"I am sorry," she said. "I did not plan to—"
"It is all right."
"I am not usually—"
"Clarissa. It's all right."
She looked up at him. Her eyes were bright from the crying, and her expression, in that unguarded moment before she remembered to compose it, was something he had not seen on her before. It was something that looked almost like uncertainty. It suited her in a way that was deeply inconvenient.
He offered her his arm and walked her back to the carriage. The ordinary mechanics of it helped: the groom, the step, the adjustment of skirts, all the small practical furniture of the moment that gave his hands something to do and his mind somewhere to be.
At the door, she turned and looked down at him. The smile was back, but softer now, as though some of the architecture of it had been temporarily taken down.
"Will you see me again?" she asked. "I would like… When I am more settled. I would like us to talk properly."
He should have said something careful. He was aware, even in the moment that careful was the appropriate register, that a wiser version of himself might have expressed warm goodwill and left it at something vague.
"Yes," he said before his mind and his mouth could agree on a course of action. “I am sure Genevieve would like to see you again.” He added, hurriedly.
She pressed his hand briefly, warmly, and the carriage door closed, and the wheels began to turn on the packed earth of the trail, and he stood and watched it go.
He stood there for some time after it had disappeared from view.
The wood was very quiet. A bird moved in the canopy somewhere above him, rustling through leaves and then gone.
He had been so certain he was past those feelings. He had built something new, had been building it, carefully and with genuine effort, in the months since the wedding. Genevieve was good, and he was grateful for her, and there were moments, recently, that had surprised him with their warmth. He had thought that was enough. He had thought perhaps it was even becoming something more than enough.
And then Clarissa had looked at him from a carriage door and smiled, saying his name the way only she said it, and he was standing on a woodland path in the middle of the afternoon feeling like a man who had just discovered that a wall he thought was solid had rather less behind it than he had assumed.
He walked back to his horse and stood with a hand on the animal's neck, and made himself think about what came next. About the house ahead. About Genevieve, who was probably sitting somewhere in it right now reading something she had found quietly amusing or talking to his grandmother with that patient tact that always slightly impressed him. Or doing any number of ordinary things that constituted a life they were in the early stages of building together.
She would be glad Clarissa was home. He was certain of that. She never said anything against her sister. Not a word, not even an inflection. Whatever complicated history existed between them, Genevieve's affection appeared undiminished by it. She would want to see her. She would welcome her warmly and mean it.
Thomas mounted his horse and turned for home, and he thought about how to tell his wife that her sister had returned, and he did not let himself think about what he had felt standing in the woods, because he was not yet ready to look at it clearly.
He suspected that was going to become a problem.
Chapter 18
Thomas was late.
This was not, in itself, remarkable. He had a particular relationship with the hour that Genevieve had come to understand in the months of their marriage. Which was to say that he always arrived eventually, and always with a slightly distracted expression that suggested the preceding quarter of an hour had not gone quite as he planned.
She had grown fond of that expression. It softened him in a way that his more careful, public face did not. At the same time, she did wish that he would not be late to their social events.
She was standing in front of the Petersons’ estate, having taken the carriage while Thomas was in town.
She had been spinning with nerves ever since she had heard of Clarissa’s return. The only one she wanted to speak to on the subject, was Thomas. She looked down the road that approached the Peterson’s house, and wrapped her arms around herself as way of protection.
She saw him coming up the gravel path just as she reached the bottom of the steps leading to the front entrance, and she paused, waiting. He was walking quickly, hat in hand, his dark coat showing the signs of a man who had ridden rather than taken the carriage. When he saw her waiting, something in his face shifted. Something like relief in his eyes.
"You are late," she said, by way of greeting.
"I am slightly late," he said. "There is a meaningful distinction."