Page 76 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I had not thought,” he said, “that you would necessarily say it at all.”

“Stirling —”

“Forgive me. I have been four months calling you Miss Wharton in my own head, and three days calling you Madeleine in it, and I find I am not yet to be trusted with either out loud.”

“You may be trusted,” said Madeleine, looking at the carpet, “with Madeleine.”

There were, between that morning and the wedding, the ordinary acts of a betrothal contracted in three weeks rather than in three months: the settlement, drawn up by the Marquess’ man of business and read out to Madeleine and her aunt in Doughty Street on the Wednesday, and signed in Lincoln’s Inn on the Friday.

There was a call upon the Dowager Marchioness in Grosvenor Square on the Thursday afternoon, in which the Dowager Marchioness received Madeleine in the yellow drawing room with a civil kiss upon the cheek and a request that she would, when she was Marchioness of Greyscarp, see to it that the Hertfordshire roses were properly pruned in March, since no one had pruned them properly in March since 1812, no matter what she had said about the matter. But the most emotionally intense moment of all was the visit to Lady Sophia, in the schoolroom at the top of the stairs at Greyscarp House on the Friday morning, in which Lady Sophia, who had been told the news by her brother on the Tuesday evening, threw both her arms about Madeleine’s neck and wept for perhaps forty seconds and then, with the mercurially rapid recovery of a child of twelve who has just decided that she is too old to cry, sat down at the schoolroom table and asked:

“Will you go on with the French and Italian, please, until the wedding? I do not want a new Governess yet.”

Madeleine’s answer had been very clear.

“There will not be a new Governess, Sophia. There will be — we shall see, when we are at the Hall. I shall still hear your French and Italian.”

“Every day?”

“Most days.”

“Very well,” said Sophia, and opened the Petrarch which had, since April, lain upon the schoolroom table as a kind of unspoken witness to a great many things, and read out four lines in a perfectly steady voice; and Madeleine, who had not been certain until that moment that she would be able to come back into the schoolroom at the top of the stairs without just collapsing in the doorway, found that she could.

Augusta came up from Sussex on the Monday before the wedding, in a travelling carriage of her own with her husband Mr Lyttelton, who was a quiet man of thirty-two with a thoughtful face and a great deal of land in Sussex, and who had, upon being told the news by his wife, written to his brother-in-law a letter of two lines which the Marquess had shown to Madeleine and which had said only, ‘My dear Greyscarp, Augusta tells me you are at last to be made happy. I am very glad of it. Yours, J. L.’

“He is not a man of many words,” said Augusta, who was twenty and was a slim dark woman with her brother’s grey eyes and her mother’s small straight mouth, and who had, upon meeting Madeleine in the yellow drawing room on the Monday afternoon, walked the length of the room and taken both her hands. “But he means each of them. I shall like to have another sister, Miss Wharton. I have had only my brother, and Cecilia and small Sophia, and Sophia is not quite a sister yet, not the same way, at least.”

“Madeleine, if you will.”

“Madeleine, then. And you shall call me Augusta, and we shall not, I think, stand upon any formality after Wednesday.”

The remaining Hawksmoor sister, Lady Cecilia — who was eighteen and golden and who had been, since April, the unreconciled centre of the Dowager Marchioness’ London project and who had, upon being told that her brother was to marry the Governess, shut herself in her bedroom for a day and a half and refused to come down — came down upon the Tuesday evening with her eyes very pink and her chin very high, and said to Madeleine, in the yellow drawing room, in the quiet careful voice of a young woman who has been spoken to firmly by her mother:

“Miss Wharton, I beg your pardon. I behaved very ill on Sunday. I — I should like to wish you joy.”

“Lady Cecilia —”

“I do not yet know how I shall like it. But I shall try to like it. Stirling deserves for his choices to be liked.”

“That is generously said.”

“It is not generous. It is the least I can do. Stirling has been — he has been good to me for a great many years, and I have not, perhaps, always noticed.”

She put out her hand, and Madeleine took it; and the Dowager Marchioness, from the chair by the fire, said nothing at all, but her embroidery, which had been very still for the past two minutes, resumed its steady even progress.

The wedding was on the Wednesday morning, the nineteenth of August, at half past nine, at St George’s, Hanover Square.

Madeleine wore a gown of cream silk which had been made for her in eight days by the Dowager’s own preferred modiste and which had cost, she suspected, more than she had earned in a year as a Governess; and with it she wore her mother’s pearls, which had been in the velvet box with the hair combs since 1814, and which Mrs Frampton had taken out on the Monday evening and laid upon Madeleine’s bed without speaking. She wore, in her hair, a small wreath of white roses which Sophia had asked to be brought up in a basket from Hertfordshire on the Tuesday and had, with Patty’s help, made into a wreath in the kitchen at Doughty Street on the Tuesday night.

She walked up the aisle on the arm of her uncle, Mr James Wharton, who had come up from Bath with his nieces, and who was the brother of Madeleine’s late father and who had, in 1814, after her father’s death, lent her mother a hundred pounds upon a quarter’s notice and never asked for the return of it, and who was, that morning, dressed in a black coat that had been brushed by his manservant within an inch of its life and that was, in consequence, slightly shiny at the elbows.

She saw, as she came up the aisle, that the pews were not full and were not empty, and that the persons in them were the people she wanted to see there.

Her aunt from Bath, who was her mother’s sister, sat in the front pew at the left, in lavender silk, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes upon Madeleine from the moment that Madeleine came through the west door; she had come up from Bath on the Sunday and had been three nights in Doughty Street and had wept once, very briefly, upon seeing her youngest niece in the cream silk gown on the Tuesday afternoon, and had not, since, allowed herself to weep again. Beatrice and Georgiana sat beside her, Georgiana in pale blue and Beatrice in green; and behind them sat Mrs Frampton in the black silk that had been let out at the shoulder by Patty on the Sunday, and beside her Mr Wharton’s wife, who was Madeleine’s Aunt Jane.

On the right, in the front pew, sat the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp in a grey that was almost pale blue, very still; and beside her Augusta and Mr Lyttelton; and beside them Lady Cecilia Hawksmoor in white muslin, and beside her, in a new sprigged muslin of pale yellow with a green sash, and with her hair done by the Dowager’s Lady’s maid’s own hand and tied with a green ribbon, Lady Sophia Hawksmoor, who was sitting upright with her hands clasped in her lap and who, when she saw Madeleine come up the aisle, did not turn her head and did not smile and did not, by any visible motion, betray that she was anything other than a perfectly composed young lady of twelve; but Madeleine saw, as she passed the pew, that Sophia’s lower lip was caught very firmly between her teeth.

She loved Sophia, in that instant, with a fullness she would not, three months before, have known how to bear.