Page 25 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Possibly seven. But I don’t think that she has left with the carriage. We will see – if another carriage arrives very soon.” Madeleine absorbed this startling comment without remarking upon it. Lady Sophia paused. She set her pen down with great care in the groove of the inkstand. She said, without looking up, “Miss Wharton.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“You will not tell Stirling what I said.”

“I will not.”

“Because he would mind. Not because of her. Because of me. He does not like to be told that he does not laugh.”

“No, I imagine he does not.”

“He minds it from Mama.”

“Yes.”

“He would mind it from me more.”

“He would.”

“Then it is between us.”

“It is between us.”

The child nodded again, with the same small grave finality, and turned over a fresh page of her exercise book, and began, of her own accord and without instruction, the verb avoir.

Madeleine rose. She did so as quietly as she could, because to disturb a child who had elected, at twelve, to conjugate a verb without being asked was a sin against pedagogy and a sin against decency, and she crossed to the window and stood at it — a pace back, as a Governess stood, with her hands clasped in front of her — and looked down into the square.

The barouche was gone. The plane tree moved its leaves a little in a wind she could not feel. A nursemaid had brought a child out onto the grass at the centre of the square, and the child, in a white pinafore, was running in small purposeless circles with the absorbed seriousness of the very young, and the nursemaid was watching her with the unfocused patience of a woman who had done this for a great many afternoons and would do it for a great many more.

Madeleine watched them for a long minute.

She thought of a hand on a book, and a thumb against a knuckle, and a voice in the dark saying ‘I had not forgotten it. I had stopped’. She thought of a celadon pelisse, and of a chair that apologised, and of a child of twelve who had decided in bed that her brother had stopped laughing. She thought of her two elder sisters in their aunt’s narrow drawing room in the cottage in Bath, with Georgiana’s mending in her lap and Beatrice at the pianoforte, working through a piece she had no spirit for, and of the small daily courage of women who had been raised to expect a different life and were not going to have it. She thought of her father — and stopped thinking of her father, because that road did not, this morning, bear walking.

She had been a Governess for over two years.

She had been a Governess in this house for a fortnight. She had been a woman who had read Petrarch in a wrapper at one in the morning, in a library in which she was not to be found, for one night.

She would not be that woman again.

She turned from the window.

“Lady Sophia.”

“Miss Wharton.”

“When you have finished avoir, we shall have our reading. I thought, today, the Vicar of Wakefield.”

“Oh, good. I like the vicar. He is silly.”

“He is.”

“In a kind way.”

“In a kind way. Yes.”

She sat down again at the schoolroom table, opposite the dark head bent over the exercise book, and she folded her hands on the wood in front of her, and she waited for the child to be done, with the composed patience of a woman who has, in the last quarter of an hour, made herself a promise she meant to keep.

Below her, in a yellow drawing room she would likely never again enter, the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp was ringing for fresh tea.