Page 62 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

At the door he turned.

“One thing more.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother.”

“What of her.”

“She placed the notice.”

“She placed it without my knowledge and without my consent, and she has not been in this room since I came back from Hertfordshire, and I have not asked her to be. I shall ask her up this evening.”

“Be gentle with her, Stirling.”

Stirling looked at him.

“I shall be as gentle as I can,” he said. “I shall not be gentler than I can. She has done a great harm. She did it for what she believed to be a good reason. The reason does not unmake the harm.”

Frederick nodded once, and went out, and Hodges, who had been in the hall, shut the door behind him with the noiseless economy of a butler who has been in the house a very long time, and the library was quiet again.

Stirling sat at his desk.

He drew a sheet of paper towards him. He took up the pen, opened the inkwell, in which the ink was fresh for Hodges had filled it that morning, as Hodges had, every morning for seven years, against the chance that his master should wish to write. Stirling’s mind was filled with unimportant thoughts about such trivial matters, because he could not bear to think, quite yet, about those things that actually were important.

But eventually, he sighed, and dipped the pen into the ink, then held it a moment over the paper, looking at the small bright bead of ink at the point, and at his own hand which was, he observed almost with surprise, almost perfectly steady this morning. It had not been steady, he recalled, on the day when he had danced with her in a schoolroom, three flights up in this very house.

He wrote the date at the head of the sheet.

‘Friday, the third of July, 1818.’

He wrote, beneath it, ‘Greyscarp House, Grosvenor Square.’

He sat for a moment, darkly amused at himself, at the reluctance he felt to continue writing, and at just how difficult this was, given the enormity of his feelings about Madeleine. Then he wrote, in the neat clear hand that he had been taught at seven, and had used for everything of consequence since, the two words by which, of all the words at his disposal in the English language, he had not, in any letter to any person, in any year of his life, ever begun a letter before.

‘Dear Madeleine,’

He looked at them.

He did not strike them out.

He set the pen in the standish, and he laid his hand for a moment on the page beside the words, as a man lays his hand on a thing he has decided not to take back, as he sat in his library with the dusty white light of a London July coming in at the window, and the small clock on the mantel telling off the quarters, then he lifted the pen again and began, with the care of a man who has at last understood that meticulous care, in this particular matter, is the only honour left to him, to write.

Chapter Sixteen

The letter from Lady Sophia Hawksmoor was written upon a sheet of schoolroom paper, and it came to the cottage near Bath on the Tuesday morning by the second post, addressed in a careful round hand that Madeleine knew before she saw the seal.

She knew it because she had set the copybook in which the hand was learned, and corrected the long s, and pointed out, more times than she could count, that the loop of the y was not the loop of the g and was not to be conflated with it. The letters on the cover were correct. The capitals were upright and the line was straight. The seal was a plain wafer, not the Greyscarp one, and was set a little crooked, as a seal will be when it is pressed by a child sitting up in bed.

Madeleine stood with the letter in her hand in the narrow hall of her aunt and sisters’ house, and did not, for a moment, move.

“Madeleine?” Georgiana had come out of the back parlour with the marketing basket on her arm. As the middle of the three Wharton sisters she had a way of looking at her sister with the particular attention of one who was just a little older, and felt that being so granted her some authority. “Madeleine. Who is it from?”

“Sophia,” said Madeleine. “Lady Sophia. The — my pupil.”

“Oh,” said Georgiana.

She did not say anything else. She set the basket on the hall table, and she went into the back parlour without looking back, and she shut the door behind her with the tact of a woman who knows when space is wanted.