Page 1 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Prologue

October 1813

The footman would not meet her eyes.

That, more than the summons itself, was what told Miss Madeleine Wharton that something was wrong. Pemberton had served at Penworthy Park since before she was born; he had lifted her onto her first pony and pretended not to notice when she stole apricots from the succession house. He had a face like a patient hound and a voice that never rose. Now he stood in the doorway of her bedchamber with his livery slightly askew, looking somewhere over her left shoulder, and said quietly:

“His Lordship’s study, my Lady. If you would.”

It was a quarter past three on a Wednesday in late October. She had been reading by the window — a slim volume of Cowper she had been meaning to finish for a month — and the autumn light through the elms had been the colour of weak tea. She remembered that with peculiar exactness afterwards: the colour of the light, the page she had been on, the small chip on the lip of her teacup. One remembers the trivial because the rest is too vast to hold.

She set the book down, smoothed her muslin, and followed him.

The hall struck her first. There were men in it. Three of them, in dark coats not cut for the country, holding their hats in their hands with the studied patience of people accustomed to waiting in halls.

She thought that they must be the men who had called on her father earlier. They did not bow as she passed. One — a thickset man with a wen on his temple — gave her a look she could not at the time interpret, though she would learn to recognise it well enough in the months that followed. It was the look of a man calculating what a thing was worth.

Pemberton opened the study door for her, and did not follow her in.

Her father was at his desk. For a half-breath she thought that he had only fallen asleep over his papers, as he had been doing more and more often that summer; his head was on his forearm, his right hand still loosely curled near the inkstand.

The ledger was open in front of him. A candle had guttered out at his elbow, and a thin twist of smoke still rose from the wick, which meant it had not been long.

“Papa?”

She knew before she touched him. She did not know how she knew. His coat, when her fingers brushed his shoulder, felt exactly like his coat had always felt, and that was the obscenity of it — that nothing about him had changed, except that he was no longer there.

She did not scream. She would think about that, afterwards, with a kind of cold curiosity. She had always supposed that, in such a moment, one screamed. Her sisters would have. Her mother most certainly would have. Perhaps that was why Pemberton had come for her. Instead, she stood very still and looked at the ledger, because the ledger was the thing he had been looking at, and she had the absurd thought that she ought to see what he had seen.

The columns swam. She made out figures. She made out a name — ‘Hollis & Co.’ — written and underscored twice in her father’s hand. She made out, at the bottom of the right-hand page, a sum so large it seemed to belong to a different kind of arithmetic altogether, the arithmetic of nations rather than of men.

She closed the ledger.

It was, she would later understand, the first decision of her adult life — small, instinctive, and entirely useless.

She closed the ledger and laid her hand flat upon it, as though she could keep what was inside from getting out.

Then she went to the door, opened it a finger’s breadth, and spoke to Pemberton, very quietly.

“Send for Dr Garrick. And ask my mother to come down. And — Pemberton — do not let those men past the hall. In fact, see them out, if you can.”

“As you wish, my Lady.”

“Thank you.”

She closed the door again and sat in the chair opposite her father’s, because it did not seem right to leave him alone.

*****

The doctor came. Then the rector. Then, within the week, the bailiffs.

They were courteous, the bailiffs. That was the part that nobody warned one about. They removed their hats in the drawing room and addressed her mother as ‘my Lady’, and apologised, with what appeared to be genuine regret, for the necessity of marking the Sèvres. They took the inventory in a small, neat hand. They allowed Lady Penworthy to keep her writing desk because she wept over it, and the pianoforte because Madeleine’s sister Georgiana stood between them and it with her chin up and her hands shaking. They were sorry about the horses, which made her sister Beatrice weep even more. They were sorry about the library. They were sorry, particularly, about the miniatures, which were of some value, and which could not, regrettably, be excepted.

By the end of November there was nothing left at Penworthy Park that had not been counted, tagged, or carried away in a cart, except the people, and even the people were diminished — half the staff dismissed with such wages as could be scraped together, the rest staying on out of a loyalty that Madeleine found nearly unbearable to witness. Pemberton would not be told to go.

He simply stopped accepting his wages and continued to answer the door, which was worse.

The investments had failed.