Page 56 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine walked. The road was warm with the last of the day’s heat, the lamps were being lit in the village, and the people coming out of the tap room of the Inn had the easy unconsidered cheerfulness of people who were on their way home for dinner. Madeleine, who had taken nothing all day but a cup of tea at Marlborough and a slice of bread that she had not wanted, kept her eyes on the ground and her hand on the valise and went up the main road, then turned off past the little church, and then down to the third cottage on the left, where she set her valise down on the step with a weary sigh and knocked.

Hetty, the maid they scraped to afford with part of the allowance that her uncle managed to give them, opened it. Hetty took one look at her and did not say anything even slightly clever, which was the kindest thing she might have done.

“Miss Madeleine.” She stood back, and Madeleine went in. The narrow hall smelt of furniture wax and the wallflowers that Georgiana kept in a bowl on the side table, and from the back parlour came the sound of a fire and the light clear ring of a spoon against a saucer, and Hetty said, “I’ll tell her, Miss.”

“Yes, do that. I’ll wait here.”

Hetty went in to the parlour, and shut the door, while Madeleine stood in the hall with her valise in her hand and looked at the wallflowers, and did not, for a moment, trust herself to look at anything else. The parlour door opened again.

“Madeleine.”

Georgiana stood in the doorway. She was in a dress of dark grey – the sort of colour that a Companion might be expected to wear, to be inconspicuous. She had seen no reason to spend money on brighter clothes, when as like as not she would be companion to another woman soon, and expected to look inconspicuous again. And because, she had written, she had no particular wish to look pleasing to anyone. Her hair was up in the plain knot she had worn since she was seventeen, and she had her small sewing scissors in one hand because she had been mending when Hetty came in.

She looked at her sister for the count of three seconds, in the quiet observant way that she had always had, before speaking.

“Come in. Put down the valise. Hetty, take Miss Madeleine’s bonnet. We shall want tea, and the cold mutton, and whatever bread there is. Don’t stand on ceremony, Hetty, she has been in a coach since yesterday. Come, Madeleine. I am here by myself, for Aunt and Beatrice are out visiting one of Aunt’s friends – a woman whom I find most irritating, so I stayed here.”

Madeleine went in, very grateful in that instant that Georgiana was alone. Dealing with everyone at once would have been overwhelming, when she was so worn from the travel, and emotionally fraught from everything else.

The back parlour was small and tolerably furnished, and faced a strip of garden in which Georgiana now grew sweet peas, because they would grow without much attention, and beyond that was a garden bed where their aunt had planted vegetables. The fire was lit against the evening chill which comes, even in June, after the sun goes off the stone, and there was a tray on the small table with the remains of Georgiana’s solitary tea. Madeleine sat down on the sofa because Georgiana put her hand under her elbow and made her, and she did not, then, do anything for some moments at all.

Georgiana sat down opposite her. She did not say anything. She set the scissors on the table beside the mending, folded her hands in her lap and waited, with the patience of a woman who had waited, in her time, through her recent employers unpredictable irritability, and let Madeleine breathe.

After a moment Madeleine found the words to begin.

“I am sorry to come without writing.”

“No, you are not. Or if you are, you ought not to be. I should have been very cross if you had written and wasted time waiting for my reply, when you obviously needed to be not where you were. Hetty, set it down there, thank you. No, leave the curtains. Madeleine, drink that.”

Madeleine drank the tea. She had not known, until she drank it, how cold she had been; the cup shook a little against her teeth, so she set it down. Georgiana looked at the shaking without remarking on it, and then she spoke, in the same level, patient voice.

“Eat the bread first. The mutton afterwards. I shall not ask you anything until you have eaten the bread.” Madeleine ate the bread. She had not thought that she was hungry, but once she began, she discovered that she needed the food, after all. When she had eaten the bread, and a little of the mutton, and drunk a second cup of tea, Georgiana nodded. “Now. You have come from London?”

“Yes.”

“From Greyscarp House?”

“Yes.”

“You have left your situation?”

“Yes.”

“Were you turned off, or did you go?”

“I went.”

“On what hour?”

“This morning. The mail at five.”

Georgiana considered her.

“Then you packed your trunk last night.”

“I packed what would go in the valise. I left the trunk. I wrote a note to Mrs Holland — the housekeeper — that I should send for it from wherever I went, when I knew where I was going.”

“Where did you tell her you were going.”