Page 26 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Chapter Six

The fresh tea did not come, in the end, with any great speed.

Madeleine learned this not because she was told, and not because she had any business knowing it, but because the schoolroom at Greyscarp House was at the top of three flights of stairs, and the last of those flights was uncarpeted, and a house, when one had lived in it for a fortnight, gave up its small noises to a woman who had learned to listen for them. Sound carried up those stairs, from the servants’ stairs below as well as the main staircase.

She heard Hodges go down. She heard, some considerable time later, a second tread go down, which was not Hodges’. She heard, eventually, the muffled clatter of a tray being carried up the back stair to the yellow drawing room on the first floor, and she thought, with the small uninvolved part of her mind that kept the inventory of the house, that it had been a long quarter of an hour for a woman who never sat above a quarter of an hour, if indeed Lady Honoria had not departed with her carriage, as Lady Sophia had suggested.

Lady Sophia had finished avoir. She had begun, with the steady untroubled appetite of a child who has decided that a book is going to be liked, on The Vicar of Wakefield, and she was reading aloud — the Vicar’s first remarks about his wife — with a gravity that was a creditable imitation of Madeleine’s own when the Vicar required a certain decorum, and with a small private smile at the corner of her mouth when he did not.

“ ‘She could read any English book without much spelling —’ ”

“Slowly, Lady Sophia. Without racing him.”

“ ‘— but for pickling, preserving and cookery, none could excel her.’ ”

“Better.”

“He does not say she could cook. He says none could excel her. That is a different thing.”

“It is.”

“That is a very Vicar way of saying it.”

“It is.”

Lady Sophia drew breath to go on, and did not. Her head lifted a little. So, Madeleine realised, in the same small involuntary instant, did her own.

A second carriage had drawn up in the square.

It was not, this time, a carriage one could not help but notice.

It was a perfectly ordinary town carriage, dark, with a pair of bays that had been driven fast enough that the near horse was casting his head about in the traces, and there was no crest on the panel that Madeleine could see from where she sat.

The footman was already at the door of the house. The bell, three flights down, gave its small remote pull.

“Another caller, as I predicted,” Lady Sophia said.

“It would seem so.”

“Not for Mama. At least not directly so. Mama has had Lady Honoria. Mama does not have two callers in a morning if she can help it. Mama considers it vulgar.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“It is what Mama says, Miss Wharton. I am quoting.”

“You may quote your mama with less satisfaction in your voice.”

“Yes, Miss Wharton.”

The Vicar of Wakefield was returned, with a forefinger holding the place, to Lady Sophia’s lap, then to the surface of her desk. Lady Sophia herself, by some natural law of twelve-year-olds and windows, had drifted to her knees on the window seat again before Madeleine could quite forbid it, and was watching, with her chin on the sill this time and not her nose against the glass, which Madeleine permitted as a compromise.

The gentleman who descended from the carriage was tall and very thin and beautifully dressed. Even from three storeys up, Madeleine could see the line of the coat across his shoulders, and the high polish of his boots, and the careful unhurried movement of a man who had been taught, before he had been taught anything else, to be looked at. He paused on the pavement. He drew off one glove with the slow particularity of a man with nothing in the world to do. He looked up.

He looked up at the front of the house, taking it in window by window, in the way a man takes in a horse he has been offered for sale; and his eye travelled up the storeys, unhurried, until it reached the small narrow casement at the top — the schoolroom window — and stopped.

Madeleine was a pace behind Lady Sophia. She was not at the glass. She knew, with the certainty of a woman who had been trained from sixteen onward not to be seen at windows, that he could not, from the pavement, make her out.

He smiled, all the same.