He tensed, feeling something in him go cold.
“Are you insinuating something?” he asked darkly.
“I am saying,” she said softly. “That it would be a shame if she were to let something slip to the wrong person. Perhaps if she knew that I was not receiving the assistance I needed from the person who had promised?”
His jaw clenched.
“You would not–”
“Would I not?” she smiled at him. He felt the chill run up his spine. “Perhaps you should be a little more friendly with me, Thomas.”
“... Goodbye, Clarissa,” he said, pulling himself up onto his horse. He flicked the reins, desperate to escape the scene.
He did not look back. He was aware, in the way one is aware of things one is choosing not to attend to, of Clarissa standing at the edge of the tree line, and then eventually no longer standing there.
He did not know exactly what Clarissa had told Lydia, he would have to find that out before it went further than he could control it.
Worse still, what if Genevieve were to hear it before he had managed to warn her? He could only think of the betrayal that would fill her eyes before she masked it with a smile.
No.
He would not allow his choices to hurt her in that way.
He knew he could not yet abandon Clarissa. She was still in need. But if he allowed her to get out of control, then there was no telling what damage she could cause.
He wanted to tell her. He was aware that this was perhaps not a sentiment he could deliver with entire naturalness, they were not yet in the habit of easy declaration, of saying the things that were true without the architecture of occasion around them, but he thought he would find a way. He was, as Genevieve had once noted with a particular expression that he had stored carefully away, thorough.
For now, he would hide it from her, not because he could not trust her, but because he had not found the way to explain it to her that would not hurt her beyond measure.
No, today he would return and be her affectionate husband.
He would find her in the library. Or the drawing room. Or at the stables, talking to the gray mare with the confiding tone she used when she thought no one was listening.
He would find her wherever she was, because she was always somewhere in this house that had become, without his entirely noticing, the place he most wanted to be. He was going to tell her what was true, and she was going to look at him with those clear, patient eyes, and whatever happened after that would not require managing at all.
He took a deep breath.
Yes, he would tell her soon, but not yet.
The horse broke into a canter on the final stretch, and Thomas let it, and did not attempt to look as though he was not, for the first time in a very long time, in a very considerable hurry.
Chapter 26
The drawing rooms of London had always felt like theater to Genevieve. All performance, all artifice, all careful smiles arranged like flowers in a vase that everyone knew would wilt by morning. She had understood that instinctively from her very first season, had learned to navigate the choreography of it with something approaching grace.
She had believed, perhaps naively, that marriage would lift her above the worst of it. That having a husband, a household, a name of her own would afford her some small measure of shelter from the whispers that circulated like weather through every gathering.
She had been wrong.
The weeks following Clarissa's return to society had ground themselves into Genevieve with the slow, deliberate patience of water wearing stone. There was no single catastrophic blow, no confrontation, no public scene, nothing so merciful as that. Instead, it came in accumulations. A titter here, a glance there.
A fan raised just a fraction too quickly at the sight of her. A hush that fell over a cluster of women the moment she stepped within earshot, followed by a resumption of conversation that was just slightly too bright, too innocent, too deliberately cheerful.
She knew what they were saying. She did not need to hear the words to understand them. Thomas and Clarissa. Clarissa and Thomas. The names linked together like a chain, passed from drawing room to drawing room, from morning call to evening assembly, acquiring new embellishments with every telling until whatever kernel of truth or speculation sat at the center of it had been buried entirely beneath layers of invention.
The cruelest instrument of her suffering was Lydia Hargrove, who had always possessed a gift for malice that she dressed in the costume of candor. Lydia was one of those women who delivered wounds with an expression of such wide-eyed concern that one could almost believe she meant well. Almost.
If one did not look too closely at the pleasure lurking behind her eyes. At the Wentworth musicale, Lydia had placed herself just behind Genevieve's chair for the entire first half of the program, and though Genevieve could not make out every word exchanged in those low, intimate murmurs, she had caught enough. Enough to know her name, enough to know Clarissa's, enough to understand the vague outline of what was being said.