He went inside. He did not sleep for some time.
Chapter 29
Something had not sat right with Genevieve that day. Yet, she could not find anything out of place. That was the thing she would return to, afterward, in the way one returns to the last ordinary moment before something breaks. She looked across her letters that she had just finished writing. Nothing was amiss in the ink, the parchment, or her phrasing. She sighed. Perhaps she had just needed air. She had remained inside all day.
She had even been in a reasonable humor. That was the particular cruelty of it. Just the day before she had written to Caroline and received a reply that had made her laugh, genuinely laugh, the way she had not laughed in some weeks.
She had sat at her writing desk in the thin morning light and thought that perhaps the worst of it was passing, that perhaps she had been giving the gossip and the doubt and all of it more power than it deserved. Perhaps things were not as irreparably damaged as they had felt at two in the morning on the nights when she could not sleep.
Then it happened. At that same writing desk, she felt a dread that would not ease. She stood abruptly, perhaps too abruptly, and went to find Thomas.
Except…
He was not in his study. She could not see him through the windows over the gardens. The maid who usually brought him tea had not seen him in some time.
Genevieve stood in the hallway and thought. All the while, the unease in her gut rose.
“You are being ridiculous,” she whispered to herself as she made her way to the morning room.
His grandmother was in the morning room, reading.
"I am sorry to interrupt," Genevieve said. "Do you know where Thomas has gone?"
Lady Harrington looked up. And there it was, that fractional thing, gone almost before it arrived, the very slight recomposition of an expression that had been, for just a heartbeat, something other than composed. Genevieve had become, over these past weeks, extremely attentive to small things.
She saw it. She understood immediately that the older woman knew something and had decided, in that fraction of an instant, not to tell her. Genevieve frowned. It was not like her to hold back information.
"I expect he will be back shortly," she said. "He mentioned something about the grounds this morning."
"The grounds… I did not see him in the garden."
"Or thereabouts." The older woman returned her eyes to her book with the air of someone concluding a subject. "I would not worry."
The surface of that was perfectly reasonable. The surface of everything was perfectly reasonable. That was the quality that had been driving Genevieve quietly to the edges of herself for weeks, the way the surface of everything held, clean and unblemished, while something entirely different moved underneath. She had grown so tired of surfaces.
"Grandmamma."
The older woman looked up again.
Genevieve had not raised her voice. She was not a woman who expressed the deepest things she felt through raised voices, it was not in her nature, and besides, she had been managing her expressions so carefully for so many weeks that she had become rather accomplished at it by now. But she was aware that the quality of her pleasantness had changed, had taken on a precision and a stillness that was not, she thought, difficult to read, if one was paying attention. And Lady Harrington was always paying attention.
"I am not asking idly," she said. "And I would rather not be managed."
A silence. Lady Harrington looked at her, really looked at her, the way she rarely permitted herself to do directly, and something moved across her face. Regret. Resignation. And something else that looked, remarkably, like relief. The relief of a woman who has been holding a door shut for some time and has finally decided to let it open.
"The forest," she said. "To the east. He rides there sometimes."
"Thank you."
"Genevieve." She paused in the doorway. Lady Harrington had set her book down entirely now, both hands flat on her lap, and she looked at her with an expression that Genevieve had not seen on her before, something unguarded, something almost maternal, the look of a woman who wanted to say something and understood it was not hers to say. "Whatever you find—"
"I will be perfectly fine," Genevieve said. "Thank you."
She was not sure that was true. She went to find her horse before she could think about it too carefully.
The ride was not long. It just felt long.