"I am not your enemy," Genevieve said. "I have never been your enemy, despite the sustained effort you have made to cast me as one." She paused. "I think you know that. I think somewhere underneath it all you do know it, and I think that knowledge is not entirely comfortable."
She stood and moved to the door. "I hope you find somewhere satisfactory to go. I mean that sincerely. I hope wherever you end up is somewhere you can be less at war with everything. Because you are exhausting yourself, Clarissa. Just as you have exhausted me. Anyone with eyes can see it."
She turned and opened the door.
"Goodbye, Clarissa," she said. And she meant it the way it needed to be meant. Not as a door slamming, but as a door closing, gently and finally, the latch settling into place.
She left the room.
She heard the carriage leave twenty minutes later.
She was at the window of her old chambers. It was not that she had gone there to watch, but because she had gone there to sit somewhere quiet for a few minutes, somewhere that did not require anything of her, and the window happened to face the drive.
She watched the carriage appear from around the side of the house, the hatbox swaying with considerable drama at the top, the maid sitting very straight beside the footman. She watched it go down the drive, slow and slightly overloaded, and turn out of the gate.
Genevieve stood at the window a little while longer. The lime trees moved faintly in the afternoon air, the new leaves catching the light, and the drive remained empty and quiet and entirely ordinary, the way things looked after something significant had passed through them and the significance had receded and what was left was simply the place, going about its business.
She thought about Thomas. She thought about what she had said on the stairs, and what he had said, and the look on his face when she had said it, open in a way she had not seen him open before, undisguised in a way that had been almost difficult to look at directly because it was so different from what she had grown accustomed to. I will come, he had said. When you are ready. I will come.
She was not ready yet. But the not-readiness felt different now. Not the dull, managed not-readiness of the past weeks, the composure that cost everything to maintain. This was lighter. She had set down the heaviest thing, Clarissa, the long habit of her, the stubborn defending of someone who had never required defending in the way Genevieve had done it, and the lightness of the absence was going to take some getting used to.
She was getting used to it. She thought she would be ready soon.
Perhaps even the next day.
Chapter 32
The study was dark except for the fire and the lamp on the desk, which Thomas had lit and then ignored. He had come to find in the days since Genevieve left that his study was his preferred place to be when the sun went down.
He had lit the lamp with some vague intention of doing something. Reading, perhaps, or attending to correspondence, or any of the various occupations a man might reasonably pursue in his own study on an ordinary evening. He had then sat down and looked at the lamp and understood that it was not going to be an ordinary evening. The correspondence was not going to be attended to.
Reading was not a thing he was currently capable of because reading required a quality of attention that he did not have access to at present. All of it having been redirected toward a single subject that was not the sort of subject one could usefully think about for five consecutive hours and yet there he was, five hours in, with no sign of improvement.
The decanter was within reach. He had been making use of that fact.
The fire needed tending. He was aware of it and had been aware of it for some time without doing anything about it, which was, he thought, fairly representative of the past several months of his life. Things requiring his attention, him being aware of them, him doing nothing, the situation worsening accordingly. He was beginning to identify a pattern.
He had sent a letter that afternoon. Three attempts, each abandoned, before he had arrived at something that was less a letter than a collection of sentences arranged in approximately the right order, informing Genevieve that he hoped she was well and that he was available to speak whenever she felt ready and that he remained… and here he had crossed out four different words before settling on yours, which was both true and insufficient and the best he had managed.
He had sent it before he could revise it into something worse. He did not know whether it had reached her. He did not know what she had done with it if it had.
He heard the door.
He looked up. Samuel was in the doorway, still in his coat, with the expression of a man who has assessed a situation from the threshold and is not surprised by what he has found.
"Your grandmother let me in," Samuel said.
"She lets everyone in. It's her primary failing."
"She seemed to think you needed company." He came in without waiting for an invitation, which Thomas had long ago accepted was simply how Samuel operated. It was a quality that had irritated him considerably when they first met, some twelve years ago, and which he had eventually concluded was preferable to the alternative, which were people who waited to be invited and therefore never arrived when they were actually needed.
Samuel settled into the chair across from the desk with the ease of someone who had been in that room many times before. He looked at the decanter. He looked at Thomas. He looked at the fire, which had burned considerably lower than fires were generally permitted to burn in inhabited rooms.
"How long have you been at that?"
"Since four."
"It's nine."