Page 13 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I shall give you no cause, ma’am.”

“And you will understand, Miss Wharton, that in this house you are Miss Wharton the Governess. Not Miss Wharton of Penworthy Park. Not the third Miss Wharton, daughter of the late Viscount Penworthy. The schoolroom is your territory. You will not stray from it without need.”

“I shall not, ma’am.”

“And the library,” said the Dowager, with the very faintest emphasis, “is not, as I understand it, on a Governess’ daily round.”

Madeleine did not, by the smallest movement of her face, betray that she had spoken those words herself, in that house, and heard them agreed to, from a different voice, not two weeks previously. She folded her hands in her lap, palm over palm, and answered with a calm so practised it might have been her mother’s own.

“It is not, ma’am.”

“Then we understand one another.”

“Entirely, ma’am.”

The Dowager rose. The interview, such as it was, was over. Madeleine rose also and curtsied — to the same depth as she had curtsied in the library, neither obsequious nor proud — and turned to go.

As she reached the door, the Dowager spoke again.

“Miss Wharton.”

“Ma’am?”

“Sophia,” said the Dowager, and for the first time her voice carried the faintest unevenness, “has not laughed since November. Price tells me she was heard to laugh this morning. Twice.”

Madeleine stood very still with her hand on the door.

“I am glad to hear it, ma’am.”

“So,” said the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp, looking not at her but at the curtain by the window, “am I. Good afternoon, Miss Wharton.”

“Good afternoon, ma’am.”

Madeleine climbed the three flights back to the schoolroom with a step that was, to any listener below, exactly as measured as it had been on the descent. She did not allow herself to breathe properly until she had closed the schoolroom door behind her, and even then she did so quietly, so as not to wake the child who had fallen asleep over the atlas with her cheek on Stockholm.

She stood a moment looking down at her — at the thin neck, the unbraided wisp of hair across the pale forehead, the small hand still curled, in sleep, around the edge of the North Sea — and she thought, with a clarity that frightened her a little, ‘I shall be sorry to leave this child.’

She might be sorry to leave more than this child, if she allowed herself to think of such things. But… she would not think of the Marquess of Greyscarp at all.

She managed it as far as the window in her own small bedroom.

Chapter Three

She managed it as far as the window, and then she did not manage it any further.

She did not weep. She had given up weeping somewhere between the first letter from the bank and the second, and had not found it useful since. But she rested her forehead against the cool of the glass — the cool barrier which still allowed her to see the view of slate roofs and chimney pots and a square going about its April afternoon as though no Wharton in it were teaching anyone’s verbs — and she let the breath she had been holding for some hours leave her in a long, soundless surrender.

In the schoolroom, Lady Sophia slept with her cheek on the Atlas. Here, in Madeleine’s own narrow rooms, a small clear voice was reciting to her, in her mind, like a catechism, the terms of her engagement.

‘The schoolroom is your territory. You will not stray from it without need. The library is not on a Governess’ daily round.’

She had been a Governess for over two years now, in two houses. She knew the territory well enough. She knew that an upper servant of her sort was permitted three things: the schoolroom, the back stair, and the small private parlour in which she might pretend, for an hour after supper, that she was a person rather than a position. She knew that she would take her meals on a tray.

She knew that the under-footmen would not see her, and that the upper-footmen would see her only enough to convey, by the angle of the eye, that they had not. She knew that if she met the Dowager in a corridor she would step aside without curtseying; that if she met Lady Cecilia she would curtsey without speaking; and that if she met the master of the house she would do neither — would, in fact, fix her eyes on a point three feet beyond his left shoulder and proceed as though both of them were made of air.

She knew all of this. She had recited it to herself yesterday in the hackney, and the day before in the bedroom at her father’s sister’s in Doughty Street, and a hundred times in many places in the months before that. It was a catechism that had cost her some pains to learn, and she had thought, until this morning, that she had it by heart.

She had not been prepared for it to be administered to her by a small white-haired woman in black silk in a yellow drawing room, with a particular faint emphasis on ‘the library’.