But Clarissa was not there. Genevieve was.
She was the replacement.
She had always known this. She had known it at the wedding, and she had known it in the early careful weeks, and she had known it every time she watched him manage his expression before it could betray too much. She had folded it away neatly in the category of true things that are not useful to dwell on and she had, she thought, done it quite successfully.
It was somewhat easier to fold away before you were in love with the person.
She looked down at her book, which she was no longer reading. Outside, the light was doing its October thing, going gold and long across the grass, and she thought, with the precision of someone who preferred to see things clearly even when clarity was inconvenient: he came to tell me about a dinner date. He has not said anything that cannot be explained by simple consideration.
This was true. She knew it was true.
She also knew what she had seen on his face before he'd had time to arrange it. She had become, over these months, quite a careful reader of Thomas, and she knew the difference between consideration and something else. She was not imagining it. She was almost certain she was not imagining it.
Almost was doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.
She closed the book. She set it in her lap and looked at the fire for a moment, and then she did what she always did with things that threatened to become larger than was useful: she looked at them directly, clearly, and reduced them to their actual size.
She was in love with her husband. Her husband had loved her sister. Those things were both true simultaneously and there was nothing to be done about either of them. She could not un-love him. She could not change what he had lost or what she had, through no fault of her own, stepped into the shape of. She could only be herself, be patient, and not allow herself to mistake the tenderness of a man still learning to trust again for something it might not yet be.
Yet, she thought… catching herself, and almost smiled.
There was, she decided, absolutely no value in being sad about something that was not sad at all. What she felt was real. What she had seen was real. And the rest was simply time, and she had always been rather good at time.
She opened the book. She found her page.
She got on with things.
Chapter 13
The society question was, as far as Genevieve was concerned, largely a non-question.
Thomas did not share her view, which was one of the few ongoing points of genuine difference between them, and which she found both understandable and faintly amusing. He worried about it with the focused attention he brought to problems he considered serious, monitoring the social weather with the practiced eye of a man who had spent his entire life understanding exactly what it meant.
She watched him do it, understanding why, while also being fairly certain that it was resolving itself. She believed that his concern, while entirely well-intentioned and directed entirely at protecting her, was in the process of becoming unnecessary.
"Mrs. Ashby spoke to me for twenty minutes at the Pemberton supper," she reported to Caroline, on one of Caroline's Tuesday visits, from her customary position sideways on the drawing room sofa. "Entirely voluntarily. She asked me about the household accounts."
"Mrs. Ashby?" Caroline looked up from her embroidery. "The one who made the remark at the Hervey ball?"
"The very same. Apparently she has been having trouble with her linen merchant and had heard, I cannot imagine how, that I had identified a discrepancy and resolved it rather firmly, and she wanted to know how I had done it." Genevieve picked up her tea. “I had help, of course, but she would not hear of it. We had a very nice conversation. She is a great deal more interesting than her remarks at balls would suggest."
"You cannot befriend everyone, Genevieve."
"I do not see why not," Genevieve said pleasantly.
Caroline looked at her with the expression of someone who had been having this conversation in various forms for eleven years and had made her peace with it.
"How is Thomas about all of this?"
"He worries," Genevieve said. "He watches rooms when we arrive in them, which I think he believes I do not notice. He pays attention to who speaks to me and for how long and with what quality of warmth." She looked out the window. "It is very sweet, actually. He is very determined that nothing should touch me."
"And does anything touch you?"
"Occasionally someone says something with an edge to it," Genevieve said, with the equanimity of someone reporting mild weather. "I give them a pleasant, uninformative answer and move on. It really is remarkable how little damage a pointed question can do if you simply decline to be damaged by it." She glanced at Caroline.
"Thomas is rather more bothered by those moments than I am, which I find endearing, and he would find deeply irritating to know."