"I simply decided that," she confirmed. "It is quite efficient. You should try it."
He gave her a smile then, a real one, and said nothing, as the carriage moved through the dark winter roads. She realized that things were considerably further along than they had been in September; a fact she held with the quiet warmth of something tended carefully and beginning, at last, to grow.
She was patient. She was certain. She was, she decided, looking out at the cold passing dark with the small private smile she did not bother to conceal because there was no one to conceal it from. She was exactly where she was supposed to be.
She just needed him to catch up.
She was lying, of course. To herself, which was the only person she made a consistent effort not to lie to, and she was doing it badly, which was a further indignity.
She was patient. That was true. She was certain. That was also true. But sitting alone in the carriage dark with the smile she was not bothering to conceal, she could admit, quietly and entirely privately, that patient and unbothered were not the same thing, and that she had been treating them as synonymous for several months and it had not been entirely honest.
She wanted him. Not just in the vague, hopeful way she had wanted things in the abstract. She wanted him, in particular. The way he listened. The way he moved through his own estate with the ease of a man who understood the land he was responsible for and had made peace with that responsibility.
The quiet humor that appeared when he had stopped managing himself. The expression he wore when she said something that landed somewhere real within him, surprising him, and then his immediate attempt to look unsurprised.
She had cataloged these things the way she cataloged figures in the ledgers, because she was, at her core, a person who paid attention to what was in front of her and found comfort in the accumulation of known things. She knew him. She had known him for months now in the way that mattered, in the small and unrepeatable way that was built from proximity and genuine attention and the shared texture of ordinary days. And knowing him had not made her patient in the serene, self-contained way she liked to present to the world.
It had made her want. Steadily and completely and with the full weight of someone who knew precisely what she wanted and understood, with equal clarity, that she could not seem to make it happen.
That was, she thought, the particular difficulty of loving a careful man. The caring was easy. She had always been good at caring about people. But there was a version of her situation in which the care became a kind of waiting. And waiting, which if you were not precise about it, could quietly become hoping, and hoping was a less reliable thing than she preferred to depend upon.
She did not, she told herself firmly, intend to depend upon it.
She intended to continue doing exactly what she was doing, which was being herself, as consistently and as genuinely as she could manage, and trusting that this was both the right thing to do and, eventually, sufficient. She had not assembled their marriage from nothing through patience and warmth and the sheer accumulated goodwill of four hundred ordinary days simply to lose confidence in it because it had not yet arrived at its destination.
She knew where it was going. She could see it from there.
She needed to let him find his own way.
The carriage turned, and she felt the smile settle into something quieter, something that was not quite happiness and not quite longing but held both of them. Looking out at the dark, she thought that she had always been, fundamentally, an optimist, and that it seemed, on the whole, like the better option.
Chapter 13
Lady Harrington did not ambush people. She considered ambushing to be the conversational equivalent of bad posture; the action of those who had not thought carefully enough about what they were doing and why. When she wished to speak to someone about something significant, she chose her moment with the deliberateness of a woman who had been choosing her moments for sixty-three years and had developed considerable expertise in the selection.
She chose Thomas's moment on a Tuesday morning, when he came in from his ride to find her already installed in the breakfast room with her tea and her particular quality of settled intention that he had learned—at approximately age seven—meant that whatever he had planned for the next half hour was no longer his primary concern.
"Sit down," she said pleasantly.
Thomas sat down. He accepted the tea that appeared at his elbow and looked at his grandmother with the expression of a man who knew what was coming and had decided his best strategy was to appear as though he did not.
"You look well," she said, which was not what she had come to say and they both knew it.
"Thank you," Thomas said. "As do you."
"I rode out yesterday afternoon," she continued, in the unhurried way she built toward things. "Along the eastern path. I happened to see the two of you returning from the forest. Genevieve was laughing at something."
Thomas said nothing.
His grandmother looked at him for a moment with the expression she wore when she was deciding how much to say.
"Your father," she said, "was a cautious man. A good man, but cautious in the particular way of someone who had been hurt early and decided that caution was the same thing as safety. He managed this estate quite correctly for many years and kept everyone in it at a careful, considerate distance. He died without, I think, having let anyone know him the way he deserved to be known."
She paused. "Your mother tried. She had more patience than most women would have had and she loved him genuinely and she spent a good number of years waiting for him to believe that it was safe to love her back in full." Another pause, shorter. "He did, eventually. Too late to be as useful as it might have been, but he did."
She looked at her grandson with the steady, unsparing attention of a woman who had observed her family for sixty years and was not going to pretend she had not. "I am telling you this not to wound you. I am telling you because this house sounds different than it has in a very long time, and I know why it sounds different, and I would like very much not to watch history repeat itself."