He laughed again. It came more easily this time.
"I will make a note. The apple tree was entirely my doing."
"And the lavender."
"And the lavender."
She smiled and returned to her work. He watched the fire for a while, and it occurred to him that he could not remember the last time he had sat in a room with another person and felt no particular pressure to account for the silence.
There had always been something required of him. Some performance of ease, some management of expectation. With Genevieve, there was only the fire and the soft sound of thread drawn through linen and the unhurried sense that the evening had nowhere else it needed to be.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You can ask me anything."
"Were you happy before? At your father's house." He was not certain why he asked it. It was not a careful question.
She was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable, he thought. She did not seem to have uncomfortable silences, only considered ones.
"In parts," she said at last. "I was fond of the house itself.” She paused. "But it was very quiet. And my father is not—" She stopped, chose again. "He is not a man who is very interested in the people around him."
"I am sorry."
"Do not be. I am not, particularly." She said it without hardness, simply as a fact. "It made me good at being self-sufficient, which has its uses. And it meant that when something was actually pleasant, I knew to recognize it." She glanced at him, briefly. "I have always thought it worse to have had something good and lost it than never to have had it at all. But perhaps that makes me unusual."
"I am not sure it does."
"No?" Her mouth curved slightly. "I had a governess who held very strongly to the opposite view. She felt that expectation was the root of all suffering and the only sensible approach was to want nothing."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It was, rather. She was also deeply unhappy, which she seemed not to notice was relevant." She tilted her head, considering the embroidery. "I decided quite early that I would rather want things and be disappointed than cultivate a thorough indifference and call it wisdom."
Thomas looked at her.
"I think," he said slowly, "that I may have been practicing something rather like her philosophy without knowing it."
Genevieve looked up at him then, with an expression that was careful and warm and not at all surprised.
"Yes," she said. "I know."
He did not have an answer for that. The fire shifted. He let the silence sit.
"I am not very good at this," he said at last.
"At what?"
He gestured vaguely at the space between them. She considered it.
"You are better than you think," she said. "And it's early yet."
He was not entirely sure whether she meant the evening or something larger. He suspected she meant something larger. He did not ask, because he thought asking might require him to have an answer ready, and he did not, yet. But he stayed where he was, in the warm room with the dying fire, and she stayed across from him with her careful, half-finished flowers, and neither of them seemed in any particular hurry to move.
He had been telling himself, with some regularity, that the situation with Clarissa would resolve itself. That it was simply a matter of being decent. A man did not abandon a woman who had once been in his care, regardless of how things had ended between them, and Clarissa was, beneath all the rest of it, a woman in difficulty. Genevieve's sister. His honor required that he do what he could. He had said this to himself often enough that it had become a kind of internal refrain, reliable and well-worn.
But sitting there, watching his wife's hands move over her embroidery with that precise and careful attention she brought to everything she did, he noticed the thread with something like discomfort. The argument was not wrong, exactly. It was just… incomplete. And he did not want to look too closely at what it left out.
"Did Samuel call on you today?" he asked, because the house had been quiet when he came in and he had not been certain.