Page 42 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She did not remember the third.

She came in at her own door and closed it and stood with her back to it, exactly as she had stood with her back to the schoolroom door on Wednesday afternoon, and she discovered that her hands were shaking and that her face was very hot and that she was not, at that moment, capable of taking off her shawl.

A maid on the stair. A maid on the stair, at midnight, who had seen the Governess come out of the library, with the line of warm light falling along the floor behind her, and who had answered, ‘yes, Miss’, with her colour high and her eyes on the carpet.

By tomorrow afternoon Mrs Holland would know.

By tomorrow night the upper housemaids would know. By the end of the week the lady’s maids would know, and after that the lady’s maids would tell their mistresses, and after that — Madeleine did not need to finish the sentence. She had been raised on the long catechism of small refusals; she had been told, since she was twelve, exactly how a woman of her sort was destroyed. It was not done in a single blow. It was done by a maid on a stair at midnight, and a colour in the cheek of the maid, and the simple clean economy of a kitchen rumour passed up by stages to the drawing room. It was done in three weeks. It was always done in three weeks.

She did not sleep. She lay under the eaves with the interior weather of the house going on around her, and she counted, lying there, the things that she might lose. She might lose her place. She might lose her character, which was the thing that secured the next place. She might lose her sister’s faith, which she had been given freely in Holborn and which she had promised, in Holborn, to deserve. She might lose her aunt’s small hope of her, the hope which had survived, doggedly, two years and four months of every other hope being burned out of the family. She might lose Lady Sophia, who would cry, and whose crying she would hear in her head for years; and she might lose, in the same blow, the small dishonest pleasure of going down at midnight to a library, which she had told herself for four weeks was not a pleasure and which she now, lying under the eaves with her hands flat on the counterpane, named to herself in the dark as a pleasure, because she had nothing now to gain by lying about it.

She got up at five. She washed in cold water. She dressed in the grey kerseymere gown. She did her hair very plainly, with no curls about the face at all, and put on her plainest cap, and went down the back stairs to the housekeeper’s room at six.

Mrs Holland looked up. Mrs Holland looked at her for rather a long moment over the rim of her teacup, and Madeleine braced herself; but Mrs Holland only said, “There is fresh tea, Miss Wharton, and there is bread,” and did not, after all, say anything else; and Madeleine sat down and drank her tea and ate her bread and did not taste either of them.

She was at the breakfast room door at half past eight. She had been told by Mrs Holland, on the first morning, that Lord Greyscarp took breakfast at a quarter past eight when he was at home, and was generally done by half past, and read his letters in the breakfast room for a quarter of an hour after, alone, and did not wish to be disturbed; and she had remembered this, as she remembered everything, and she knocked now once at the door and went in without waiting for an answer, because she had decided in the small hours that if she waited for the answer her courage would not last.

He was alone. He had a cup of coffee at his elbow and a letter open in his hand, and he looked up at the sound of the door, and rose immediately when he saw who it was.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord. I beg your pardon. I shall not keep you above two minutes. May I close the door, or had you —” She caught herself. “I shall leave it ajar.”

She left it ajar by an inch.

It was, she thought, the last small honest thing she had to give him.

“Will you sit.”

“I thank you, no. I shall stand. I shall stand because if I sit I shall — I shall lose the use of what I have come to say, and I have come to say it, my Lord, and I shall.”

He set the letter down. He did not sit either.

He stood at the head of the table with his hand on the back of his chair, and his face very still, and waited.

“My Lord,” she said, “I was seen last night.”

He went, in the upper half of his face, white. The lower half he kept perfectly in hand, and she admired him for it, distantly, the way she had admired Beatrice for keeping her countenance over the milliner in Bath.

“By whom?”

“By the housemaid Anna, who was carrying coals to the library at midnight on Mrs Holland’s instruction. She passed me on the stair. She was civil. She was — she was a very good girl, my Lord, and she will be a very loyal girl, but she will not be able to help mentioning it, because girls of fifteen never are able to keep such things to themselves, and by Saturday it will be in the kitchen, and by next Wednesday it will be on the back stairs of three other houses in this square.”

“Miss Wharton —”

“I am not finished, my Lord. I beg your pardon. I shall finish, and then you shall speak, and then I shall go.”

“Yes,” he said. “Forgive me. Go on.”

“I have come to tell you that I will not be alone with you again. Not in the library at midnight. Not in the schoolroom in the afternoon, if my charge is not present. Not on the stairs. Not in the corridor by the schoolroom window. Not in any room in this house in which a door may be closed behind us, and not in any room in this house in which a door may be open and yet the situation may still be sufficient to ruin me. I shall do my work. I shall do it well. I shall do it as I have done it for four weeks, and you shall have no cause to complain of me; but I shall not see you, my Lord, except as a Governess sees the master of the house in which she is employed, which is to say across a passage with two servants in it, and at no other time, and on no other terms, and I shall not —” her voice did not break, but it took a small step down, and she made it climb up again — “I shall not come down to the library at night, and I shall ask you, as a gentleman, not to expect me, and not to listen for me, and not to set out books on side tables with passages marked in them. I shall ask you that, my Lord, because I cannot afford to be asked of it the other way.”

She stopped. She had her hands at her sides. She had not used them once.

He stood a long time before he answered. He stood looking not at her, but at the letter on the table, as though there were a thing in it that required reading.

“Miss Wharton,” he said at last, “you are entirely right, and I am entirely ashamed, and I shall do as you say. From this morning. From this moment. I shall — I shall not listen for the step. I shall not set out the books. I shall not put you in the way of the maid on the stair again.” He drew breath. “I beg your pardon.”

“You have it, my Lord.”