"This morning, yes. He brought news of the Hatfield race next month. He thought you would like to enter the gray." She did not look up. "He also mentioned that there has been some talk."
The word sat in the room. Thomas looked at her. Her needle moved, unhurried.
"I know," he said.
"I know you do." A pause. "I am not worried about it."
He was not certain he believed her. He was not certain she believed herself. But there was something in her voice that made him think she was choosing, consciously, not to worry about it. That she was granting him something, whether he deserved it or not.
"Genevieve."
She looked up.
He had not planned to say anything in particular. He had some half-formed idea that he would say something reassuring and she would smile, and he would go to bed feeling that he had discharged some vague obligation. But she was looking at him with those clear green eyes, the firelight moving over her face, and what came out was: "You deserve better than uncertainty."
The words fell strangely in the quiet room.
She held his gaze for a long moment. He could not read her expression precisely. There was something in it that was close to sorrow and close to hope and perhaps not entirely either one. Then she shook her head, very slightly, and looked back at her work.
"I have a good deal more than uncertainty," she said. "I have this house. I have your grandmother, who terrifies and delights me in equal measure. I have a husband who says what he wants and then actually does it." She glanced up briefly, a faint curve to her mouth. "And I shall have a very fine garden one day, I think."
He laughed, a short sound, surprised out of him. She smiled at the embroidery. The fire crackled and settled.
He stayed until the lamp began to gutter and the fire had burned to coals. He did not go back to the ledgers. When she finally rose to retire, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes with that particular exhaustion that came from fine work in low light, he stood as well, and she paused by the door.
"Good night, Thomas."
"Good night."
She left. He stood in the warm and dimming room a moment longer than was necessary, looking at the chair she had occupied, the abandoned embroidery hoop left on the side table with its small blue-gray flowers half-finished.
I should do something about Clarissa.
And then, underneath that thought, quieter and more honest. I do not want to lose this.
He did not yet understand that these two things were incompatible. But the knowledge was gathering at the edges of him, patient as winter, waiting for him to sit still long enough to let it arrive.
Chapter 24
It was a week after the ball when Thomas was to have his first meeting with Clarissa to hand over the money. He had woken up that day, his stomach in knots, but he smiled through the morning until it was time to go.
Thomas had chosen the location, which meant the location was in the open air, in the middle of the morning, near the edge of the woodland path that wound along the eastern boundary of his land. The one where he rode most mornings.
The one that Genevieve had recently begun to ride with him now that he had arranged the horse he had promised her. He was not unaware of the slight irony. He chose it nonetheless because he wanted no ambiguity about the meeting and because a location with no walls and no privacy was its own kind of statement.
He had told Genevieve he was going out for his usual ride. This was true, as far as it went. Genevieve had elected to stay at home on account of the chill in the air and the need to fix her wool coat. It had been caught on a branch.
The morning was sharp and clear, the kind that arrived in autumn without apology and made everything look slightly more consequential than it was. He arrived at the agreed point of the path and dismounted, looping his reins over a low branch, and waited with the patience he had cultivated over years of situations that required it.
Clarissa arrived a few minutes after him, which he suspected was deliberate, and was wearing something the color of autumn leaves that he noticed because he was a human being and not because it had any particular effect on him.
She looked, when she came close enough to read, less certain than she had in the drawing room. There was something different in her expression. Some quality of tension underneath the composure that she was managing with slightly less ease than usual.
He supposed it must be difficult, her situation. He did not allow himself to dismiss the reality of her difficulty simply because her behavior at the ball had disappointed him. She stopped a few feet from him and looked at the path, and then at him.
"It is strange," she said. "Being here. On your land."
"Is it?"