"You are not going to tell him?"
"I am going to let him continue being protective," Genevieve said, "because I think it is good for him and also because he does it so nicely."
***
Samuel Rutherford came on Fridays, generally, or when he had something to report, or when he was in the vicinity and saw no reason not to stop in, which amounted to approximately the same frequency.
He had taken to Genevieve with the immediate and uncomplicated warmth with which he took to most people he considered worth taking to, and she had taken to him with equal immediacy, and the result was that Thomas spent a certain amount of time at his own dining table watching his best friend and his wife discover new things to agree enthusiastically about, which was pleasant, and occasionally slightly bewildering, and always accompanied by more laughter than his dining room had previously been accustomed to.
"You were right about her," Samuel said, on an afternoon in November when Genevieve had gone to find Lady Harrington and left them with the port. It was said simply, with the quiet certainty of someone amending a previous record.
Thomas looked at him.
"I do not recall saying anything."
"You did not need to," Samuel said. "Anyone watching you watch her could have worked it out. I am simply confirming that the conclusion I drew was correct and that your taste, which I had begun to despair of, has turned out to be excellent." He swirled his glass. "She is genuinely wonderful, Thomas. I do not say that lightly."
"I know," Thomas said, which was more than he had intended to say and less than he could have, and Samuel, who was a man of considerable perception and long friendship, simply nodded and changed the subject, which was exactly the right thing to do.
***
Lady Harrington and Genevieve had arrived, by November, at the kind of relationship that did not require much description because it was simply understood by everyone who observed it. They did the accounts together on Tuesday mornings. They took tea in the garden on fine afternoons, which were becoming less frequent as the year turned, and moved the tea to the morning room when it was cold, which was becoming more frequent.
Lady Harrington had opinions about everything and shared them with the directness that had initially alarmed Genevieve but now felt like one of the most reliable comforts in her daily life. Genevieve had an apparently inexhaustible supply of warmth and interest that Lady Harrington received with the expression of someone who was not going to admit how much they appreciated it, but whose appreciation was entirely evident to anyone with eyes.
December arrived with frost and the resumption of various social obligations that the calendar imposed with the cheerful indifference of a calendar, and Genevieve attended a quantity of suppers and card evenings and afternoon calls and one rather magnificent Christmas assembly that she enjoyed enormously.
She enjoyed them more than she had expected to, which was a development she examined with interest. She had always been sociable, had always found people genuinely interesting, but she had attended those things for most of her adult life as a Penrose daughter; pleasant, unremarkable, expected to behave correctly and not particularly expected to do anything beyond that. Now she attended them as Mrs. Harrington, and the difference was not what she would have predicted.
It was not the status, although she was honest enough with herself to notice that the status was real and carried weight in ways it had not before. It was the solidity. She had a position in the room that was her own.
She had a household she had built into something, opinions she had formed through genuine experience, a husband at her side who watched rooms when they entered them and whose hand found hers occasionally in the press of a crowd, briefly and warmly and apparently without entirely deliberate intention. She felt, at those times, like herself in a way that was new and rather wonderful.
The town was letting go of the scandal. She could feel it happening, the slow relinquishment of a story that had seemed very interesting in September and was becoming, by December, rather old news. There were newer things to discuss.
The Harrington marriage was settling into the furniture of the local social landscape, becoming unremarkable in the way that solid things eventually became unremarkable, simply because they were clearly going to continue and there was only so long one could find continuity dramatic.
Thomas noticed it too. She could see it in the slight relaxation of the careful vigilance he maintained in public spaces, the way his attention shifted from monitoring to simply being present, which was a better use of his attention and also considerably more pleasant for her to be beside.
"People have stopped," she told him one evening in the carriage home from the Collyer supper, with the directness she had found he responded to better than circumspection.
He looked at her.
"Stopped looking," she clarified. "The way they were. It's changed."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I had noticed," he said.
"Good," she said. "Then you can stop watching them do it."
He looked at her with the expression she had cataloged as the one that meant she had said something that landed somewhere real, and then he looked out the window, and the corner of his mouth moved in the way it moved when he was not going to let himself smile and was not entirely succeeding.
"You are remarkably unbothered by all of it," he said.
"I am bothered by the things that are worth being bothered by," she said. "This stopped being one of them some time ago."
"And you simply decided that."