Page 9 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

There was a globe on a brass stand by the nearer window, the brass dulled, the painted continents rubbed pale where small fingers had skated repeatedly across the Atlantic. A pianoforte against the far wall, lid down. A table with two chairs. A bookcase in which the books had been arranged, she noticed at once, by height rather than by sense: a thick atlas next to a thin volume of fairy tales, a Latin grammar leaning against The Vicar of Wakefield. Someone had wanted them tidy. No one had wanted them read.

And in the chair nearest the cold grate, with her back at an angle that was almost, but not quite, turned to the door, sat Lady Sophia Hawksmoor.

She was, Madeleine thought, very thin for twelve. The neck above the collar of her white morning frock was the neck of a child who had been ill, or had grieved in the way children grieve, by forgetting to eat. Her hair was the same dark brown as her brother’s, braided down her back in a plait that had not been redone since yesterday. She held a book in her lap, and she was not reading it. She was, very deliberately, looking out of the window.

Madeleine pushed the door open the rest of the way and went in. She did not knock. Knocking, in her experience, gave a child too much warning, and too much warning gave a child too much advantage.

“Good morning, Lady Sophia.” The shoulders lifted half an inch and dropped again. The eyes did not turn. “I am Miss Wharton.”

“I know.”

“I am your new Governess.”

“I know.”

Madeleine set her workbag down on the table, not too near the child, not too far. She took off her gloves, finger by finger, and laid them beside the bag. She did not sit.

“Your brother has told me a little about you,” she said. “He says that you play the pianoforte with more feeling than sense of timing. I should like to hear that for myself, one day, but not this morning.”

A flicker. Not quite a turn of the head. The book in the lap shifted by perhaps a quarter of an inch.

“And he says,” Madeleine went on, in the same temperate voice that she used when speaking of the weather, “that you have had three Governesses in two years, and that one of them required you to read aloud from the Book of Job. I am sorry for that. It was not well done.”

This time the head did turn. Two grey eyes — her brother’s eyes, exactly, only smaller, and more recently used for weeping — fixed on Madeleine with a directness which was almost adult.

“She said it was for the good of my soul.”

“It was not. It was for the good of her own difficulty in thinking what else to do with you.”

Lady Sophia considered this. Her mouth, which had been set in the small hard line of a child preparing to be disliked, and dislike in return, loosened a fraction.

“Are you going to make me read aloud?”

“Not from Job.”

“From what, then?”

“That is a question for tomorrow. Today I do not intend to make you read anything. Today, if you are agreeable, we shall do nothing at all that resembles a lesson.”

The book in the lap slid closed. Lady Sophia did not put it down; she held it against her with both hands, as though she had not yet decided whether to keep her guard or lower it.

“What shall we do, then?”

“I thought,” Madeleine said, “that we might walk round this room together and you might tell me what you should like to keep and what you should like to throw out of the window.”

A pause. A long one. Somewhere in the chimney a pigeon shifted, sending a faint drift of soot down into the cold grate.

“The globe,” said Lady Sophia at last, in the careful tone of a child laying a small wager. “I should like to throw out the globe.”

“Why?”

“Because Miss Beecham used to make me say the capitals of Europe over it, and I always forgot Stockholm, and she would tap the place with her thimble.”

“Then we shall not use the globe.”

“You do not mean it.”

“I do mean it. I have no thimble, and I do not care whether you know Stockholm. You will learn it one day because you will go there, or because you will read a book in which someone goes there, and then you will know it without my making you.”