Page 49 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Stirling was on the terrace.”

“His Lordship,” said Madeleine, who heard her own voice come out of her at the right pitch and was grateful for it, “was good enough to let you in at the window. Begin at the third line, Lady Sophia. We have lost a quarter of an hour.”

Sophia began at the third line.

*****

Below, in a bedroom which caught the south light, before he called his valet to bring dry linen, Stirling Hawksmoor stood with his back to the room, his hands flat on the chest of drawers, and looked at his own face in the glass above it. He did not recognise, this time either, the man who looked back.

He heard, very distinctly, under the drumming of the rain on the windows, the slow steady English clock of his grandfather’s in the library two floors below, chiming the half hour after three, and he thought, with the cold precision of a man making the last entry in an account: ‘The Duke of Daventry’s carriage will be at the gate within the hour. I will not, after all, be deciding it on Monday.’

He rang for his valet, who came at once.

“Lay out my blue coat. And go down, if you please, and tell Mrs Galt that I shall be in the small parlour at five, and that I should be obliged if my mother would come to me there before the Duke of Daventry arrives.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

The valet went out.

Stirling stood another moment at the chest of drawers, his hands flat upon it; and then he straightened, went to the window, and looked out at the rain coming down across his park, the lake going grey under it, and the lemon trees, all but two, gone safely under the eaves of his mother’s orangery.

He set his jaw, in the manner he had set it at eighteen when he had been told he was not to purchase his colours, and at twenty-five when his father had died; and he discovered that the setting of it, this third time, was the first time in his life that he had set it for a thing of his own choosing.

*****

Upstairs, in the schoolroom that smelled of beeswax and lavender and now, faintly, of wet wool, Madeleine read out the day’s passage of dictation in a perfectly even voice, and Lady Sophia, who noticed everything, wrote it down without speaking, and did not look up.

Chapter Twelve

The Hertfordshire road went back into London by way of Highgate, and the carriage was on it by half past eight on the Wednesday morning, which was the twenty-fourth of June and the third day of unbroken heat after the storm. Madeleine rode inside with Lady Sophia and Sophia’s nurse, who slept with her bonnet straight against the squab. Lady Sophia, who had been silent for the first ten miles, took out her copybook at Barnet and wrote in it, in a careful schoolroom hand, ‘Returned to London’ and the date, and showed it to Madeleine, and put it away again.

They were at Greyscarp House by two. The hall smelled of fresh beeswax and of the lilies that had been brought in from somewhere that morning, and Mrs Holland met them at the foot of the great stair with the small inventory of news that runs in any London house upon the day its family returns — Lord Edmund Carmody had called twice in the fortnight, a card from Lady Jersey, the chimneys had been swept on the Tuesday — and Madeleine heard it all standing one pace behind Lady Sophia, with her gloves still in her hand, and went up the three flights to the schoolroom without seeing the Marquess at all.

He had ridden up late in the day before. She had been told that by Mrs Galt, in the civil way that Mrs Galt had of telling her things she would otherwise have to discover for herself; and she had received it standing by the carriage step just before they left, and had said, “Thank you, Mrs Galt,” in the voice of a woman to whom it was a matter of housekeeping, and Mrs Galt had looked at her once, kindly, and gone away.

He had not been in the hall at Greyscarp House when they came in. He was not in the library when she passed it, going up. The schoolroom, when she reached it, smelled of beeswax and of the close stale air of a room shut up for a fortnight, so she set Lady Sophia at her copybook and went herself to the windows to put up the sashes one after another, then stood for a moment at the middle one with her hand on the frame and looked down into Grosvenor Square. A barouche was setting down at the corner house and a small dog was being walked by a man in a brown coat, and she thought, with the strange flat clarity of a woman returning to a place she had only just learned was not hers: ‘I am here again. I am here again and nothing is altered and everything is altered, and I have not, yet, decided which.’

She had decided, in the matter of what had been said on the terrace, almost nothing. She had decided that she would not think of it; and she had not thought of it during the four further days at the Hall after the Duke of Daventry’s carriage had come up the drive; she had not thought of it on the long Tuesday of the packing; she had not thought of it on the road, except in the way that a person does not think of a bruise, which is to say that she had been aware, at every jolt of the carriage, of the precise place where the bruise was.

She had not seen the Marquess since those fraught words had been spoken in the rain. He had not come to the schoolroom; he had not been at breakfast on the Sunday; she had been told by Mrs Galt that he had ridden out early with the Duke, and she had received this also as a matter of housekeeping. Lady Honoria had stayed three days. Madeleine had seen her once, from the schoolroom window, walking on the gravel below in a green pelisse with her hand on the Dowager’s arm, and had stepped back from the window before the green pelisse had looked up.

Whether anything had been said in the small parlour at five o’clock on the Saturday — whether the Duke of Daventry had been spoken to, whether Lady Honoria had been spoken to, whether the Dowager had been spoken to, and what the Dowager had answered — Madeleine did not know, and she had set herself, on the road, the discipline of not wishing to know.

It was not her business.

She had said to him on the terrace that he would do what he had come down to do, and she would not, now, ask whether he had done it or not. She would teach Lady Sophia her Italian.

She would draw her sixty pounds a year. She would, in time — in a great deal of time — find that the bruise had faded.

That was, at any rate, what she had told herself between Barnet and Highgate.

She did not see him on the Wednesday afternoon, nor on the Thursday.

On the Friday morning Lady Sophia came up at a quarter to nine with her hair already done and a folded sheet of the Morning Post under her arm, and declared airily:

“Miss Wharton, Hodges says I may bring this up if I do not crumple it, because his Lordship has not finished with it. His Lordship will not want to see it until the afternoon. May I read out the ‘On Dits’ to you while you set the sums?”

“You may read the foreign intelligence, Lady Sophia, and then we shall have the sums.”