"He was always attentive," she said. "It is simply his character."
"Yes," Lydia agreed, with that same tone.
Clarissa set her teacup down rather more firmly than she intended. The small sound of it against the saucer was sharp in the quiet room.
It would not do. She had come home with a plan. Not a plan precisely, more an arrangement of instincts and intentions, but the shape of it was clear enough. Thomas had always loved her. That love did not simply dissolve because of time and ceremony. She had the advantage of history with him, of a depth of feeling that her sister, however pleasant, could not replicate from a standing start. She needed only to be present. To remind him of what they had been, what they might still be in some form that served her purposes.
She had rehearsed the logic often enough that it arrived smoothly, without the rougher edges that had characterized it in the first days after her return. Thomas had not sought the marriage; she was certain of that much. He had been maneuvered into it by circumstance and family pressure and the particular social arithmetic that punished men who failed to step forward at the required moment. He was dutiful. He would have made the best of it. That was not the same as preference.
None of that, she was finding, addressed the horse race particularly well.
She moved past it.
She needed money. That was the fundamental reality, stripped of its more complicated layers. Her parents were serious in their threats. She had come home to a household that viewed her as a problem to be resolved. Their resolution was likely to involve somewhere considerably less comfortable than her current room. Somewhere remote and dull and full of people who would watch her with the particular attentiveness of those assigned to watch. She would not allow it.
Thomas was her most reliable resource. He had offered to help her. He had given her money already, quietly, without making her beg for it, and she had understood from the ease of it that there was more where that had come from. What she needed only to manage the situation with sufficient care.
But if he was falling in love with Genevieve, genuinely, not merely performing the obligation of a decent husband, then the nature of the situation changed considerably. A man in love was a man with a fixed center of gravity. He would not reach out toward her; he would maintain his careful, principled distances.
She had watched it happen to other men. She had seen the slow, unremarkable process by which a sensible person reorganized themselves entirely around another sensible person. The often emerged from the reorganization apparently satisfied with the result. She had always found it faintly incomprehensible. She found it considerably less abstract now.
She thought of them at a horse race. Of Mr. Foster reporting Genevieve's laughter. Of the easy, afternoon quality of the image it produced.
"I need them to be less happy," she said.
The words landed in the room with a flatness that was almost practical.
Lydia's expression moved through several stages. Surprise, reassessment, and finally the particular quality of alertness that meant she had decided to find this interesting rather than alarming.
"That is a fairly direct thing to say."
"We have known each other too long for the indirect version." Clarissa looked at her steadily. "I am not asking you to be cruel to her. I am asking you to create a little… concern."
"Concern," Lydia repeated.
"Doubt. The kind that makes people look twice." She paused. "Genevieve has always been uncertain of her own standing in a room. A little well-placed uncertainty from outside would not require much effort to take hold."
Lydia blinked.
"Clari—"
"I am not asking you to do anything terrible." She waved a hand. "Gossip. That is all. The right word in the right ear at the right time. It is what society runs on, Lydia, and you know better than anyone how to move in it."
Lydia appeared to consider that. Balancing a moral scruple against the considerable pleasure of being considered essential. The pleasure won, as Clarissa had known it would.
"I will not be associated with anything that can be traced back," Lydia said, which was not a refusal.
"It never will be," Clarissa said, which was not quite a promise.
"What sort of thing did you have in mind?"
Clarissa reached for her tea, which had gone slightly cold, and looked out the window at the tidy street below. She had the beginning of something. Not the whole of it yet, the real shape of what she intended was still forming, the details still sharpening from instinct into strategy.
There would be a ball soon. There would be a public moment, of some kind, that could be made to serve her purposes.
She would think it through properly later.
For now: "I want people to remember what happened. The real story… or the version of it that does not make her look like the obvious, fortunate choice that fate conveniently provided when I was unavailable."