Page 28 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Then it closed again.

And then, with a steadiness which surprised her, Madeleine heard multiple sets of footsteps, coming up.

Not the front stair — they would not come up the front stair, except to go to the drawing room, and the drawing room was on the first floor, and they had just come out of it. The back stair, then. Lady Sophia had begged, a week ago, to be permitted to show Lady Honoria the schoolroom — ‘because she will be my sister, whether I like it or not, Miss Wharton, and she ought to know where I am locked up’ — and the Dowager had said, with the remote graciousness that meant a thing had been decided already, that perhaps another day; and Madeleine had thought no more of it.

Today, evidently, was another day.

She had time. She had — not much, but enough — to register what she had heard, and to put her hand quietly on Lady Sophia’s shoulder, and to speak, in a voice she did not recognise for its evenness.

“Lady Sophia. Down from the window, if you please. Sit at your desk. Your hair is undone.”

“My hair is always undone.”

“Sit at your desk.”

Something in her voice made the child obey without argument. Lady Sophia slid down off the seat, smoothed her pinafore with both hands, mended her plait by tugging it once over her shoulder, and was at her place with her book open and her pen — dry, but in her hand — by the time the footsteps reached the last narrow flight.

Three sets of footsteps.

The Dowager’s, light and unhurried; a lady’s, slower and rather measured; and a man’s, slowest of all, in beautifully made boots that struck each uncarpeted tread with the firm and intentional sound of a man who knew that he was being heard.

Madeleine rose.

She moved to the place beside the schoolroom table where a Governess stood when her room was to be entered by her employers — a pace back from her pupil, hands folded, eyes lowered to a point on the floor some six feet in front of her — she stood there, she waited, and she did not look up when the door opened.

“— and as you see,” the Dowager was saying, in the voice she used to people she wished to impress without appearing to wish to impress them, “it is a very tolerable schoolroom. My late husband chose it for the north light. He felt strongly about north light.”

“How very enlightened of him,” Lord Edmund said.

His voice was exactly what Madeleine had expected.

It was light, and dry, and pleasant, and there was a private amusement in it that did not belong to the words.

“Lady Sophia,” the Dowager said. “Make your curtsey to Lady Honoria and to Lord Edmund.”

Lady Sophia rose.

Lady Sophia made her curtsey. Lady Sophia, Madeleine noticed with a flicker of pride that she had no business feeling, did it perfectly.

“Lady Honoria. Lord Edmund.”

“Lady Sophia. You are grown.”

“Thank you, Lady Honoria.”

“And this,” the Dowager said, with the even courtesy of a woman who had not, in twenty years, omitted the introduction of a Governess to a guest because the omission would have been more conspicuous than the introduction, “is Miss Wharton. My daughter’s Governess.”

Madeleine raised her eyes — only as far as was proper, no farther — and made her curtsey.

“Lady Honoria. Lord Edmund.”

Lady Honoria Morley inclined her head a precise half-inch. It was the half-inch one gave to an upper servant of acknowledged respectability, and it was, Madeleine registered with the cool clarity that had settled on her at the base of her throat, exactly the half-inch she had expected.

Lord Edmund Carmody did not incline his head at all.

He looked at her.

He looked at her with the unhurried particularity of a man examining a thing he had not been told he would find, and his eyes — they were pale blue, and very clear, and quite without warmth — went over her face once, and then a second time, slower, and then a small light came into them that had not been there before.