Page 57 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I did not tell her. I said only that I had been called away on family business. I left a note for Lady Sophia on the schoolroom table, and a note for —” She stopped. She set down the cup. She put her hands together in her lap and she looked at her hands and she said, “and a note for the Marquess.”

“Ah.” It was a very small syllable. Georgiana said it without any inflection at all, and she let it sit in the warm room with the fire and the half-eaten plate of cold mutton, and after a moment, in the same level voice, she said, “Tell me, Madeleine.” Madeleine did not, at once. “I shall not be shocked,” said Georgiana. “I am twenty-four and I read the Morning Post every morning in this parlour with my coffee. There was a notice in it yesterday.” Madeleine looked up. “The London papers come down on the day. I had it at breakfast. Greyscarp and Lady Honoria Morley. I read it twice and then I sat for a quarter of an hour and looked at the sweet peas, because I’d had your last letter on the Tuesday and I knew, Madeleine, what you had not yet told me, and I thought of you in that schoolroom reading the same paper at the same hour, and I was not, on the whole, surprised when Hetty opened the door this evening. Tell me.”

So, Madeleine told her.

She told her badly, in the wrong order, beginning with the notice in the paper and going back to the conversation in the breakfast room in April, and from there to the waltz in the schoolroom which she had not put in any letter, and from there forward again to the fortnight at Hawksmoor Hall, and the rain on the terrace. Then she spoke of the steady civil distance that she had kept in the schoolroom, and on the journey back, and then about the Morning Post yesterday morning at half past eight when Lady Sophia had come up ready to do her sums, and she had brought up the paper from the tray in the front hall because she had asked for it. She described how she had looked at the paper herself, had read the three lines, had set it down, and then gone back and set Lady Sophia the next sum, looked at the answer, and said, ‘Very good, Lady Sophia. The next.’ As if nothing important had happened. But it had.

She told Georgiana about the rest of the day.

About sitting at the schoolroom table after Lady Sophia had gone down to her tea, with the late sun coming in at the window and the dust floating in it, lit to sparks of gold in the light, and thinking, with a clarity which had frightened her, that she had only two choices.

That she could stay, and watch a marriage happen which her presence in the house would slowly poison; or she could go, before any harm was done, before any maid on a stair or any caller in a drawing room could put a name to what she herself had not put a name to, even in her own head.

“So you left, and came here. Before life became unbearable. And before Lord Edmund Carmody could do anything… undesirable,” Georgiana said.

Madeleine looked at her.

“You wrote to me, in April, about Lord Edmund Carmody. You said that he had called, and looked at you on the stair as a man looks at a horse he is thinking of buying cheap. You said that he had said your name in front of the Dowager. You are not a fool, Madeleine. You left because of Carmody as much as because of the notice.”

“I left,” said Madeleine, “because I could not stay.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is the only thing.”

Georgiana looked at her a long moment. Then she got up, and went to the small writing desk in the corner, and brought back a folded newspaper, and laid it on the table between them. It was that day’s Morning Post, come down on the afternoon fast mail coach.

“I had it at five this afternoon,” she said. “Before you came. Read the third column.”

Madeleine read the third column.

It was three lines. ‘The announcement made in these columns on Friday last of an intended marriage between the Marquess of Greyscarp and Lady Honoria Morely was inserted in error, and is withdrawn at the instance of both families.’

It was signed at the foot, in smaller type:

‘Greyscarp. Daventry.’

Madeleine read it twice. She read it a third time.

She set the paper down on the table beside the plate of cold mutton, and put her hand flat on it as though to keep it from rising, but she did not, for some seconds, say anything at all.

“You see,” said Georgiana, gently.

“I see nothing.”

“You see that there was no betrothal. You see that the notice on Friday was placed by someone who had no authority to place it. You see that the gentleman in question likely rode somewhere yesterday — to Hertfordshire, I should guess, since he is not a man to do these things by letter, and that is most probably where the Duke of Daventry was at the time — and was back in London in time to get a retraction into Saturday’s edition, which means that he rode hard, in the heat, and made someone in Fleet Street move at an hour that they do not usually move. Madeleine, you took the coach at five this morning. Did you see the morning paper before you went.”

“No.”

“No. Because it would not have been in the house yet. The morning paper goes up to Grosvenor Square at half past seven or thereabouts, and you were at the Coaching Inn by then. You left on the strength of yesterday’s notice. You did not wait for today’s.”

“There would have been no point in waiting.”

“There would have been every point.”

“Georgiana —”

“No. Listen to me. I shall say this once, then I shall give you the small bedroom that looks over the garden, which was yours before, and you shall sleep, then we will talk about it tomorrow when you have slept. But I shall say it once tonight, because if I do not, you will lie in that bed and you will tell yourself, in the dark, a story about yourself which is not true, and I will not have my sister tell herself a story that is not true under this roof.”