It was not dramatic. It was not the kind of kiss that announced itself or made demands. It was quiet and warm and careful, his hand still at her cheek, and she was still for one suspended second and then she kissed him back with the same gentleness, her hand coming up to rest lightly against his chest, and the stream moved over its stones and the cold morning air held them both and everything was very quiet and very still and very clear.
He drew back slowly. She looked up at him, eyes open, color risen in her cheeks that had nothing to do with the cold, her expression something he did not have a name for and thought perhaps he did not need, because it was simply her. Simply Genevieve, looking at him as though she had been patient for a very long time and had just discovered the patience had been worth it.
He thought he probably owed her an enormous apology for how long it had taken him to arrive there. He thought he would owe her that later, when he had the words for it.
"The climbing roses," she said, after a moment, her voice entirely steady in a way that made him fairly certain it had required some effort, "would be beautiful along the western wall."
He looked at her. Something in his chest, which had been wound tight for longer than he could accurately account for, released by a measure he had not known was possible.
"Yes," he said. "I think they would."
She smiled then—the private one, the real one, the one he had been cataloging for months without admitting to himself why—and turned back toward the horses. He stood for a moment at the edge of the stream watching her go with the feeling of a man who has been standing in the same place for a very long time and has just, finally, taken a step.
Chapter 15
Samuel arrived early enough that the breakfast things had not yet been cleared and the morning was still doing the tentative, provisional thing it did before it had fully committed to being a day.
Genevieve was in the morning room with her second cup of tea and a letter she was composing to Caroline, which had been going well until she had tried to describe the kissing incident, at which point she had written three different sentences, crossed out all three, and decided that some things were better communicated in person and with a great deal more tea than she currently had access to.
She heard the knock at the door, and then voices in the hall, and then Mr. Cavendish appeared in the doorway with the particular expression he wore when something had arrived that required her attention.
"Mr. Rutherford, ma'am."
"Samuel?" She was already setting down her cup. "Yes, of course, show him in."
Samuel came in with his usual ease and his usual warmth and a quality underneath both of them that she clocked immediately, because she had known him long enough by now to know what he looked like when he was managing something carefully. He looked like himself, which was to say pleasant and unhurried and entirely at ease, and underneath that he looked like a man who had something to say and was deciding how to say it.
"You are very early," she said, smiling at him. "Thomas has ridden out, he will not be back until luncheon at least. But sit down, please, and have some tea."
"Thank you." He sat, and accepted the tea, and looked at her with the directness that was one of the things she liked best about him, the quality he shared with Thomas of not making you wait longer than necessary for the thing they had actually come to say. "I apologize for the hour. I wanted to catch you before the day got away from itself."
"You do not need to apologize," she said. "You are always welcome here, Samuel, you know that." She studied his face. "What's happened?"
He set down his cup with the small, deliberate movement of a man organizing his words.
"Clarissa is back," he said.
The morning room was very quiet. Outside, one of the groundsmen was doing something distant and rhythmic somewhere near the east garden. Genevieve heard it with the strange, heightened clarity of someone whose attention had just been entirely arrested.
"Clarissa," she said.
"Yes."
She took a breath and arranged her face into the expression that felt correct, which was the expression of a woman receiving good news about a sister she loved, because she did love her sister, that was simply and plainly true regardless of anything else. She was not going to sit in her morning room and feel anything other than glad about the return of a person she had been worried about.
"That's wonderful," she said, and it came out warmly enough that she thought she meant it, which she was fairly certain she did… mostly. "Where are they staying? Are they at my parents' house?"
His expression had changed. Not dramatically, Samuel did not do dramatic expressions, but she could see it, the slight tightening, the quality of attention that preceded something difficult.
"Samuel," she said quietly.
"She is not," he said carefully, "from what I am hearing, with a husband."
The sentence arrived and she heard it and processed it and then heard it again, and the morning room remained exactly where it was and the groundsman continued his distant rhythmic work and the tea in her cup cooled by a degree, and she sat very still and looked at Samuel with the feeling of someone for whom the floor has shifted slightly without actually moving.
"I beg your pardon?" she said, because she needed to hear it again.
"The understanding I had," Samuel said, in the measured, gentle way he spoke when he was being careful with someone he cared about, "was that she had left with a captain. That there was an attachment, a serious one, and that she had gone with him."