Page 52 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

When Lady Sophia came back at noon, with a length of pale blue sarcenet over her arm and a great deal to say about it, Madeleine simply said:

“Lay it on the chair, Lady Sophia. We have the sums to finish, and then the Italian, and then at three you may show me the sarcenet properly.”

“Yes, Miss Wharton.”

Lady Sophia obediently laid it on the chair, then sat down at her place.

She picked up her pencil, and she looked at Madeleine once across the table — a long unhurried look — and then she bent her head to the slate.

They worked through the sums together in the steady ordinary silence of a schoolroom in a great house in Grosvenor Square on a Friday morning in June, with the window open onto the heat, and a barouche going by in the square below.

Downstairs, in a library Madeleine would not enter, the Marquess of Greyscarp — who had not, in fact, placed the notice; who had not seen it until Hodges had laid it on his desk at half past nine; who had stood for a long moment with the paper in his hand and then walked out of the library and called, in a voice his butler had not heard from him before, for his mother — was, at that hour, learning what had been done in his name.

But Madeleine did not know that.

She set Lady Sophia the next sum, and read the answer when it was given.

“Very good, Lady Sophia. The next.”

She felt completely hollow, yet somehow, her voice was even, and ordinary.

Chapter Thirteen

He had called for his mother. He had called in a voice he had not, in the seven years since his father died, and the servant summoning bells of Greyscarp House had begun to ring at his hand, used to anyone; and Hodges had carried the message up to the yellow drawing room with the careful step of a butler who has heard, in his master’s tone, something he does not wish to interpret aloud.

The Dowager came down at her own pace. Stirling heard her on the stair — the slow even tread of a woman who would not be hurried by a son in any house, however much that house was now nominally his — and he stood with his back to the window of the library, the folded Morning Post on the desk before him, set his hands behind him on the sill, and waited.

She came in. She shut the door herself. She was in lavender silk, the half-mourning which was the palest thing she had worn for seven years, and would, he sometimes thought, wear into her grave, and she did not sit down.

“You called for me.”

“Mama. Did you place this notice?”

“It was placed with my agreement.”

He had thought she would prevaricate.

He had run, in the long thirty seconds between the desk and sending for her, through six different opening sallies, and they had all assumed that she would prevaricate; and the single dry syllable of her admission went through him like a blade laid flat against the skin, cold rather than sharp, and he stood for a moment in the clear coldness of it and did not, at first, answer.

“On what authority.”

“On the authority of a mother who has watched her son make a fool of himself for a fortnight in the country, and who has no intention of watching him make a worse fool of himself in town.”

“There is no betrothal, madam.”

“There was an understanding.”

“There was no understanding. There was a conversation in a small parlour, at which I was not present, between yourself and the Duke of Daventry, which I declined to ratify on the Sunday morning, and which I declined to ratify again on the Monday. The Duke took my meaning. Lady Honoria took my meaning. You alone, it appears, did not.”

“Stirling —”

“You will write, this morning, to the Morning Post. You will write that the announcement was placed in error. You will write it over your own name and you will sign it, Hodges will take it to Fleet Street himself, it will appear in tomorrow’s paper, and the day after that, you will receive Lady Jersey and you will tell her, in whatever form pleases you, that the matter was the work of an over-zealous family friend who has been spoken to.”

“I shall do no such thing.”

“You will.”

“I shall not. Stirling. Listen to me. I have buried a husband, I have brought you up to a title, I have married Augusta to a man worth nine thousand a year, and I will not, I will not, sit in this house and watch you ruin yourself for the sake of a Viscount’s daughter who keeps your sister’s slates.”