Page 4 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“If you will follow me to the library, ma’am. Her Ladyship’s compliments — she has been delayed by half an hour. His Lordship asks if you might be received by him, in her stead.”

Madeleine felt the floor settle very slightly under her feet.

“His Lordship,” she repeated. It was not quite a question.

“The Marquess of Greyscarp, ma’am.”

“Of course.” She managed it with the smoothness she had spent two years polishing in Yorkshire, in a household where the master had liked to pinch, and the mistress had liked to pretend that he did not. “Of course. I should be glad.”

She was not glad.

A Dowager one could meet.

A Dowager would ask about French and the use of the globes and whether one had the patience to draw a child through her scales; she would name a wage that did not insult one’s birth, and a half-day off that did, and the interview would be done in twenty minutes with tea and a stale macaroon.

A Marquess would not know how to interview a Governess.

A Marquess would either be bored, or — worse — kind.

The footman opened a door at the end of the corridor and stood aside.

“Miss Wharton, my Lord.”

She stepped through, and the door closed behind her with the discreet competence of a very expensive latch.

It was a long room, two windows deep, lined floor to ceiling with books that had the dark, oiled gleam of having been read.

A fire burned, though the day was mild.

A desk stood at the far end, between the windows; and at the desk, rising, stood a man she had last seen at Almack’s in the spring of 1813.

For one quite dreadful moment she thought that she might be obliged to put a hand on the back of a chair to keep herself upright.

He was just as handsome, but taller than she remembered, or perhaps only broader through the shoulder; his hair was the same dark brown, cropped now in the careless Brutus style that gentlemen had taken to, and his eyes — she had remembered the eyes — were grey, and steady, and at this moment fixed on her with an attention she did not at all desire.

“Miss Wharton.” He came around the desk. He did not offer his hand; one did not, to a Governess. “Forgive my mother. She is detained at Hookham’s, of all places, by a quarrel about a novel.”

“My Lord.”

She curtsied.

The depth of it was a small calculation: not so deep as to be obsequious, not so shallow as to claim anything. Her mother, bless her, had drilled her in such measurements as other mothers drilled their daughters in pianoforte.

He gestured to a chair set at an angle to the fire.

“Please.”

She sat.

He returned to his own side of the desk and seated himself, and she was grateful for the polished mahogany expanse between them. She arranged her hands in her lap, palm over palm, gloves still on, as one did. The fire snapped. Somewhere above, faint and stubborn, the unseen child was still murdering the piano.

“My sister,” he said, with the smallest lift of his eyes ceiling-ward.

“Lady Sophia?”

“Lady Sophia. Aged twelve, and convinced that musical feeling is a substitute for timing.”

“It is, in fact, a substitute for very little, my Lord.”