Page 47 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Lady Sophia was laughing still.

“Yes Stirling.”

Then she went past him into the room and was gone, and her boots could be heard a moment later on the inner stair.

He did not, then, go in.

He stood in the window with his hand on the frame and looked at Madeleine across three yards of wet flagstone, as the rain came down between them in a steady grey curtain. He did not speak for what felt to her a long time and was perhaps the count of four.

Then he stepped out into the rain.

“Lord Greyscarp —” she said.

He came as far as the balustrade and stopped, with his hand on the stone where she had seen it on Thursday. The rain darkened his shirt at the shoulder within seconds, and he spoke, in a voice she had not heard from him before — not the library voice, not the breakfast-room voice, but a voice stripped down to the man inside it.

“Miss Wharton. A moment. Please.”

“My Lord, I must — “

“A moment.”

She did not move. She could not, in any event, have gone in without going past him; and she found that she did not, at that moment, despite the rain, wish to.

He said, “I do not love her.” She put her hand out to the balustrade because she felt that she needed it. “I have not loved her at any time in seven weeks. I have not loved her at any time in the seventeen years since our parents made an agreement. I told myself a thing that was not true and I have been telling it to myself every morning since April, and I cannot —” He stopped. He looked away, down the terrace, at the rain coming off the lead of the roof above them in a thin silver line. “I cannot tell it to myself any longer.”

“My Lord, this is not a thing I can hear.”

“It is a thing I cannot say to anyone else.”

“Then it must not be said.”

“Madeleine.”

He had not, in seven weeks, said it. He had not said it in the schoolroom with the waltz, he had not said it in the library at midnight over the Petrarch, and he had not said it in the breakfast room with the door ajar by an inch; but now he stood three feet from her in the rain on his own terrace at Hawksmoor Hall and said it once, and she felt it strike her in the chest as the first drop had struck the schoolroom window.

“You must not call me that,” she said.

Her own voice surprised her by being level.

“No. I know. I am sorry. I have called you nothing for seven weeks. I have not had — I have not permitted myself — Miss Wharton, I am about to do a thing tomorrow, or on Monday, or this evening if her father will hear me, that I cannot bear to do; and I cannot bear it, because the thing that I should be doing instead, I have no right to do. I have no right at all. I know that. I have known it since April. I am not —” He stopped again. He had the look of a man unused to allowing the expressions free rein on his own face, and finding the work of it difficult. “I am not asking anything of you. I am telling you, because I have not anywhere else in the world to tell it, that I do not love her, and that I do love you, and that I am sorry.”

Eight sentences. She counted them afterwards. She counted them lying in the narrow bed under the eaves of the Hall that night, with the rain still going on the slates above her, and she found that there had been eight, and that she had heard each of them, and that not one of them could now be unheard.

She said — and she did not know, until she heard her own voice, what she was going to say —

“My Lord. You will go in. You will go in now.”

“Yes.”

“You will not say this to me again.”

“No.”

“You will do what you came down here to do. You will speak to the Duke. You will speak to Lady Honoria. You will — “

“Madeleine.”

“You will not — “