It had been largely unsuccessful.
The evenings were different from the mornings. The mornings had the horses and the open air and the easy excuse of practical things to discuss. The evenings had the drawing room and the fire and no excuse at all, and they were, Genevieve had concluded, considerably more revealing.
It was sometime in September that the careful formality of dinner began to loosen. Not all at once. Not in any single evening she could point to and say there, that was when it changed. But gradually, the way rooms warm gradually when a fire has been going long enough.
The conversation stopped requiring the light effort she had been applying to it, the conscious reaching for topics, the consideration of which observations would be welcome and which would be too much too soon. It simply began to go, moving from one thing to the next with the ease of something that had found its level.
She noticed it properly on an evening in late September when they had been talking about the north field for twenty minutes.
It was not, she would have been the first to admit, an inherently romantic subject. The north field was a practical matter. It had a drainage problem that had persisted across two tenants and a not-insignificant amount of money spent on solutions that had not solved it, and Thomas had explained all of this with the measured concision of a man who had thought about it a great deal and had arrived at a clear position on what needed to be done.
She had listened carefully and then said, "I do not think that will work."
A pause. The particular quality of a pause in which someone is deciding whether they have heard correctly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The drainage solution." She set down her wine glass. "Redirecting at the eastern edge. I understand the reasoning, but the problem is not the slope, it's the clay layer. It's too close to the surface there for redirection to do much. You'd need to address it about forty yards further north or you will be having this conversation again in two years."
Thomas looked at her steadily. She looked back at him steadily. Outside, something made a distant sound in the dark.
"You know about field drainage," he said. It was not quite a question.
"My father's estate had similar problems. I spent a great deal of time following the land agent around as a girl." She picked up her wine again. "He had strong opinions on clay layers. Some of it took hold."
Thomas was quiet for a moment. He had the expression of a man encountering new information and doing the honest work of adjusting to it, rather than the expression of a man waiting for the right moment to explain why he was still correct, which she had been watching for, and which had not appeared. "The northern section," he said. "You would take it past the old boundary marker."
"Slightly past. Yes."
He frowned, not with displeasure, but with concentration. The particular frown of a man running calculations.
"That would require re-routing the access track as well."
"Only the drainage path, not the track itself. If you bring it at an angle rather than straight across—"
"Show me," he said, and stood up.
Which was how they ended up at the writing desk for the better part of an hour, Thomas's estate map spread between them while she drew lines in pencil. He argued about each one with the composed intensity of someone who was taking her completely seriously, which she found she cared considerably more about than she had anticipated.
He conceded the point at ten past nine with the expression of a man who was finding concession a more interesting experience than expected, and she felt something warm settle in her chest and made no particular show of being right, because being right was not what she was most interested in at that moment.
After that, the evenings became the part of the day she thought about with most anticipation.
There was the evening they disagreed about the novel that had been recommended by his Cambridge friend, with a warmth that surprised them both.
There was the evening he asked her about her childhood with the focused interest of someone actually collecting information rather than making conversation, and she talked for longer than she usually did about her own life, and he listened, and asked a question at the end that told her he had heard every word.
There was the evening she made him laugh. Actually laugh—not the near-smile she had cataloged but the real thing—sudden and genuine, at something she had said about the vicar, and she had thought, with the calm certainty of someone noting an important fact: I am going to make him do that as often as possible for the rest of our lives.
She had subsequently had quite a significant word with herself about that thought, which had been even less successful than the previous one.
Genevieve noticed it first in the small things. The way Thomas had begun to appear at the stables without particular comment on mornings when the weather was good, as though he had simply happened to be passing and had no specific intention about it, which she understood perfectly well was not true and which she found perfectly charming.
It was sometime in October that she fell in love with her husband.
She was in the library when it happened, which felt appropriate, because the library was the room she had made most thoroughly her own and it seemed right that it should be the location of something significant. She had been there since after luncheon, curled into the corner of the window seat with a novel that had been recommended by Caroline and had turned out to be considerably better than Caroline's description of it had suggested, which was often the way with Caroline's recommendations.
The light had been doing the particular thing it did in October afternoons, long and gold and faintly melancholy in the way of all beautiful things that were also temporary, and she had been entirely absorbed and entirely content and entirely unaware that anything was about to happen.