Thomas nodded. He had heard this before, of course, but it felt different now.
"She has a very good laugh," his grandmother said. "The kind that sounds like she means it, which in my experience is considerably rarer than it ought to be." She set her cup down with the small precise movement she used when she was transitioning from the preamble to the point. "She is also, Thomas, in case it has somehow escaped your attention, a remarkably beautiful young woman."
"Grandmother," Thomas said, in the tone that was intended to close a subject.
"I am not finished," she continued, in a tone that did not acknowledge closed subjects. "She is beautiful, and she is good, and she has made this house into something it has not been for quite some time, which is a home that feels as though someone in it is genuinely glad to be alive. The staff are happier. The accounts are in better order than they have been in years.
There is, on occasion, the sound of someone humming in the drawing room, which is not something these walls have heard in rather too long." She looked at him steadily. "And you are treating her as though she is a very pleasant houseguest whose comfort you feel responsible for but whose presence you do not quite know what to do with."
The accuracy of this landed somewhere Thomas did not particularly want it to land. He kept his expression level.
"I treat her very well," he said.
"You treat her with great consideration and enormous distance," she replied, "which is not the same thing. I think you know it is not the same thing, and I think she knows it too, and I think the fact that she has not said so to you directly is a function of her own considerable grace and not an indication that she has not noticed."
Thomas looked at the window. The grounds were bright that morning, frost still on the grass in the places the sun had not yet reached. "I am not," he said carefully, "going to discuss my marriage with you."
"You do not need to discuss it," she replied. "I am not asking for a discussion. I am telling you something I believe you need to hear, and then I shall have my breakfast, and you can do whatever you like with it." She folded her hands in her lap.
"You are punishing her for something that was not her fault, Thomas. Not deliberately, not unkindly, but you are doing it, nonetheless. You are keeping yourself at a remove because it feels safer than the alternative, and in the meantime there is a young woman in this house who deserves considerably better than safe."
"I am not punishing her," Thomas said. The words came out with more edge than he intended.
"No," his grandmother agreed, without flinching from the edge. "I do not believe you mean to. I believe you are frightened, which is a different thing and considerably more forgivable, but which produces the same result if you allow it to continue unchecked."
She picked up her cup again, signaling, in the way he had learned to read over a lifetime, that she was coming to the end of what she had to say. "She is not Clarissa. Whatever happened with Clarissa, and I have my views on that which I have kept largely to myself, Genevieve is not like her sister at all, and does not deserve to pay the debts of her sister's choices. I think, if you examine yourself honestly, you know that."
Thomas said nothing.
"That is all," his grandmother concluded, and reached for the toast with the serene finality of a woman who had said what she came to say and required nothing further from the conversation.
Thomas excused himself shortly afterward on the grounds of correspondence that did not, in truth, require his immediate attention.
He went to his study and stood at the window for a while without sitting down, which was not something he did, and looked at the grounds without particularly seeing them, which was also not something he did, and tried to do what his grandmother had suggested and examine himself honestly, which was something he had been avoiding with considerable dedication for several weeks.
The honest examination, it turned out, was not especially comfortable.
He cared about Genevieve. That was the first and plainest fact, and he had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the second week of their marriage, when she had appeared in the corridor with a book and walked into the doorframe and looked so thoroughly unbothered by it that he had laughed before he had made any decision to laugh, which was the sort of thing he had not done in some time. It had startled him.
He had filed it away and continued about his day and taken it out again that evening when he was alone and looked at it carefully. He had concluded that he was simply relieved to have a wife who was not a source of misery, which was a reasonable and sensible thing to feel and nothing more complicated than that.
He had been telling himself sensible things for several weeks, and the sensible things were becoming less convincing.
He found her beautiful. That had been evident from the first morning, when she had come downstairs in the grey dress with her hair done and her composure assembled and he had thought, with the distant surprise of a man encountering something he had not anticipated, that she was genuinely lovely. He had noted it and set it aside as irrelevant in the way one set aside facts that did not bear on the current situation.
The current situation had changed.
What he had not anticipated—what no one, he thought, could have anticipated without knowing her—was how much of her beauty was not the obvious kind. It was not the green silk, though the green silk had produced in him an experience he had no intention of examining too closely.
It was the way she looked when she was absorbed in the accounts, entirely unaware of being seen, her expression open and pleased in the way people's expressions were when they were doing something they genuinely loved. It was the laugh, which his grandmother had correctly identified as the kind that meant something.
It was the quality of her attention when she was interested in what you were saying, which made you feel, with entirely irrational conviction, that what you were saying was the most interesting thing that had been said in that room in some time. It was the fact that she spoke well of her sister, Clarissa, who had left her in an impossible position without, as far as Thomas could determine, a great deal of thought for what that would mean for Genevieve.
That she spoke of her with a genuine warmth and pride that contained no visible bitterness, which was a quality of character so considerable that he found he could not look directly at it without some corresponding feeling he was not ready to name.
And then there was the stream. He kept returning to the stream.
He had not meant to let his hands linger. He was not, in general, a man who let things happen without meaning them. But she had been warm and close and had looked up at him with that expression, open and unself-conscious, and the intention had simply not organized itself in time.