Page 44 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Then she put her hands flat upon the sill and made herself breathe slowly until the breathing was even; and then she went down the passage to the schoolroom and found Lady Sophia already there, kneeling on the window seat, looking out.

“Miss Wharton! It is the lake. Do you see? Stirling taught me to row on it. I was seven. I caught a crab and he fell in laughing.”

“We do not say ‘Stirling’.”

“My brother. My brother fell in laughing. He had to ride home in his shirtsleeves. Mama scolded him. She was not really cross.”

“Your mother is of Italian heritage, Lady Sophia?”

“Half Italian. Her mother was a Roman. Grandmama grew up there, when she was small. That is why the garden. Shall I show you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, if it is fine.”

*****

It was fine.

Thursday morning began clear, with the kind of high blue sky that one saw, in Hertfordshire, perhaps three times in a June.

They had lessons in the morning, in the schoolroom that smelled of beeswax and lavender, and at half past eleven Lady Sophia closed the Italian grammar with a snap.

“Now. Now the garden. You promised.”

“I said tomorrow if it was fine. It is fine. Get your bonnet.”

They went down by the side stair and out at a small door which gave onto the south side of the house.

Lady Sophia took her hand — which she did not often do, being twelve and lately conscious of dignity — and led her around the corner of the terrace, down three shallow stone steps, along a gravel walk between yew hedges, and through an opening in the yew into a place that made Madeleine stop and simply stand there, taking it in.

It was not a large garden.

It was perhaps thirty yards by twenty, walled on three sides in the same honey-coloured stone as the house, open on the fourth towards the lake.

A long rectangular pool ran down the centre, with a low coping, and at the head of it a small fountain — a stone basin held by a stone dolphin — gave out a thin clear thread of water.

Cypresses, dark and narrow, stood at intervals along the pool. Between them were lemon trees in great terracotta pots, brought out for the summer, with a clipped box parterre surrounding that, and roses — pink and white and a deep crimson that was nearly black — climbing the walls.

There was a stone bench under the west wall, weathered by a hundred winters, and the smell of the place was the smell of warm stone and box and water.

“Oh,” said Madeleine, very quietly.

“You see,” said Sophia, who was watching her. “He said that you would understand it.”

“Lady Sophia — “

“Grandmama made it. She drew it on paper first. Papa wished her to have it as she’d had it when a small child in Italy. She said it was not exactly as there, because the light was wrong; but it was as near as she could come. She sat on that bench in the afternoons. She had her workbox there. She died in the spring, when I was nine. I do not remember her very well, but I remember her here.”

Madeleine found that her throat had closed.

She spoke softly, when she finally could.

“It is a very beautiful place, Lady Sophia.”

“Yes. Look — the lemons. They go into the orangery in October. Stevens carries them. He grumbles. He says that they are the heaviest pots in England.”

She went forward, chattering, to point out the inscription on the dolphin, and the place where her grandmother had planted a particular rose, and the small sundial on the south wall with its motto in Latin; and Madeleine followed, and looked, and answered when she was spoken to, and did not turn her head towards the terrace because she had known, from the moment that they had come through the yew, that he would be there.

He was there.