Page 43 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I have not earned it.”

“You have it, nevertheless. Good morning, my Lord.”

“Good morning, Miss Wharton.”

She went out. She left the door ajar by the inch it had stood at, went down the corridor at a Governess’ steady pace, up the great stairs, up the second flight, up the third narrow uncarpeted flight which announced one’s arrival to anyone who cared to listen, and into the schoolroom. She shut the schoolroom door behind her and stood with her back to it, her hands flat against the wood, and she did not cry, because a Governess did not cry at twenty-five minutes to nine on a Tuesday morning in April when her charge was about to come up; but she stood very still, with her eyes shut, and let the small wound she had just made in herself bleed inwardly, where no one could see it, until she had it under such government as it would consent to be put under.

Then she opened her eyes. She went to the schoolroom table. She set out the slate, and the French grammar, and the small reader with the silk marker in it. At a quarter to nine, when Lady Sophia came in with her hair already done and her sash already tied, Madeleine said, “Good morning, Lady Sophia,” in a perfectly even voice, and Lady Sophia, who noticed everything, looked at her for one long moment and then sat down without speaking and opened the grammar to the correct place.

Chapter Ten

The Hertfordshire road went out of London by way of Highgate, and the carriage was on it by half past nine on the Wednesday morning, which was the eleventh of June and the first wholly fine day in a fortnight. Madeleine had been told by Mrs Holland on the Friday previous that the household would remove to the Hall for a fortnight before the betrothal was to be made formal, and she had received the information with the small grave nod which was her habit now in any matter touching on the Marquess, and had gone upstairs and laid out, in her own room under the eaves, the precise calculation of what she would need: two gowns, the grey and the lavender; one cap for Sundays; the books for Lady Sophia’s Italian, which had been begun in May and which Lady Sophia attacked, lately, with the ardour of a child who has discovered that a language is a kind of cipher.

She had not, in the seven weeks since the morning in the breakfast room, broken her own rule.

She had not been alone with him. She had crossed his path on a landing twice, both times with a footman in the corridor; she had been required, on the third of June, to bring Lady Sophia down to the yellow drawing room to make her curtsey to a guest, and had stood by the door, in the Governess’ place, with her eyes on her charge and her face composed, and had not looked at him once in the quarter of an hour she was in the room.

She had heard, from Mrs Holland, on the eighth of May, the small piece of news that his Lordship had begun, at last, to attend Lady Honoria Morley at home of a Tuesday afternoon, and she had heard it standing at the housekeeper’s cupboard with a duster in her hand, and had said ‘Indeed,’ very evenly, and had gone back upstairs and set Lady Sophia three pages of conjugation, which Lady Sophia had done without complaint, watching her sidelong.

A betrothal notice had not yet been published.

It would be published, Mrs Holland had said in her quiet way, after the Hertfordshire visit, when the families had been a fortnight in company and the matter could be made formal at the Hall. Madeleine had heard ‘the matter could be made formal’ with the same small inward step down she had become accustomed to, and had answered ‘Yes, Mrs Holland’, and had gone to count the possessions that she would need.

Now she sat in the second carriage with Lady Sophia beside her, and Lady Sophia’s nurse opposite, and a hamper at her feet, and the June morning going past the window in a long green ribbon of hedgerow. The first carriage, ahead of them by a quarter of a mile, carried the Dowager Marchioness and her personal maid, and Lady Cecelia, the eighteen-year-old sister, who had come home from town two days before in a state of fretful excitement about a riding habit. Lord Greyscarp himself rode. Madeleine had seen him from the schoolroom window at nine, mounted on the chestnut, in a coat she had not seen before; she had stepped back from the window before he could glance up, and had busied herself with Lady Sophia’s gloves.

“Miss Wharton,” said Lady Sophia, who had been quiet for an hour and was now finished with being quiet, “shall I show you my grandmother’s garden?”

“If your brother permits it, Lady Sophia.”

“He permits it. I asked him last week. He said you must see it because—” Lady Sophia stopped, and looked at the seat opposite, where her nurse was nodding against the squab — “because you would understand it, he said. I do not know what he meant.”

“He meant only,” said Madeleine, after a moment, “that I have read a little about Italian gardens, and might know the names of the plants.”

“Oh,” said Lady Sophia. “Yes. That was what he meant.”

She turned her face to the window again, and Madeleine looked down at her gloved hands, which were folded in her lap, and did not permit them to do anything else.

They came to Hawksmoor Hall at four.

The drive turned off the high road through a gate of weathered stone, and ran for the better part of a mile between beech trees, and came at last upon the house, which Madeleine had not seen before, and which she found, in spite of herself, beautiful: a long honey-coloured front in the style popular in the last century, with tall windows and a stone terrace, and beyond it the green falling away to a piece of water, and beyond the water the rising of a wood.

He was already there.

He had ridden ahead and was standing on the terrace with his hat in his hand, talking to the steward.

He turned when the carriages came up and went to hand his mother down from the first; and Madeleine, descending from the second with Lady Sophia’s hand in hers, did not look towards the terrace, and was conducted by a housekeeper she did not know — a Mrs Galt, who curtsied very civilly — up a side stair to a room on the second floor with north light and a small writing table and a view of the kitchen garden.

“The schoolroom is the door at the end of the passage, Miss Wharton. Lady Sophia’s apartments are below, on the floor under. You will be sent for at dinner, or a tray will be brought, as you prefer.”

“A tray, Mrs Galt, if you please.”

“Yes, Miss.”

She unpacked the two gowns.

She set out her brush and her comb.

She washed her face in the basin of cold water that had been left, and stood for a moment at the window looking down at the kitchen garden, where a boy was at work among the gooseberries.