Page 51 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She heard her own voice come out of her at the right pitch and she was, again, grateful. She stood another moment at the window.

She thought — and the thought came to her with the flat practicality of a person reading a timetable — ‘He has chosen duty. That is what he has chosen. He is a Marquess and he has chosen duty. He said on the terrace that he could not bear to, and yet he has borne it; he has gone in at five o’clock to the small parlour and he has spoken to his mother and he has spoken to the Duke of Daventry, and he has done the thing he went down to Hertfordshire to do, and he has done it, perhaps, the better for what he said to me in the rain — for having said it once and known it could not be said again, and for having put it away. He has chosen what he was raised to choose. He has chosen what every man of his rank chooses. He has chosen, in the end, exactly as I told him he must, and I have no right whatsoever to be standing at a window in his house with my hand on the sash as though a thing has been done to me, because no thing has been done to me; a thing has been announced in the Morning Post, very properly, an arrangement between two families of consequence, and I am the Governess.’

It was a long thought. It took perhaps the count of ten.

At the end of it she straightened her hand on the sash and turned back to the table.

“Show me the slate, Lady Sophia.”

Lady Sophia showed her the slate.

Three of the sums were right. The fourth was wrong, in the way it had been wrong on the Tuesday, and Madeleine explained again — patiently, in the same words that she had used on the Tuesday — the carrying of the ten; and Lady Sophia listened, and rubbed out the figure with the heel of her hand, and put in the corrected one, and looked up.

“Miss Wharton, are you cross?”

“No, Lady Sophia.”

“You look cross.”

“I am thinking of the sums.”

“Lady Honoria is very pretty.”

Madeleine set her hand down flat on the table beside the slate. She did it without quite meaning to, and she lifted it again at once.

“Lady Sophia. We do not, in the schoolroom, discuss his Lordship’s affairs. We do not discuss them with each other, and we do not discuss them in front of the servants, and we do not, on any account, discuss them in front of his Lordship. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Miss Wharton.”

“Take out the Italian.”

Lady Sophia looked at her for a moment, then took out the Italian. They worked through a half-page of Petrarch — a poem Madeleine had not chosen and would not, in better governance of her own affairs, have set; she had taken it from the book without looking, and they were three lines in before she heard what it was, and she set her finger under the line and read it through evenly to the end and gave Lady Sophia the construction, and Lady Sophia, who noticed everything, did not look up.

At eleven Mrs Holland came up with the message that Lady Sophia was wanted by her mother in the yellow drawing room, at a quarter past, on the matter of a new dress; and Lady Sophia went, with a small backward look at Madeleine from the door, and Madeleine was left in the schoolroom alone with the Morning Post folded along its two creases on the table beside the slates.

She did not, then, weep.

She had not wept on the terrace, she had not wept on the road, and she would not, now, weep in the schoolroom at eleven on a Friday morning with the window open onto Grosvenor Square, and the housemaid likely to come up at any moment.

She took up the paper.

She unfolded it.

Then she read the three lines a third time, slowly, as one reads a thing one is required to commit to memory; and then she folded it again, along the original crease, and she carried it down the schoolroom passage and laid it on the small table outside the door, where the footman would find it and take it down, and she came back into the schoolroom and shut the door.

She sat down at the table.

She put her hands in her lap.

For a long moment she looked at the place on the table where the paper had been; and she thought, with the flat clarity that had been with her since she had stood at the window, ‘I shall not be dismissed. There is no occasion for it. Lady Sophia must have a Governess until she is sixteen, and there is no reason in the world that the Governess should not be me; I shall be here until the autumn and through the autumn and on into the winter, when the new Marchioness will come to this house, and I shall take Lady Sophia down to be presented in the yellow drawing room, I shall curtsey, I shall be addressed by my name, and then I shall withdraw. That is what is required of me. That is what I am paid for.’

Silence surrounded her. ‘I shall do it.’

Which thought was followed by another - ‘I shall do it because I have nothing else to do, and because my sisters have nothing, and because there is no place in the world for the granddaughter of an Earl with two gowns and no character but the one she earns at the schoolroom table, and because I told him on the terrace that he must, and he has, and I will not be the woman who told him to do a thing and then could not bear that he did it.’

Then she thought, last and quite calmly: ‘I shall not see him alone again. Not in the library at midnight. Not in the breakfast room with the door ajar. Not on a terrace in any rain. I shall not see him alone again in this life.’

It was, she discovered, a thought one could think and go on breathing, although with difficulty. She drew one breath after it, and another, and she found that the second was steadier than the first. So she rose from the table and went to the slate that Lady Sophia had left, rubbed it clean with the cloth, and set out, in her own careful schoolroom hand, the four sums for the afternoon.