"You do not know me well enough to make such assumptions,” she replied.
"True," he said, with that almost-wry quality she had noticed before, the faint sense of a man who could see the shape of the absurdity even now and was choosing, very carefully, how much of that to show. "And yet I find I have formed a tolerably good impression."
She felt the warmth in her cheeks again, which was inconvenient, and she chose to ignore it.
"I hope it is a favorable one."
"It is," he said simply, and looked away toward the window, and the quality of the silence that fell between them then was altogether different from the silence at the beginning. Less empty. More inhabited.“I do wish to ask something of you, but I am aware that I have no place to do so.”
“I am to be your wife, you may ask anything of me,” she said softly. For a moment, she almost reached out to him, to take his hand, but she decided against it and pulled back.
“Please,” he said, almost in a whisper. She had not thought a man as athletically gifted and sized as him would be able to make such a vulnerable noise. “Do not attempt to replace her in my heart. As much as I am able to put on a brave face for the sake of propriety, I do not think I could bear it if you tried to be her.”
Genevieve’s heart clenched in her chest and she felt her shoulders slumping without her allowing her to.
“I understand,” she said softly. “In truth, I suppose I had always hoped for a love match.”
“I am not sure I can give you that,” he said, his hands gripped together. She nodded slowly. Looking at him, taking in his nervous expression, she did her best to do what she did best in these moments. She pushed the smile back onto her face, trying to obscure her feelings.
“I know,” she said softly. “I do not think anyone could replace a woman like Clarissa.” She watched as the corner of his mouth twitched.
Outside, a wood pigeon called from somewhere in the elms; the low, lulling repetition of it was answered, after a moment, from further off.
"Well then," Thomas said and rose from his chair. There was something… not easy, precisely, but less fraught than it might have been, about the way he said it, as though some private arithmetic had resolved itself during the course of the last quarter of an hour and left him steadier than he had been when he sat down. He offered her his hand. "Shall we go and tell your parents?"
She stood. She was taller than she sometimes remembered herself to be, and he was closer than he had been, now that they were both standing, and she was briefly, acutely aware of that proximity, the narrow distance of it, the fact of him as a physical presence rather than a figure in a chair across the room. She reached for his hand. His fingers closed around hers.
It lasted only a moment, warm, and steady, and entirely correct in every outward way, and then he released her, and stepped back, and the room resumed its ordinary dimensions.
But she could feel, still, the warmth of it in her palm as she turned toward the door. She did not think about it. She made a point, with considerable self-discipline, of not thinking about it.
"Yes," she said, and her voice was perfectly composed. "Let us go and tell them."
She walked beside him into the hall, and the house closed in around them with its familiar sounds and smells, beeswax and old wood and the faint cool of a house that had not yet had time to settle into its day, and somewhere beyond the sitting room door her mother would be waiting with all the anxious hope of a woman who had spent the last hour reconstituting her expectations of the day, and her father would be standing somewhere he could see the door, and she would have to go through it and be looked at, and everything would begin.
She had, she thought, walked into rather a lot of rooms in her life without knowing exactly what she would find on the other side.
She supposed this one was simply the beginning of considerably more of them.
She could only hope she would not regret agreeing to walk through them.
Chapter 4
Thomas strode out of the Penrose estate and back to his carriage.Behind him, the Pemberton’s were busy sending out couriers to inform guests that there had been a change in the wedding and they were not to attend. It was the only way to contain the damage scandal.
He knew they needed to prepare and discuss the change with the vicar, and he had important steps to take. Namely, informing his grandmother. He let out a long sigh that was almost like a groan. She would have something to say about all this. He knew she would.
The entrance hall was cool and dim after the brightness outside, and Thomas found his grandmother precisely where he had expected to find her: sitting in the dining room, with her tea, and her expression arranged in that particular way she had, the one that had seen off bailiffs and bad weather and at least two generations of Harrington stubbornness without flinching. She had not been told anything yet.
She did not need to have been told anything to look, as she did, entirely prepared to receive it.
He crossed to her quickly. Her stubbornness did not soften with delay.
He took his seat beside her, the smell of her black tea filling the space around them.
“You have returned,” she said calmly.
“I have,” he nodded. “I need to warn you about a change in the day.”