Page 11 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

The child considered her for another long moment.

Then, with the abrupt practicality of her age, she crossed to the table, sat down in one of the two chairs, and pushed the other one out an inch with her foot.

“You may sit down, Miss Wharton,” she said, in an exact imitation of her mother’s voice — Madeleine could tell at once that it was an imitation, and a long-practised one. “We shall have tea at eleven.”

“Thank you, Lady Sophia.”

Madeleine sat.

She did not, by any movement of face or hand, allow the child to see what it had cost her to be permitted that chair.

*****

The Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp sent for her at three.

Price came up the back stairs herself to deliver the summons, and her face, ordinarily so still, had in it a faint pinched look that Madeleine read at once and chose to ignore.

“Her Ladyship is in the yellow drawing room, Miss.”

“Thank you, Price.”

“His Lordship,” said Price, with the very smallest hesitation, “is from home.”

“I see.”

She did see.

She saw a great deal.

She saw, for one thing, that Price was a woman whose discretion had been bought twice over by long service, and that even Price had felt it necessary to mention that the Marquess was out. She rose from the table where she had been writing out, in her clear hand, a list of books she would like to send for from Hookham’s, and she shook out her skirts and looked at herself in the small spotted glass over the schoolroom mantel.

Grey kerseymere. A white collar. A cameo at the throat that had been her mother’s, the mother who had succumbed to a wasting illness and died, near two years ago now, whilst Madeleine had been in Yorkshire. That cameo was the only ornament she permitted herself. Her mid brown hair was drawn back, smooth, plain. The face above the collar was paler than it had been at ten that morning, and her own eyes looked back at her with a question she did not have time to answer.

A Governess walked the last hundred yards. A Governess also walked, she thought grimly, the three flights down to the yellow drawing room as though her boots had no opinion of their own.

She had reached the first-floor landing when she heard them.

Two voices, from behind the half-closed door of what she took to be the drawing room — the Dowager’s, light and dry and unmistakably annoyed, and another woman’s, younger, more rapid, with the upward inflection of a person enjoying her own indignation.

“— Penworthy, Mama. The Penworthy girl. The Viscount’s family name was Wharton. She is the youngest of the three. Surely you knew?”

“I knew her name, Cecilia. I did not connect it. There are Whartons and Whartons in this country, and very few who are related to the late Viscount Penworthy.”

“There was precisely one Viscount Penworthy, Mama, and his family name was spoken often after he lost forty thousand pounds in the Argentine bonds and shot himself in his own library —”

“He did not shoot himself, Cecilia. Do not repeat what you cannot prove.”

“— or as good as, and left three daughters with nothing, and the eldest one would not even come to town last year because she had not a gown fit to wear, and now you have brought the third one into the house to teach Sophia her French verbs, and Stirling knew, Mama, he must have known, because he interviewed her himself — “

“Stirling,” said the Dowager Marchioness, in a voice that closed the subject as a heavy lid closes a box, “did what he believed to be correct. As he generally does. Lower your voice, Cecilia. The girl is somewhere in the house.”

“She is on the stairs, Mama. I heard her boots a minute since.”

A silence. Madeleine did not move. She could not, with dignity, retreat; she would not, with dignity, advance. She stood on the half-landing with her hand on the banister and her face composed in the precise expression of a woman who had heard nothing and would, if asked, swear to that on a Bible.

The morning-room door opened. Lady Cecilia Hawksmoor — for it could be no one else, eighteen years old and on the brink of her first Season and possessed of her brother’s grey eyes set in a prettier and less guarded face — stepped out, saw her, and had the grace to colour to the roots of her fair hair.

“Miss Wharton.”