"It was a reasonable position," he eventually said. "And an entirely reversible one."
She turned to look at him again. He met her eyes this time.
"I have always thought that I should like to ride more than I do. But it is not… it is not considered especially…" She made a small gesture.
"I could arrange it," he said. "If you wanted to ride more."
She looked at the roan. She was aware that the offer was genuine, she had learned, over months of careful attention, to distinguish his genuine offers from his polite ones, and this was the former. She was also aware of the particular way she felt when he made them, which was complicated by the fact that she was still, despite considerable practice, not entirely accustomed to being offered things and invited simply to want them.
"Could you?" she asked. "Genuinely?"
"Genevieve. Yes."
She looked back at the field. She let herself absorb it—not the material fact of it, though that was real enough, but the thing beneath it, the simple and still slightly startling experience of being known well enough that an offer required no negotiation.
"There is a gray at Ashworth's stable," she said, eventually. "I noticed her last month when we called. Very sensible-looking."
"I will speak to Ashworth."
"You do not have to do it immediately."
"I am aware."
She pressed her lips together against what might have been a smile.
"You are very…" She considered the word that had arrived first and decided it gave rather too much away. "Thorough," she settled on.
"It has been said."
"By people who meant it as a criticism?"
"Generally, yes."
"I do not," she said simply, and turned back to the horses, and did not look at him again for several minutes, which was a discipline she considered entirely necessary under the circumstances.
The carriage ride home was easy in a way that the past week had not been, and she was glad of it. It was the uncomplicated gladness of someone setting down something heavy.
She told him about a horse her neighbor's child had named something spectacularly inappropriate and he told her about a disastrous race he had attended with Samuel some years ago in which everything had gone wrong in an escalating sequence of improbabilities.
She laughed more than she had in days, and by the time the familiar gates came into view she felt something that she had not felt for a week. She felt simply herself, simply ordinary and present and at ease.
Clarissa was far from her mind, as if right then she did not matter. In truth, right at that moment, she did not. Perhaps she could even convince herself that her sister would cause no issue at all.
At the door she stopped on the step and turned back to him before she had fully decided to. The evening light was doing something to his face that she observed and did not comment on. She reached up and pressed her lips to his cheek, warm and deliberate, and felt him go very still in the way he went still when something had arrived that he had not prepared for.
"Thank you," she said. "For today."
She went inside before her face could do anything she would have to account for, standing for a moment in the entrance hall with her hands folded and her heart conducting itself in a manner she considered highly inconvenient, and smiling at the middle distance for slightly longer than was strictly necessary.
Then she went to find Lady Harrington and tell her about the gray.
Chapter 21
Lydia Hargrove's drawing room had always struck Clarissa as slightly overreaching. The drapes were too heavy, the ornaments too numerous, the whole effect suggesting a family that had arrived at its current respectability with some effort and was not entirely finished congratulating itself.
Clarissa was fond of Lydia, insofar as she was fond of anyone. That was to say she found her useful, reliably so, and occasionally good company. A person whose opinion one does not particularly value, she believed, could sometimes be excellent company.
Lydia had been her closest confidante at sixteen and her most reliable social instrument at twenty-three, and the relationship had never been troubled by either of them mistaking it for something warmer than it was. There was a comfort in that, Clarissa had always found. Honest transactions were considerably easier to maintain than false ones.