She meant it. She did genuinely mean it. She was also aware, sitting in this carriage with her hands folded and her face doing exactly the right things, that meaning it and finding it straightforward were not presently the same experience.
That there was a version of her, a smaller and less generous version, who was having a considerably less composed afternoon than the one she was presenting. She was not going to let that version anywhere near their conversation. But she could feel her, distantly, pressing at the edges.
"I believe she went home. That she’s staying with your parents,” he explained.
"I see," Genevieve said.
He was watching her in the careful, particular way he had. And she was aware of it with the specific quality of awareness she always had when he looked at her like that, which was warm and thorough and considerably inconvenient given that she was currently devoting a significant amount of interior resource to not feeling several things simultaneously.
"I am sorry," he said. "That you had to go through this afternoon not knowing. I should have found a way to speak to you."
She looked at him.
"You were trying to find the right words," she said.
"They took longer than I would have wished."
She nodded. She turned back to the window.
Outside, the last of the light was going, the fields gray and still and entirely unbothered by the contents of this carriage, which she found, in that moment, faintly offensive of them. She pressed her lips together.
She felt the complicated, jostling, thoroughly inconvenient collection of things she had been managing all afternoon arrange themselves into something that was not quite any single feeling, rather it contained most of them. She held it there, carefully, the way you held something fragile, and breathed, and looked at the passing dark.
You know him, she told herself. You know who he is. You knew who he was before today and today has not changed it.
She believed that. She believed it with the stubborn, clear-eyed conviction she brought to things she had arrived at through genuine attention rather than hope, and that was not nothing. That was, in fact, considerable.
"I believe her," she said at last. And she did. She believed her sister's account, because she knew enough of the world and enough of Clarissa to know that even her sister's missteps tended to have their origins in want, in impulse. "Poor Clarissa."
“Indeed,” Thomas replied.
Once they were home, Thomas helped her out of the carriage and walked her inside. She kept her eyes straight ahead. He kissed the top of her head.
“I need to finish something in my study, go get some rest,” he said gently against her hair.
“Of course,” she said.
He stepped away from her, and she watched him go.
For once, she did not feel the usual fluttering in her chest when he was affectionate with her. Fighting back her own emotions, she ascended the stairs.
Perhaps she just needed sleep…
Chapter 19
It had been three days since the Peterson’s tea party.
Lady Harrington heard the knock at the door before anyone else did, which was precisely how she preferred things.
Thomas heard it from his study, the particular quality of a knock that was not the postman and not Samuel, too deliberate for either, registering it with distracted half-attention . He heard his grandmother’s footsteps in the hall, which was unusual. She did not generally position herself near doors.
He went back to the letter.
She appeared in his doorway a few moments later. He looked at her and felt sweat bead on the back of his neck. He had the expression used when she had something to tell him that she considered beneath the dignity of a significant announcement but wished him to receive with the gravity of one.
"Clarissa Penrose is in the hall," she said.
He was on his feet before the sentence was complete, which he was aware of and could not entirely account for. Not eagerness, that was not the word, nor was it the feeling. Something closer to bracing. The particular physical response of a man who has been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, for a thing to arrive.