Page 59 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Georgiana looked at her for a long moment.

“Then,” she said, “you will have your answer; and it will be a harder one to bear than the one you are afraid of; and we shall, between us, bear it. But it will come, Madeleine. I have read the retraction in today’s paper, and I have read your face for the last quarter of an hour, and I have, I think, taken the measure of a man I have never met; and I therefore believe that the letter will come. Now finish the mutton. Hetty has made up the bed in the small room and put a warming pan in it, because I told her, earlier, that if you came here at any point, that was what she was to do. I will not allow you to refuse one. Eat, Madeleine. And then go to bed.”

Madeleine ate.

She ate without tasting, drank a third cup of tea, and after a while she found that her hands had stopped shaking, that the wallflowers in the bowl on the side table had a faint sweet evening scent that spoke of summer, which she had not noticed when she came in, and that the small clock on Georgiana’s mantel said a quarter to nine.

All of those details arrived in her awareness at once, as she settled, mentally, into the truth of what Georgiana had said. It was a truth that was somewhat painful to hear, but it was, she recognised, unavoidably a truth.

Somewhere in the upper part of the cottage, Hetty was moving a jug of hot water from a landing into a bedroom; and Madeleine thought, with the very last clarity left to her at the end of a day which had begun before five in a hackney in Grosvenor Square, of the man she had left in London.

She thought of him standing in an empty schoolroom three flights up in a house in London with a folded sheet of paper in his hand, which had his name on the outside of it in her own careful copybook hand; and she put her face in her hands, briefly.

Georgiana let her be until she dropped her hands down again, stood up, and spoke.

“Thank you. For all of it. Even the parts that I do not like. Now please take me to the room, for I find that I am suddenly beyond exhausted.”

Georgiana stood up too, came to her, and gently embraced her.

“Of course you are. Tomorrow, we shall write the letters. Tonight, you will sleep.”

She took the candle from the side table and went ahead of Madeleine up the narrow stair to the small bedroom which looked out over the garden.

Madeleine followed her, with the valise in her hand, and behind them in the back parlour the fire settled in the grate.

The folded ‘Morning Post’ paper lay on the table beside the cold mutton, and the wallflowers, in the bowl on the side table, went on, very quietly, smelling of the gentle sweetness of summer.

Chapter Fifteen

The first whisper of it went up the steps of White’s on the Monday afternoon, and the second came down them again before the half hour was struck, with the small private improvement that any story acquires in the course of being repeated by a man who has himself heard it from a friend who heard it at his club.

Lord Edmund Carmody had not, in fact, set the thing down in any one sentence. He had not the vulgarity for that, and he had, besides, the patience of a man who has spent ten years of his adult life sitting at a great many tables waiting for a particular card to be turned. He had merely come into the bow window on the Monday at four, and stood for some minutes looking at the rain on Saint James’ Street, and said to nobody in particular, in the tone of a man making a remark upon the weather, that it was a very curious thing how a wholly credible announcement of a betrothal could be inserted in the Morning Post one morning and withdrawn the next day. And curiouser still when one happened to know — Carmody did not say that he happened to know; he said, ‘one could not but be aware’ — that there was a person in the house in Grosvenor Square whose presence in the case might, were it generally understood, account for it.

He did not say her name.

He did not, indeed, say Governess.

He said ‘a person’; he said ‘a young woman of, I believe, some pretensions to gentility, though much reduced’; he said ‘the kind of arrangement we have all of us seen before, and shall, no doubt, see again’. He said it once, and then he set down his glass, and went out, and did not return to the bow window that afternoon.

It was enough.

By the Tuesday it was at three clubs and two card tables, and on the Wednesday it was in a drawing room in Grosvenor Square, and by the Thursday it had reached the morning calls, which are the proper artery of any rumour worth its passage. By the Friday — the third of July, and the seventh day, by Stirling’s silent count, since he had stood in the schoolroom at the top of his own stairs with a folded sheet of paper in his hand and read, in a copybook hand he knew, the words ‘I am sorry’ — the story was repeating itself in the form in which all such stories at last settle, which is the simplest.

The Marquess of Greyscarp had broken off his betrothal to a Duke’s daughter for the sake of his sister’s Governess. The Governess had been his mistress. The notice in the paper had been the mother’s doing, an honest woman trying to save her son; the retraction had been the son’s doing, and he was ungrateful and unwise. The Duke’s family had behaved with great dignity. The Governess had been turned off, or had run; opinions differed on the point, and were canvassed with interest at a great many tea trays.

Stirling heard it on the Friday morning, in his own library, from his cousin Frederick, who came in without being announced because Hodges, who had let him in, had taken one look at his face and known better than to send him up by the usual route.

“You had better sit down,” said Frederick.

“I had rather stand.”

“Sit down, Stirling.”

Stirling sighed and sat down. He sat down on the edge of the desk, which was not a chair, and kept his hand on the blotter.

“I’m sitting – now tell me.”

Frederick told him.