Page 23 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“That is a word I will permit you.”

“She is so correct that I think that, when she sits down on a chair the chair apologises to her.”

“Lady Sophia —”

“And when she walks into a room every person in the room remembers, all at once, three things that they had been doing wrong, and they cannot think which to mend first.”

Madeleine said nothing.

She watched Lady Honoria Morley cross the pavement with the unhurried economy of a woman who had never, in her life, had to wonder whether she would be admitted, and she thought — with a calm that surprised her, with the kind of calm that came of having pressed both hands against one’s mouth in the dark for some considerable time the night before last, and then having got up at the usual hour and conjugated avoir with a child as though nothing in the world were the matter — that Lady Sophia was right. The chairs would apologise. The rooms would remember. It was the gift of women like Lady Honoria, and it was not a small gift, and Madeleine would not, she would not, allow herself the cheap small consolation of pretending it was. The door of the house opened. Lady Honoria went in. The barouche drew off and went around to wait, presumably, in the mews.

“She will be a quarter of an hour,” Sophia said, with the air of an old hand. “She is never above a quarter of an hour. Mama says it is breeding. I think it is that she has six other houses on her list and has timed the horses.”

“It may be both.”

“It may. Aller, je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont. There. May I get down from the window?”

“You may go to your desk.”

Lady Sophia went. She trailed past the schoolroom table with the slow drift of a child who has been promised nothing and has therefore decided to enjoy the journey, and she settled at her place with her elbows planted and her chin on her knuckles and her grey eyes —so like her brother’s eyes, as Madeleine had registered on the second day, and had not permitted herself to register again since — fixed on Madeleine with a directness which was, on a child, charming, and on the child’s elder brother, something else entirely.

“Miss Wharton.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“Do you think that Stirling loves her?”

Madeleine sat down. She did so with the great care of a woman who has been asked, by a small and not unkind interrogator, the one question for which she had been preparing herself, in the back of her mind, since the moment that the celadon green pelisse had come out of the carriage.

“I think,” she said, “that it is not a question one asks about persons of your brother’s rank.”

“Why?”

“Because their marriages are not, in the main, made on that basis.”

“On what basis, then?”

“On the basis of suitability. Of family. Of fortune. Of —” she found, with a small surprise, that she could say it quite evenly “—of what is owed to a name.”

“That is what Mama says.”

“Then your mama and I are in agreement.”

“You are not in agreement. You said it as though you did not like the taste of it.”

Madeleine looked up.

The child was watching her with the unblinking shrewdness of which only the very young and the very old were capable, and Madeleine thought, not for the first time in a fortnight, that she had been engaged to teach Lady Sophia Hawksmoor French and the use of the globes, and that Lady Sophia Hawksmoor was, in the meanwhile, conducting an education of her own.

“It is not a question of liking the taste of it, Lady Sophia. It is a question of accuracy. Marriages in your brother’s world are arranged upon those grounds, and I should be lying to you if I said otherwise. Whether he loves her is a matter between him and his conscience, and not yours, and certainly not mine.”

“It is mine. He is my brother.”

“Then it is yours to wish him well. It is not yours to decide for him.”

“I do wish him well. That is why I shall never call her sister.”

“Lady Sophia.”