Page 50 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“The foreign intelligence is dull.”

“It is meant to be.”

Lady Sophia made a small face and sat down with the paper, and Madeleine set out the slates at the other end of the table, and for some minutes there was the small dry rustle of the paper and the scratch of Madeleine’s pencil and, from the open window, the slow Friday-morning traffic of Grosvenor Square, a dray turning out of Brook Street, the call of a milk girl two doors down.

“Miss Wharton.”

“Mm.”

“Miss Wharton, Stirling is going to be married.”

She did not, at first, look up.

She had laid out three sums and was setting the fourth, and her pencil completed the figure it was forming — a five, with the small loop at the foot of it — before she put it down, and she put it down quite carefully alongside the slate, with the point towards the window, and only then did she speak, in the voice she used for declensions.

“Lady Sophia.”

“It is in it. Look. ‘Marriage in High Life.’ I shall read it. ‘We are authorised to announce the approaching nuptials of the Most Noble Stirling Hawksmoor, Marquess of Greyscarp, and the Lady Honoria Morley, only daughter of the Duke of Daventry, of —’ ”

“Lady Sophia, give me the paper.”

Lady Sophia gave her the paper.

It was on the third page, in the second column, in the small black serious type they used for these things; and it was three lines long, and the third line ended ‘— a marriage to be solemnised in the autumn,’ and Madeleine read it through once, and read it through a second time because she had not, the first time, taken in the words between ‘Greyscarp’ and ‘Daventry’, and then she folded the paper along the crease that Hodges had made in it, and along a second crease of her own, and she set it down on the table beside the slates, and she spoke, as if nothing had changed at all.

“Begin the sums, Lady Sophia. The first three are addition. The fourth is the one we did on Tuesday before we left.”

“But Miss Wharton — “

“The sums.”

Lady Sophia looked at her for a long unhurried second in the manner that she had, of late, taken to looking at her, and then she sat down to her slate, and picked up her pencil, and began.

Madeleine rose.

She went, with what was, surprisingly, a perfectly steady step, to the window — not the middle window where she had stood on the Wednesday, but the one beyond it at the end of the room, that looked down over the back of the next house — and she put her hand on the sash and she looked at the brickwork eight feet from her face, and she did not see it.

‘Autumn’. He had said ‘this evening, if her father would hear him’. He had said ‘I cannot bear to do it’.

He had stood three feet from her on his own terrace in the rain and he had said eight sentences, and she had counted them, and she had set them away in the place where she set such things; and somewhere between the rain on the terrace and the Wednesday on the road he had, after all, done the thing he had said he could not bear to do, and the Morning Post had been authorised to announce it, and Hodges had brought it up with the toast, and Lady Sophia had carried it up the three flights of stairs under her arm.

She had not, on the terrace, believed his proclamation of love. That was the thing she could see now, with the cold clarity of a woman looking at the brickwork of the next house.

She had not, in any wholly governed corner of her mind, believed that he would do what he had been long promised to do, either.

She had told him to, and she had meant it; she had walked back along the terrace in the rain to the side door, she had changed her gown, she had read out the day’s dictation in a perfectly even voice; and underneath all of that, in the part of her that did not answer to the Morning Post or to sixty pounds a year, she had been carrying about with her, for ten days, the small unspeakable folly of a hope. She had not given it a name. She had not given it leave to be an acknowledged hope. She had only, at certain moments — going down the side stair in the morning, standing at the schoolroom window at dusk — felt it move in her, the small soft flutter of it, and looked away.

It was, she discovered now, a thing one could feel die.

It went out of her the way a candle goes out when somebody shuts a door against a draught: a small definite alteration of the air in a room, and then a coldness, and then the steady ordinary darkness that had always, in fact, been there.

“Miss Wharton, does eight and seven add to fifteen or sixteen?”

“Fifteen, Lady Sophia.”

“I had put sixteen.”

“Then put fifteen, and go on.”