He had seen Clarissa. That very morning.
She was not angry. She told herself firmly that she was not angry.
No. Anger presumed that there was a party that had been wronged. As of now, all she knew was that the two of them had met. She did not know what could have been said or done. So she was not angry. She had no right to anger.
What she was, she admitted only to herself, standing very still in a bright room full of people who were watching her with various degrees of subtlety, was afraid. Afraid in a way that she found difficult to name precisely, because it was not fear of Clarissa exactly.
Nor even of what Clarissa's return might mean for the gossip that had only just begun to settle. It was older than that. It was the fear of someone who knows that the person standing beside her once loved another woman completely. She could only wonder, in the quietest, most private chamber of her heart, whether something that entire ever fully leaves.
Next to her, she could practically feel the tension radiating from Thomas. She could feel him watching her from her peripheral vision. He was waiting. Perhaps expecting a response. He was not the only one. She could feel others in the party had paused conversations to look at her.
They were waiting to see how she would react.
Would she cause a scene?
She took a slow, steadying breath. She would not give them that satisfaction.
“What was said?” Genevieve asked.
“She asked for forgiveness, I said there was nothing to forgive,” Thomas replied.
Genevieve caught her hands gripping into her skirts before she stopped herself.
“There is more that I need to tell you. Not here," Thomas finally said, breaking the silence.
"No," she agreed. She turned back to face him; a smile plastered on her face. "Not here."
The remainder of the party was a performance she delivered with precision and grace, and when the carriage door finally closed behind them, leaving the Petersons' lit windows receding into the afternoon, the silence between them had a different quality from the one that had accompanied their arrival.
She had smiled until her face ached with it. She had admired Mrs. Peterson's new drapes, ivory damask, very fine, and she had said so with every appearance of genuine admiration. She had agreed that the weather had been uncommonly fine for the season, and laughed at a remark she barely heard from a Mr. Somebody whose name she had collected at the door and immediately mislaid somewhere in the hour that followed.
She was very good at all of that. She had always been good at all of that. That day however, it had required a degree of active effort she was not going to think about until she was somewhere private enough to fall apart in, which she was not going to do. But the option was there if she needed it.
Thomas had been watching her. Not in the obvious way. It was quieter, more personal, and she had felt it at intervals throughout the afternoon like a hand briefly placed on her shoulder. She had not looked at him when she felt it. She had not trusted her face.
The carriage moved. The pale winter light was going. The bare hedgerows passed in silence.
"Genevieve."
She turned from the window with an expression she had assembled specifically for this purpose, the pleasant, open one, the one that said I am perfectly well and entirely receptive to whatever you have to say. She had been wearing versions of it all afternoon, and she was very tired of her own face.
He was looking at her with the expression that preceded something he had decided to say, despite finding it difficult. She had learned to recognize it.
"She came to find me," he said. "This morning. When I was riding from town to the Petersons’. I know I should have told you immediately," he said. "I did not know how to—" A pause. "But there simply was not the time between my meeting with her, and my meeting with you."
"What did she want?" Genevieve asked, in the pleasant, even voice she was apparently capable of producing under any circumstances whatsoever, which was a quality she had previously considered an asset.
"I am not entirely certain she knew." He looked at his hands. "She talked for a long time. About what happened. About the officer." He was quiet for a moment, choosing words with the care he brought to things that mattered. "She had believed they would marry.
She said he had told her they would, once his situation was settled, and she had gone with him on that understanding, and by the time she understood the understanding was not mutual, she was already—" He stopped. "She was in a situation she could not easily return from."
Genevieve nodded. She looked at the passing road and nodded and kept her hands folded very quietly in her lap, which was where hands went when one had to make a considerable effort not to do anything with them.
She thought about that morning. She thought about sitting in the morning room with Samuel's careful, kind voice delivering news that had rearranged the day and then having to put on a hat and go to a tea party and stand in a room full of people who knew and smile at all of them while the person she wanted to speak to was with somebody else.
"She did not ask me for anything," Thomas said. "I want you to know that. She came because… I think because she did not know where else to go, and because she knew I would not be unkind about it."
"No," Genevieve said. "You would not be."