Page 53 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Have a care, madam.” He had said it quite quietly. The Dowager, who had been about to say something further, looked at him, and did not say it. “Have a very great care,” he said. “You will speak of Miss Wharton, in this house and out of it, with the courtesy due to a gentlewoman in my employ and to the granddaughter of the late Earl of Wexford. You will not speak of her, on any occasion, in the tone you have just used. If I hear that you have, I shall know how to answer it.”

“You are not yourself.”

“I am, perhaps for the first time in seven years, entirely myself. Write the letter.”

“I shall not.”

“Then I shall write it.”

He went to the desk.

He went past her — she did not move out of his way and he did not ask her to; he simply went around her — sat down at the desk, and drew a sheet of paper from the standish, uncapped the inkwell, and wrote, in the neat firm hand that had signed leases and presentations and the quarterly accounts of a great estate for seven years, three sentences to the editor of the Morning Post, signed it Greyscarp, sanded it, folded the sheet, and rang the bell.

Hodges came at once.

“Take this, personally, to Fleet Street within the hour. By hand. Wait for an acknowledgement that it will appear in tomorrow’s edition. If they hesitate, you will say that I shall come down myself.”

“My Lord.”

Hodges went. The Dowager, who had stood through the writing of the letter with her hand resting very lightly on the back of a chair, spoke only once the door had closed.

“You will regret this.”

“Possibly.”

“You will regret this, Stirling, when she has the schoolroom maids talking, the housekeeper at Hawksmoor Hall talking, Lady Jersey talking, and Carmody — Lord Edmund Carmody, Stirling — talking in every club between St James’ and Piccadilly. You think you can stand against that. You cannot. No man can. Your father could not have, and he was twice the —”

“Do not,” he said, “finish that sentence.”

She did not finish it.

“I am going to Hertfordshire,” he said. “I shall be back by dark. While I am gone you will write to the Duke of Daventry. You will tell him what I told him on the Monday — which, since he is a gentleman and you are not, he understood — and you will tell him that the notice was placed without my knowledge and contrary to my expressed wish, that I am riding down to him this morning to say it again in person, and that the retraction will be in tomorrow’s paper. You will write it within the hour, and you will show it to me before I go. We will send it by express messenger. It may, that way, perhaps reach him before I do.”

“Stirling —”

“Within the hour, Mama.” He went past her again. At the door he paused with his hand on the latch. He did not turn, but he said, in a different voice, a tired voice, the voice perhaps of the son she had brought up, “You ought not to have done it. Whatever you thought of her, and whatever you thought of me, you ought not to have done it. It was not — kind.”

“I was not,” said the Dowager, “brought up to be kind. I was brought up to be a woman suitable to be the mother of a Marquess.”

He went out.

*****

He was on the road by half past ten.

He took Achilles, who was fresh, but took no groom and went out of London by the same Hertfordshire road they had all come in upon on the Wednesday. He set the horse a pace that was not quite cruel and held him to it past Highgate, past Barnet, and on into the long dry heat of the open country, with the dust rising white behind him and the hedges in their full June leaf, and he did not, for the first many miles, think at all.

He thought after that, and what he thought was not pleasant; and by Hatfield he had run it through in his thoughts twice and set it aside.

He stopped at the inn yard to water the horse and drank a glass of small beer himself, stood in the shade of the gallery for the count of five minutes, and then he was up again.

He was at Daventry Park by half past one.

He had sent no word, beyond the letter that he had commanded his mother to write, which likely had not arrived here yet. The Duke was at home — the Duke was almost always at home in the country in June — and received Stirling in the small bookroom that looked out over the rose garden.

He stood when Stirling came in, but he did not put out his hand.

“Greyscarp.”