Page 20 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“It is the Canzoniere,” he said, as though they had been speaking of it for some time. “My father’s. He bought it in Florence in ‘93. He did not, I think, ever read it. He bought books in Italy as some men buy hounds in Leicestershire — by the quality of the leather.”

“It is a very fine binding.”

“It is. But the print is execrable.”

She permitted herself the smallest smile.

“I had noticed, my Lord.”

“Had you?”

“From the doorway. The page you were reading from — the column is set too close to the gutter. One reads it at an angle.”

He looked down at the book. He turned it in his hand. He looked up at her, and for the first time since she had crossed the room he met her eyes, and she found that she could not, after all, do what she had been trained to do, which was to fix her gaze on a point three feet beyond his left shoulder. She met his look. She did not know what was in her own face. She knew what was in his, and it was not a thing the Dowager had named in any catechism.

“You read it at an angle,” he said.

“I read most things at an angle, my Lord. It is a habit one acquires.”

“As a Governess?”

“As a Governess. And before that.”

“And before that.”

There was a silence. He looked down at the book again, and she watched his hands on it, and she thought: ‘I shall remember his hands. Whatever else happens, I shall remember his hands on this book, with the fire behind them.’

“My friends went to the Peninsula,” he said. It was said without preface and without any particular emphasis, in the same tone in which he had told her about the binding. “In the year nine. I was twenty-one. I had a commission as good as written for me — Hugh Carlisle’s father had spoken to a man at the Horse Guards — and my father came into the library one morning and put his hand on the desk and said, ‘Stirling, you will not.’ And I did not.” She did not speak. She did not know whether she was meant to. “I have not spoken of it,” he said, “in nine years.”

“My Lord.”

“I do not know why I should speak of it now, and to you.”

“No, my Lord.”

“Except that you read Petrarch at one in the morning in a wrapper, in a house in which you have been told you are not to be found in the library, and I find that I would rather speak the truth to you for a quarter of an hour than the necessary things to any other person in this house for the next twelve.”

She felt her hands tighten on each other in her lap. She felt the heat go up under her jaw. She kept her voice level, because a Governess’ voice was level, because she had spent more than two years making it so.

“You should not say such things to me, my Lord.”

“No.”

“It is not kind.” He looked up sharply. “It is not kind,” she said again, and she did not look away. “To either of us.”

He was silent. She thought, for a moment, that he was angry; and then she saw that he was not angry, that he had taken the small clean blow of her sentence and was standing very still under it, and that he was, in some part of himself that she could not see, grateful for it.

“You are right, Miss Wharton.”

“I do not wish to be right, my Lord. I wish —” She stopped. She could not, in fact, finish that sentence in any way that would not undo, at one o’clock in the morning, every careful thing she had built since her father had died. “I wish to read the Canzoniere,” she said, “for ten minutes. And then I wish to go up to my room and sleep, because Lady Sophia has her French at nine.”

“Lady Sophia has her French at nine.”

“She does.”

“Then you shall read the Canzoniere for ten minutes.”

He crossed the room. He did not, she noted with a small distant precision, come within four feet of the chair. He set the book down on the little table beside her candle, open at the sonnet they had spoken between them, and stepped back, and went to the desk, sat down at it with his back half turned to her, and drew a sheet of paper towards him as though he meant to write.