Page 61 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He went back to the desk. He sat down behind it this time, in his own chair, opened the small drawer on the right-hand side, took from it a folded sheet of paper, and set it on the blotter. It was the note that he had found on the schoolroom table on the Saturday morning, when he had come up the three flights of stairs at half past eight with the retraction in his hand.

He’d had the intention then, formed in the saddle between Hertfordshire and London, of laying it on the schoolroom table in front of her himself.

That note he’d found was in her hand. It said very little, simply that she had been called away on a family matter, that she was grateful for the kindness she had received at Greyscarp House, that she begged he would convey her affection to Lady Sophia, and that she remained his obedient servant, Madeleine Wharton. There was no direction.

He had carried it in his pocket for two days. He had put it in the drawer on the Monday because he had judged, with a cold precision that he was beginning to learn to use upon himself, that a man who carried such a thing in his pocket was a man who would, in the end, take it out in a room where he ought not to take it out, and read it, and be observed reading it - and he would not give them that.

“I shall write to her this morning,” he said.

“You have her direction.”

“Hodges had her trunk sent on yesterday. Mrs Holland had the address from her on Wednesday by the second post. It is Bath. She is with her sisters and aunt, in a village just this side of Bath itself.”

“You will write.”

“I will write today. I shall not go down. If I went down it would be in the papers within the week, and I will not have her name in the papers because I could not keep myself out of a coach. I shall write.”

“And say what.”

Stirling looked at him.

“I do not know yet,” he said. “I shall find out when I write it.”

Frederick nodded slowly. He was a careful man, and a fond one, and he had known Stirling all their lives, and more closely since they were boys at Eton together, with the difference of three months in their ages. He sat for a moment longer in his chair, looked at his cousin across the desk, and weighed, with the gravity proper to the case, whether there was any further thing he might usefully say.

He spoke eventually.

“Stirling, may I speak plainly?”

“You always do.”

“Not always. Not in this. I have not, in this, said any of the things which I have thought, because you have not asked me to, and because I am your cousin and not your conscience. But I will say one thing now, because I think that you will not be the worse for hearing it. May I?”

“Speak.”

“You have been,” said Frederick, “in love with this woman since April. I know it because I have eyes, and because I dined in this house in May, and because you have not — Stirling, you have not been able to say her name in my hearing without taking a breath first, and you took the breath again three minutes ago. Do not insult me by denying it; I am not asking you to confirm it. I am asking you only to consider, before you write your letter, what you are writing it for.”

Stirling did not speak.

“If you are writing,” said Frederick, “to ask her pardon, write it. If you are writing to ask her to come back to her place, do not write it; she will not come, and she ought not to come, and you know both of those things. If you are writing — Stirling, look at me — if you are writing to ask her something else, then you must first ask yourself whether you have any right to ask it, and you must answer that question honestly, because she will answer it honestly when she reads the letter, and you owe her at least the courtesy of having got there before her.”

There was a silence in the library.

The clock on the mantel struck the half hour. It was half past eleven, on the third of July, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighteen, and, somewhere in the upper part of the house, a door closed softly, and somewhere in the lower part Hodges was speaking to a footman in the undertone which he used when he had been instructed to admit no one, and in Saint James’ Street, three‑quarters of a mile away, a man at a window of his club was, at that precise hour, saying to yet another friend, ‘No, I had it from Allerby, who had it everywhere’.

Stirling put his hand on the folded note on the blotter.

“I have no right,” he said, “to ask her anything. I know that. I am not a fool, Frederick, whatever else I may have shown myself to be this fortnight. I shall ask her nothing. I shall tell her what has been done in her name. I shall tell her what I propose to do about it. I shall tell her —” he stopped. He took the breath Frederick had spoken of. “— I shall tell her that her name shall not be in any paper printed in this town while I have breath in my body to prevent it; and that if she wishes never to hear from me again after she has read my letter, then she has only to say that, and she shall not thereafter hear from me. That is what I shall write.”

“That is a great deal.”

“It is what is owed.”

Frederick stood up.

“Then I shall go to Hodges,” he said, “and to Mrs Holland, and to Bicknell. You will have the first answers by six. Write your letter, Stirling. Write it before you read what Bicknell brings, because what Bicknell brings will alter the temper in which you write, almost certainly for the worse, and the letter to Miss Wharton must not be written in a temper.”

He went to the door.