him as the obvious and logical solution to a logistical problem. She recognized that tone. She had heard it deployed by a certain kind of person over a certain kind of feeling for as long as she had been in society. She found it, on this particular occasion, deeply endearing. "Show you the areas to avoid. It would only take a morning."
"That would be lovely," she said.
She meant it with a sincerity that she was fairly confident she was keeping to a reasonable volume, which was an act of considerable self-control that she felt she deserved some credit for.
"If you can spare the time," she added, because she was also a woman of some composure, and she was not going to make it easy for him to change his mind.
"Tomorrow morning," he said. He said it with a settled quality, an almost-immediate settlement, as though the decision had organized itself with less difficulty than usual, as though the having-decided felt more natural than the deliberating. She filed that away carefully, the quality of that ‘tomorrow morning,’ for later examination.
"Tomorrow morning," she agreed.
She left.
She did not allow her smile to become unreasonable until she had turned the corner of the corridor and was entirely certain she was alone, at which point she permitted herself a moment of what could only be described as quiet, private triumph, contained within a single, thoroughly undignified exhale.
Then she straightened, and composed herself, and went to find his grandmother to ask what one wore to an early morning ride in cold weather, because there was, she had decided, no version of tomorrow in which she was not wearing exactly the right thing.
The morning arrived clear and cold, with the particular quality of autumn light that made everything look freshly rendered, the grounds bright and still and smelling of damp earth and wood smoke from somewhere distant.
Genevieve was at the stables before Thomas, which had not been her intention but also, on reflection, she was not sorry about. It gave her time to make friends with the mare, who was a dark bay with a white star and a deeply sensible expression, and who accepted Genevieve's immediate and enthusiastic approval with dignified equanimity.
Thomas appeared around the corner of the stable block in riding clothes, and she had the brief thought that he looked considerably more at ease than he did in his study or across a dining table, some quality of relaxation that the outdoors produced in him that four walls did not.
"You are already here," he said.
"I am an early riser," she said. "We have introduced ourselves. I think we are going to get on very well,” she replied, indicating the mare. Thomas looked at the horse and then at Genevieve with an expression that was attempting to be neutral and was not entirely succeeding.
"Good," he said, and went to his own horse with the ease of long familiarity.
They rode out through the eastern gate and across the open ground that ran along the edge of the formal gardens, and then onto the longer grass of the fields beyond, and Genevieve felt the particular pleasure she always felt on horseback, the sense of occupying exactly the right amount of space in exactly the right way. She let the mare find her pace and settled into it, and after a while became aware that Thomas was watching her.
"You ride well," he said, with the slight quality of someone who had been not-saying something and had decided to say it.
"Thank you," she said. "I have been riding since I was four. My father put me on a horse before I could reliably walk in a straight line, which my mother never quite forgave him for."
There was a brief pause.
"Your sister," he began, and then stopped.
Genevieve glanced at him. He had gone carefully still in the way he went still when he had said something he wished he could take back, and she felt a quick, clear sympathy for him that had no room in it for anything complicated.
"Was absolutely terrified of horses," she said cheerfully, completing the sentence as though he had always intended to give it to her. "Which was a shame, because they are so very likable. But Clarissa's passions were really more of the indoor variety, she played the pianoforte beautifully. Genuinely beautifully, not in the way that everyone's daughters play beautifully if you ask the parents. She had a real gift for it. And her embroidery was extraordinary.
She made this cushion cover once with these tiny flowers along the edge, each petal no bigger than my thumbnail, and it was…" She shook her head. "Really remarkable. She and I were always very different in that way, she was always better indoors than out. I was always better out than in. We used to say we were opposite halves of the same person, which sounds a great deal more poetic than it was in practice, mostly it meant we argued about whether to open the windows."
She had been talking at her usual pace without watching him, but she watched him now. The careful stillness had eased. He was looking at the middle distance with an expression she could not entirely read, but the worst of the tension had gone from it, and that was enough.
"She was," he said, after a moment, "genuinely talented."