Page 22 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

It was not, Madeleine had decided in her first week, the window’s most useful feature — which was the light, perfectly steady and even and merciless to bad penmanship — but it was the feature that Lady Sophia preferred, and a Governess who had any sense at all did not contest the preferences of a child of twelve in the matter of a window.

Lady Sophia was at it now, on her knees on the broad seat under the casement, with her chin propped on her folded arms and her nose, in defiance of every rule of Mrs Holland’s that Madeleine had been instructed to enforce, pressed flat against the glass. She had a smudge of ink on her left cheek, and her plait was undone at the end. They had been, on paper, conjugating the verb aller. They had been, in fact, watching the square.

“That is the third carriage,” Lady Sophia announced.

“It is the third carriage of the morning. It is not the third carriage in the world.”

“It is the third carriage of any note. The brougham was a physician’s. One can always tell. And the landau was Lady Pinkerton, who does not count, because she calls upon everyone.”

“Lady Pinkerton does not count,” Madeleine repeated gravely, and made a mark in the margin of her exercise book that was not, strictly speaking, a mark for aller.

“This one will be for Mama.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they always are, at this hour. And because —” Lady Sophia detached her nose from the glass long enough to give Madeleine a look of withering twelve-year-old satisfaction “— it is Lady Honoria.”

Madeleine set down her pencil.

She had not, she discovered with the interior surprise of a woman who had thought herself prepared for most things, expected the name of the Duke of Daventry’s daughter to do what it did. It was not an unpleasant sensation. It was simply the sensation of a step missed on a stair: a small jolt that travelled upward and was gone, and left, in its passing, the consciousness that the stair had been there all along and one had merely failed to count it.

“Lady Honoria Morley,” she said, because a Governess corrected a name in full, and a Duke’s daughter would always expect to be correctly addressed.

“Lady Honoria Morley,” Lady Sophia conceded, “who is going to marry Stirling, and whom I shall never, never call sister.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“It is the truth, Miss Wharton. You may scold me for saying it, but you cannot scold me for thinking it, because thoughts are private, you said so yourself on Tuesday.”

“I said that one’s thoughts were one’s own. I did not say they were beyond improvement.”

“Then I shall improve them by saying them aloud, and you shall improve them by scolding me, and we shall both have done our duty.”

Madeleine did not, with great effort, smile. She rose instead, and crossed to the window, and stood a careful pace behind Lady Sophia’s shoulder, where she could see down into the square without putting her own face to the glass. A Governess did not put her face to the glass. A Governess saw what could be seen from a pace behind.

A barouche had drawn up at the foot of the steps.

It was a very handsome barouche, the kind that one noticed without meaning to, with a pair of greys whose harness was polished to the point of impertinence, and a coachman in a livery she did not recognise, but which had clearly been chosen by a woman with strong views on the colour of frogging. The footman was already down. The carriage door was open.

The lady who descended did so without haste.

Madeleine had time, in the small interval between the gloved hand on the carriage door and the slipper on the pavement, to see her entirely.

She was tall — taller than Madeleine, and Madeleine was not short — and her pelisse was the precise pale celadon green that one had been assured, in the Belle Assemblée for April, was the only colour a woman of any pretension would consent to wear out of doors this Season. Her bonnet had a single curling feather of a darker green, set at an angle that had been studied and then made to look unstudied. Her hair, what one could see of it, was very fair. She did not look up at the house. She did not need to. She knew the house was there, and she knew that the house, with all its windows, was looking down at her, and she did not propose to flatter it with her notice.

“She is very beautiful,” Madeleine said, before she could prevent herself.

“She is very something,” Lady Sophia said. “I have not decided whether beautiful is the word. Honoria is the word that one says when one is in the drawing room. Upstairs one may say other words.”

“One may not.”

“One may, if one is twelve.”

“One may not, if one is being taught by me.”

Lady Sophia turned her head and gave Madeleine a smile of such sudden, brilliant, conspiratorial sweetness that Madeleine’s heart, for an instant, hurt for her — for the small fierce intelligence of her, locked at the top of three flights of stairs with a French verb and a Governess and a window, while the women of the Season arrived in barouches below.

“She is very correct,” Lady Sophia said. “There. That is a word you will permit me.”