Page 58 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine gritted her teeth.

“I do not know that I can agree with what you just said – what story do you imagine I am inventing? I do not think that invention is involved – after all, I am the one who has lived all of these things!”

“You did not run away to protect your honour,” said Georgiana. “You ran away because you were afraid. Those are not the same thing. They sometimes look the same from the outside, but they are not the same. A woman who protects her honour stays where she is and behaves with propriety and tells the gentleman, if she must, that he is not to address her on such terms again; and if he persists, she goes to her employer’s mother, or to the housekeeper, or to her own family, and she arranges her removal in the daylight, with a character, and with a forwarding address. She does not take the coach at five in the morning with a valise, and leave a note on a table for a man who has done — Madeleine, look at me — who has done, so far as you have told me, nothing dishonourable at all.”

“He danced with me in the schoolroom.”

“He danced with you in the schoolroom. Did he kiss you?”

“No.”

“Did he touch you, beyond what was required by the figure?”

“No.”

“Did he, at any time, address you in a way no gentleman should address a gentlewoman?”

“No. He has been — he has been only —”

“Yes. I thought as much. He has been only what you most feared he should be, which is a man who loves you and has not said so, because he knows he cannot say so without ruining you. And you have been afraid, and so you have run; and you have left him to find a folded note on a wiped table in an empty schoolroom, after he rode, I should think, forty miles, in the heat yesterday to undo a thing that someone, his mother I suspect, did in his name. Madeleine. You are not protecting your honour. You are protecting yourself from having to face him.”

Madeleine spoke then, her voice very low and uneven.

“I cannot face him.”

“You can. You may choose not to. That is a different matter. But you can.”

“Georgiana — what would you have me do?”

“Tonight, nothing. Tonight you eat the rest of the mutton, you go up to bed, and you sleep until you wake, which will not, I think, be before noon. Tomorrow you write two letters.”

“Two.”

Madeleine met Georgiana’s eyes, needing reassurance.

“One to Mrs Holland, with this address, so that your trunk may be sent on. One to Lady Sophia, who is twelve and who, from what you have said, noticed everything, and to whom you owe a better farewell than a folded note in a schoolroom. You will not pretend with Lady Sophia. You will tell her what may properly be told, which is that you were called to your sisters in Bath, that you hold her in great affection and that you shall write to her again.”

“And —”

“And there will be a third letter, which I did not yet mention, that you will not write tomorrow. You will wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For him to write to you. Which he will.”

“He does not know where I am.”

“He will know within the week. Hodges will have the direction from Mrs Holland the moment that your trunk is sent for. The Marquess is not a fool, Madeleine, and neither, I gather, is his butler, and neither, when she is not being foolish, I expect, is his mother. He will write. And when he writes, you will answer him; and you will answer him as a gentlewoman, with your own name, in your own hand, from this address, in the daylight. Not by running. By staying.”

Madeleine sat for a long moment looking at the folded paper on the table, at her own hand upon it, at the small fire in the grate, and at her sister, who sat opposite her in her dull grey gown with her sewing scissors on the table beside her, and looked back with the level hazel eyes.

Her voice was gentle, yet implacable. It was the voice which had been, since Madeleine was nine and Georgiana eleven, the voice which had told her, on every occasion that mattered, the things that she did not wish to hear.

“I have made a mess of it,” Madeleine said.

“You have made the beginning of a mess of it. The end of the mess is not yet made. You may still unmake it. But you will not unmake it by sitting in Bath in this parlour, and weeping into the wallflowers; and you will not unmake it, either, by going back to London tomorrow on the coach in a panic, which I know is what you are thinking of doing, and what you will not do. You will write the two letters. You will wait for his. You will eat your dinner, and you will walk in the village with me in the mornings, as though you were a perfectly ordinary woman visiting her sisters and aunt, which for the present, as far as anyone hereabouts is concerned, is exactly what you are. And when his letter comes, you will answer it. That is what you will do.”

“And if his letter does not come?”