Page 41 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I am glad that she is well,” he said.

“Thank you.”

A silence. The clock on the mantel — a small French clock, gilt, which Lady Sophia had told her once was a wedding present to her mother from a Russian princess — said three minutes before midnight. Madeleine heard it tell each minute very distinctly. It was not, she observed, ticking any louder than it had ticked on any other night. It only seemed to.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord.”

“I find,” he said — and his voice was perfectly level, and the levelness was the thing one heard, the way one heard the clock — “I find that I have begun, when the house has gone quiet, to listen for a step on the stair. I have not asked it of you. I should not ask it of you. But I have begun to listen for it, and to be disappointed when it does not come, and I owe it to you to say so, because if I do not say so, I shall by and by ask it of you without speaking, which is a worse thing, and I will not do you that injury.”

She had thought that she was prepared for him to say something. She had not been prepared for him to say this. She had not been prepared, in particular, for the simple dry honesty of it, for the ‘I owe it to you to say so’, which was the speech of a man who had already, in his own mind, given up something he could not afford to give up.

She kept her hand on the back of the chair. She kept her eyes on the spine of Cowper, where it sat neatly beside its fellows on the side table.

“My Lord,” she said, “I do not think that we ought —”

“No,” he said quickly. “Nor I.”

“I came down tonight because of the book.”

“You came down tonight,” he said, with the smallest twist of a smile that was not, on his face, a smile at all, “for the same reason that I am still awake. We shall not lie to each other about it, Miss Wharton. We shall be too tired to keep it up.”

She drew breath to answer him, and the answer did not come. He had said ‘we shall be too tired’. He had said we, and the we had hung in the air between them like a small lit thing. Incandescent with meaning. She felt her hand tighten on the chair back. She made it loosen.

“I shall go up,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I shall — I shall not come down again, my Lord.”

He inclined his head. He did not answer that.

He had the grace, or the cowardice, not to answer that.

“Goodnight, Lord Greyscarp.”

“Goodnight, Miss Wharton.”

She turned. She walked to the door at a Governess’ steady pace, not faster, and put her hand to the doorframe, and stepped out into the corridor; and the line of warm light from the library lay along the floor behind her, and her own shadow fell across it, narrow and slight, and she went down the corridor towards the stairs and was four steps from the foot of them when she saw the maid.

The maid was on the first half of the stair, halfway between the half-landing and the head of the great flight, with a coal scuttle in one hand and the small brass tongs in the other; and she stopped, when she saw Madeleine, with one foot on the higher tread and one on the lower, and her face — Madeleine saw the face very clearly in the lamplight, very young, fifteen perhaps, and round, and not yet schooled — went through three expressions in the space of one breath.

Surprise. Calculation. The blank careful nothing of a servant who has seen something she ought not to have seen and knows it.

“Miss,” said the maid.

“Anna,” said Madeleine, because she knew the maid’s name, because she had made it her business to know the names of every servant in the house, because a Governess who did not know the names of the servants was a Governess who would be hated within a month.

“I was — I was just to make up the library fire for his Lordship, Miss. Mrs Holland said. For midnight, as he sits up.”

“Yes. Of course. Go on, Anna. I am going up.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Anna went past her. Anna went past her with the coal scuttle held very precisely so that it did not knock against the wainscot, and her eyes on the carpet, and her colour high; and Madeleine heard her own voice, calm and dry, say something perfectly ordinary about the night being cool, and heard Anna’s voice answer it; and then Anna was gone up the corridor and Madeleine was on the stair and going up, one tread at a time, with her hand on the rail and her chest entirely full of a cold that had nothing to do with the night air.

She did not remember the second flight.