Page 14 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine lifted her forehead from the glass.

She would not, she resolved, think of him. She would not think of the grey eyes that were Sophia’s eyes, only larger and more tired; she would not think of the hand that had rested for half a second on the back of the chair as he had effectively asked her, very gravely, whether she could endure a child who had been made unhappy by indifferent women. She would not think of the way that he had said ‘Miss Wharton’ — with the smallest pause before it, as though her name were a thing he had decided, in that moment, to handle carefully.

She would think instead of Beatrice, in Bath, mending her one good gown for the third time. She would think of Georgiana, in Hampshire, reading aloud to a Mrs Verity who took snuff. She would think of the sixty pounds a year she had been promised, which was twenty pounds more than her last place had paid her, and of the brown paper parcel she meant to send to Bath at quarter day.

She would think of the territory which was hers, and not stray from it.

*****

In the library, three flights down and at the other end of the house, Stirling Hawksmoor, Marquess of Greyscarp, was not reading the letter in his hand.

He had been holding it for some minutes. It was from his man of business and concerned a question about the Hertfordshire timber, and ordinarily he would have answered it immediately. He had been raised to such promptness as some men were raised to the saddle. His father had said, more than once, and never as a compliment, that Stirling had a clerk’s habit of mind. This afternoon the clerk’s habit had deserted him. He had read the first paragraph three times and could not, if pressed, have said what the second contained.

He had spent the morning with Edwin Morley, the Duke of Daventry, in Berkeley Square, going over the wording of a motion the Duke meant to bring before the Lords next month. Daventry was sixty-two, gouty, and as sharp as a new pen; he had given Stirling sherry he did not want and a quarter of an hour’s exhortation he did not need, on the duty of younger peers to put their shoulders to the public wheel. Stirling had nodded in the right places. He had taken away two sheets of notes in Daventry’s slanting hand. He had walked back from Berkeley Square to Grosvenor Square through a noon that smelt of horse and lilac and the first warmth of a London spring, and he had not, for any of those twenty minutes, thought of Daventry’s motion.

He had thought, instead, of a grey kerseymere sleeve and a cameo at a white collar, and the way a woman of two-and-twenty had swallowed, and looked grateful for the wage he had offered – the paltry sum of sixty pounds for a year of her life.

Sixty pounds. He had thought to offer her more, but knew, somehow, that she would try to refuse. She knew what governesses were paid, and she was a woman who would choose to retain her dignity, and not take charity.

So he had not, in the end, pressed her, because to press her would have been to insult her, and because he had seen, in the firm steadiness of her mouth, that the refusal would not be a piece of theatre, but a piece of bone. A Governess walked the last hundred yards. A Governess took the wage that was offered. A Governess of noble blood, who had buried both parents and a fortune in two years, took it with both hands and did not look up.

But he had looked up. He had looked at her across his own desk in his own library and he had thought, with a clarity that had felt at the time like a piece of news, ‘here is a woman who has had everything taken from her and has kept the only thing that mattered.’

He had not known, then, what to call the thing that she had kept. He still did not. Honour was the word that came first to him, because it was the word his upbringing had given him for every virtue, but he was beginning to suspect that he had been using it all his life as a man uses a single key for a great many doors.

She had said that she’d hoped he would not remember her. But how could he have forgotten? She was still beautiful, five years later, although the brightness of her had been tarnished by grief and troubles, and still as refreshingly direct and honest as she had been, in that ballroom long ago. He wasn’t sure that he had done the right thing – but how could he have done anything else?

He set the letter down. He rose from the desk and went to the window — the long window that gave onto the square — and stood with his hands behind his back and looked, without seeing, at a nursemaid carrying a small child past the railings.

Above him, somewhere in the upper reaches of his own house, a board creaked. He had always had particularly acute hearing, and usually, that served him well. But it also meant that he knew, intimately, every tiny sound that anything in this house made. And that creak was the creak of the second-floor landing, which he had known since boyhood and could not have mistaken for any other board in the house. It was followed, after a measured interval, by the lighter, more cautious creak of the narrow stair to the schoolroom floor.

He listened.

He had not, half an hour ago, been a man who listened for footsteps.

He was appalled, on a small private level which he did not yet wish to examine, to discover that he had become one.

The footsteps stopped. A door closed, three flights up, with the particular softness of a door closed by a woman who did not wish to be heard closing it.

Stirling let out a breath he had not known he was holding, and turned from the window.

“Damn,” he said, mildly, to the empty room.

*****

He had meant to spend the afternoon with the Hertfordshire papers. He spent it instead, after a fashion, with his mother.

She came to the library at four with her workbasket on her arm, which was, in his experience, never a good sign. The Dowager did not pursue her embroidery in any room which she did not mean to occupy for at least an hour. She settled herself in the chair by the fire — the chair his father had used, and which she had taken over without comment within a month of the funeral — and drew out her silks, and did not, for some minutes, speak.

He waited. He had learned, more than five years ago, that his mother’s silences were always the preface to her sentences, and that to interrupt the preface was to be read the whole sentence twice.

“I have spoken with Miss Wharton,” she said at length, without looking up from her hoop.

“I assumed that you would.”

“You might have prepared me, Stirling.”

“I might. I chose not to.”