Page 10 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

The grey eyes widened by the smallest possible degree.

“What if I never go there?”

“Then you will not need it. There are a great many capitals I do not know, Lady Sophia, and I have managed to reach the age of two-and-twenty without being struck down for it.”

The mouth moved. It was not, yet, a smile. It was the consideration of a smile, weighed and laid aside for later use.

“Mama says I am to call you Miss Wharton and you are to call me Lady Sophia and we are not to be friends.”

“Your mother is correct in two particulars.”

“Which two?”

“My name, and yours.”

There was a small, startled sound that might, in a less guarded child, have become a laugh. Lady Sophia bent her head over her book to hide it, and Madeleine, who had been holding herself very straight, allowed herself to move at last — to cross to the bookcase, to draw out the leaning Latin grammar, to set it on the lowest shelf where it would not threaten The Vicar of Wakefield with its proximity.

“What are you doing?” Sophia asked, suspicious.

“Tidying. By kind, not by size. Books are like people: they do better in company they understand.”

“Where does Job go?”

“On the highest shelf I can reach, and a little further back than the others.”

This time the laugh did come. It was small and rusty and seemed to surprise its owner more than anyone else. Lady Sophia put her hand quickly over her mouth, as though laughter were a thing she had been forbidden, and looked at Madeleine with a wariness that was almost an apology.

“It is permitted to laugh, Lady Sophia,” Madeleine said, without turning around. “Even in a schoolroom. Especially in a schoolroom.”

She did not press.

She went on shifting the books, slowly, deliberately, allowing the child the dignity of recovering her composure unwatched. The atlas she moved to the table near the window, where the light was good. The fairy tales she placed at eye-height, where a hand might reach for them in passing without making a decision of it. The Latin grammar she did not, in the end, exile altogether; she left it on the middle shelf, spine inward, so that one would have to want it before one found it.

When she turned around again, Lady Sophia had put the book aside and was standing at the globe, one finger laid lightly near the painted blue of the North Sea.

“Stockholm is here,” the child said, not looking up. “I do remember. I only pretended not to, because she tapped.”

“That was very sensible of you.”

“Was it?”

“It was a small revenge, and a small revenge is sometimes the only one a person of twelve has at her disposal. I should have done the same.”

Lady Sophia lifted her head and looked at her, properly, for the first time.

“Should you really?”

“I should. I was a younger sister, Lady Sophia. I have, in my time, hidden a great many things from my Governesses, and forgotten Stockholm with the best of them.”

“You had Governesses?”

There was a small silence in which Madeleine heard, very distinctly, the click of her own past against the present, like two pieces of china touched together to test the ring.

“I had,” she said evenly. “Two. The first was kind and not clever. The second was clever and not kind. I prefer, on the whole, to be the third sort.”

“Which is?”

“That is for you to decide, in a month or two. I should not like to recommend myself.”