"I think," he said, "that Clarissa started it."
Genevieve looked at him for a moment. Samuel was not a man who said things imprecisely. She had understood that about him early and had come to trust it in the way she trusted Thomas's particular form of careful honesty. If Samuel said he thought it, he meant he was reasonably certain but was giving her the grace of the qualifier.
"How much has it spread?" she asked.
"Enough that Caroline heard it in two separate conversations before she found me." He paused. "It has been moving through the room with some purpose."
With some purpose. Not idle gossip drifting randomly. Directed. Genevieve looked at the dark garden beyond the terrace railing and thought of Clarissa at the window in her blue gown and felt something harden quietly in her chest. Not rage, nothing so hot as that. Something colder and more durable.
"All right," she said. "Thank you for telling me plainly."
The terrace door opened. Thomas came through it quickly, too quickly for someone who had simply been asked to step outside, and his eyes moved from Genevieve to Samuel with an expression that was not, quite, the concern she expected. His jaw was slightly set.
Samuel moved back.
"The gossip has escalated," he said to Thomas, low and direct. "You need to hear it, and you need to take care of your wife."
Thomas looked at Genevieve. She met his eyes and felt something shift in her chest at the expression in them. The concern, yes, genuine and immediate, and beneath it something fiercer.
He came and put his arm around her, and it was not like Samuel's arm— it was different in a way she did not try to name precisely. He turned her gently toward the door.
"We are leaving," he said.
"Thomas, if we leave it will look as though—"
"I know what it will look like," he said. "I do not care."
She was grateful. She was so grateful that it was difficult, for a moment, to breathe through it properly. And even as he guided her away from the terrace and through the house and out to where the carriage could be called, she carried in the other hand the thing Samuel had told her, and the image of Clarissa, laughing.
Chapter 23
The fire had burned low by the time Thomas found her.
He had gone to his study after dinner with every intention of reviewing the ledgers, but the columns of figures had blurred before him, and he had sat for the better part of an hour doing nothing at all. His grandmother had retired early, pleading fatigue, though she had given him one of her long, considering looks on the way out that made him feel thoroughly seen and slightly irritated. He did not know what the look was meant to convey. He never did.
He found Genevieve in the sitting room off the east corridor, the one she had quietly claimed as her own over the past several weeks without ever announcing that she had done so. A lamp burned on the table beside her, and the fireplace offered a low, steady warmth. She did not notice him at first.
She was embroidering. He stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment, the careful tilt of her head, the slight furrow of her brow as she guided the needle through the fabric. The small, satisfied exhale when she completed a stitch she had apparently been worrying over. Auburn hair caught the firelight and turned it copper. She looked, he thought, as though she had always belonged here, in their house, in that chair, with the fire burning low and the whole estate quiet around her.
He knocked once on the open door, though it was already open.
She looked up. The furrow dissolved into a smile, quick and warm.
"You have escaped the ledgers."
"How did you know I was in with the ledgers?"
"Because you always go to the ledgers when you have something on your mind and want to convince yourself that you do not."
He came into the room, feeling the familiar slight wrong footing that her observations produced in him. He had not expected, when he married her, to be known. It was not a thing he had bargained for, and he was still not entirely certain how to conduct himself in the face of it. He took the chair across from her, the one angled toward the fire, and stretched his legs out before him.
"What are you making?" he asked.
She turned the hoop toward him. It was a spray of blue-gray flowers against cream linen. Small, meticulous, more lovely than anything he would have thought to call lovely before.
"A cushion cover," she said. "For the window seat in the library. The existing ones have gone quite shabby, and I kept meaning to mention it, only then I thought it might be easier to simply replace them."
"You did not need to do that yourself."