Page 55 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Yes. Well.” He stood up. “Honoria will be told. She will, I think, be relieved; she has not enjoyed the morning. She is fond of you, you know, in a moderate and civil way, and would have made you a perfectly tolerable wife — and you would have made her a perfectly tolerable husband — and we should all have been moderately civil and moderately bored, and it was, I think, on the whole, an arrangement better unmade. Do not look so stricken, Greyscarp. I am sixty-two. I have seen worse betrothals made and worse betrothals broken, and I do not, in the country in June, take such things very tragically. Will you take a glass of madeira before you ride back?”

“I had rather not, sir. The horse is waiting.”

“Then go. And Greyscarp —”

Stirling paused at the door.

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“Whatever it is that has put this iron into you between the Saturday and the Wednesday — and I think that I can guess at it, and I shall not ask — I hope that you have the sense to see it through. There are not many men of your rank who would have ridden twenty miles in this heat to say what could have been said by a letter, and there are fewer still who would have said it without flinching when they got here. Your father, I think, would have been pleased with you this morning. He was a man, you know, who set rather more by courage than by prudence, whatever your mother may have told you since.”

Stirling, who had not — in five and twenty years and then in five more — been told any such thing of his father by anyone, stood for a moment in the doorway of the small bookroom at Daventry Park, and did not, at first, trust his voice.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

He rode home in the long slant of the late afternoon. He took the horse more kindly on the return; he had nothing to ride from now, and a great deal, he found, to ride towards. He thought, between Hatfield and Barnet, with a clarity that he had not had at any point in the preceding fortnight, of what he meant to say to Miss Madeleine Wharton when he came into the schoolroom at the top of the stairs in his own house; and he thought of it not as a speech to be delivered but as a thing to be offered, plainly, in the place where it had been earned.

He did not deceive himself that she would take it.

He thought, in fact, that she very probably would not.

But he had ridden twenty miles in the heat to undo a thing said in his name without his leave, and he had the right, now, to go up three flights of stairs and say a thing in his name with it.

He came into Grosvenor Square at a little past eight, in the long blue summer dusk that comes at that hour in June, with the lamps not yet lit and the swifts going round and round above the plane trees in the centre of the square.

He gave Achilles to the groom at the mews and came in at the side door because his boots were not fit for the hall, then changed in his dressing room without ringing for Hobbs. With the impatience of a man who has, finally, work to do, he washed his hands and face, put on a clean cravat and went up — not down to the library, up — the three flights to the schoolroom at the top of the house.

The narrow last stair was uncarpeted, as it had always been, and announced him. He did not slow. He came up to the schoolroom door, and he knocked, once, as he had knocked in April; and there was no answer, and he knocked again, and there was no answer, and he set his hand to the latch and went in.

The room was empty.

It was not the emptiness of a room from which the occupant has stepped out for a quarter of an hour. The windows were shut. The slates were stacked.

The grammar and the Petrarch and the slim brown atlas were squared on the shelf with the particular neatness of a woman who has put things away for someone else to find. The chair where Lady Sophia normally sat was pushed in. The chair where Madeleine usually sat was pushed in.

The fire was cold, and had not been laid for the evening, and there was no work-bag on the hook by the door.

On the schoolroom table, set squarely in the centre on the wood that had been wiped down, was a folded sheet of paper. It was folded along one crease, and his name was written on the outside, in a careful schoolroom hand he had seen, in copybooks and in the margins of dictation, every day for ten weeks. The Marquess of Greyscarp. Not Stirling. Not anything else. The four words, and the small precise full stop after them.

He stood for a moment with his hand on the latch of the door that he had just come through, and he looked at the folded sheet on the table, and he did not, for a long count, cross to it.

He could hear, distantly, the slow Friday-evening traffic of Grosvenor Square through the closed sashes — a carriage going by towards Brook Street, the call of a man to a horse — and he could hear the ordinary creak of a beam in the roof above him, the same beam that he had heard Madeleine say, once in April, from the doorway of the library, kept her company at night. He could hear his own breath, which was not quite steady, which had not been quite steady, he realised, since he had set his foot on the bottom stair three flights down.

He crossed to the table and picked up the paper. He did not, at first, unfold it. He stood with it in his hand and looked around the schoolroom — at the squared books, at the empty hook, at the cold grate, at the chair pushed in — and he thought, with the flat clarity of a man who has ridden forty miles in a day and arrived a quarter of an hour too late at the only door that mattered, ‘She has not seen the retraction. She cannot have. It is not yet printed’.

He thought: ‘She saw the notice this morning. She has had the whole day with it. And I was not here.’

He unfolded the paper.

Below him, three flights down, Hodges — who had returned from Fleet Street at a quarter past two with the editor’s assurance that the retraction would appear in the morning’s edition, and who had not, after, been able to find Miss Wharton, though he had looked — stood in the front hall and waited to be rung for, and was not rung for. In the yellow drawing room, the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp sat with her embroidery in her lap and her hands quite still upon it, and listened, with the particular attention of a woman who has known a house for forty years, to the silence at the top of the stairs.

Chapter Fourteen

The Bath coach set her down at the Inn in the last village just before the city of Bath at a quarter past six on the Saturday evening, and Madeleine, who had been twenty-six hours on the road with three stops and one change, in an inside seat between a clergyman’s widow and a corn-factor from Reading, came down the iron step with the careful step of a woman who has not slept and does not wish the world to know it.

She had her own valise — it was not heavy, she had taken only what would easily fit in it — and she had her bonnet straight and her gloves on, and she stood for a moment under the inn lantern in the long blue dusk of the Saturday, and made herself, in the way that she had made herself do a great many things in the past more than two years, take her bearings.

The cottage where her aunt and her sisters lived was ten minutes’ walk. She knew that for she had been to her sisters twice before, once at Christmas more than two years ago, and once thereafter, when their mother had died. Georgiana had now, Madeleine knew, returned from being companion to Mrs Verity, and was staying with Beatrice and their aunt while she considered what she might do next. She had some savings, and her final payment – enough that she could pretend, in Bath, to be a woman of moderate consequence and not, as she would have been in London, a woman of none.