It was, Genevieve thought, one of the kindest things she had ever witnessed. Genevieve was grateful. She was also, in some part of herself she could not quite reach, entirely unreachable.
After Caroline left, the sitting room felt different. Not worse, just quieter, in the way that spaces feel quiet after someone warm has been in them. Genevieve sat for a while without moving, her hands in her lap, and looked at the chair Caroline had occupied and thought about Thursday at two, and the portraits, and the hat situation that was not and had never been a crisis, and felt the warmth of it and the distance from it simultaneously.
That was the trouble. She could feel that Caroline loved her, could feel it clearly, could receive it and be grateful for it, and it still could not reach the place where the doubt lived. It was like holding a candle up to a wall. The candle was real. The light was real. The wall remained.
She wished she did not feel such a seemingly ever-present gloom or malaise. It had somehow soaked into all of her thoughts, like ink spreading over parchment.
“You are not smiling,” Lady Harrington said from the door. Genevieve startled and looked at her.
“I do apologize, I did not hear you—”
“I have not seen you smile that infuriating smile in some days now,” she continued.
“Does one need to constantly smile?” Genevieve asked.
“If you had asked me that some months ago I would have said no,” the older woman sighed. “But on you, a frown is truly unnatural.”
Genevieve hesitated. Then she tried to smile but it did not reach her eyes.
“Like this?”
“No, no, no,” she sighed. “A false smile is worse than no smile.”
“But then how can I—?”
“I do not know what my silly grandson has done to make this situation the way it is,” she said, stepping forward. “But I shall inform him that if he does not see to it that you are smiling again, properly, within the month, there will be trouble from me.”
Genevieve nodded and tried to smile more naturally.
It did not work.
“A letter has arrived for you,” she said, handing it to her. “The staff mixed it in with mine. I will make sure it does not happen again.”
“Thank you,” Genevieve said as she took the letter. Her eyes traced over the writing. It was Samuel’s. He had become one of her closest correspondents since the early days of her marriage. It was a friendship that had surprised both of them, she thought, growing up gradually from the tentative civility of new acquaintance into something she genuinely valued.
His letters were intelligent, warm, and often funny. He had a gift for understanding what she needed to hear without her having to say it directly. He kept her informed, he had told her once, because he believed she deserved to be informed, that she was not the sort of woman who was better served by ignorance, however comfortable ignorance might feel in the short term.
She had appreciated that. She appreciated his letters now. But even they could not reach the cold, still place inside her where she had been keeping everything since it had all begun.
She read it twice. The second time more slowly, pausing at the line near the end that had made her set the paper down for a moment and look at the window.
I will say plainly what I suspect you already know: you are not the problem here and never have been. I am aware this is the sort of observation that is easier to receive than to act upon, and I do not offer it as instruction. I offer it only because I think you deserve to hear it stated directly, by someone who has watched this situation from a position of some proximity and finds your composure in the face of it nothing short of remarkable.
She had read that line and had felt, briefly, the warmth of being seen clearly by someone who had no reason to flatter her. It had not resolved anything. It had not touched the cold place. But it had sat alongside her in a way that was different from nothing, and she was grateful for it in the undemonstrative way she was grateful for things that could not fix what was broken… but refused to pretend it was not there.
She was still thinking about the letter over dinner when she had been moving food around her plate without much appetite. Dinner had been going for twenty minutes before Genevieve realized she had not said anything of import to her.
She had asked about the estate accounts, Thomas had mentioned them that morning and she had stored the fact away, deployed it now with the efficiency of someone reaching for a tool. She had made an observation about the weather. She had inquired after the Pembrokes' new foal, because she had heard the stable boy mention it to someone in the yard and it had seemed like the kind of thing one could ask about without risk.
Thomas had answered all of it. He was answering the foal now, something about the dam, something about whether the color would hold, and she was nodding with what she believed was appropriate interest, and across the table his grandmother was cutting her meat with the focused precision of a woman engaged in a private occupation.
“I see Samuel wrote to you… again,” Thomas said quietly at one moment.
“He is a good friend,” Genevieve replied, pushing potatoes around her plate.
“Yes… a good… male friend… whom you read the letters of in the sitting room, alone,” Thomas continued.
His grandmother sighed.