Page 64 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Please write back, Miss Wharton.

Please write back, even if it is only to say that you have had my letter and that you are well. I shall not show it to anyone. I shall keep it under the loose board in the schoolroom under the window, which I do not think you knew about, and I shall not tell anyone that you have written.

I am, dear Miss Wharton, your affectionate pupil,

Sophia Hawksmoor.

P.S. Stirling is unhappy.

I am putting that in because I think that you ought to know. He came up to the schoolroom on Sunday, stood in the doorway, but did not come in, and he looked at your chair, and then he went away again.

He has been in his library since we came down to the Hall, except when he rides out before breakfast, and does not come in until dinner.

I am not telling you this to make you do anything, Miss Wharton. I am telling you because you taught me that one does not pretend a thing is not true, just because it is inconvenient that it should be true, and so I am not pretending.

P.P.S. The wafer will likely be crooked because I am sitting in bed, and being very careful with the candle.

Madeleine sat for a long while with the letter in her lap.

The light at the window moved, very slightly, on the counterpane. Downstairs a door opened and shut, and Georgiana’s voice said something quiet to someone in the kitchen, then the kettle was set on, and the small, ordered noises of the morning went on without her.

She read the letter again.

Then she read it a third time. On the third reading she stopped at the sentence ‘I know the betrothal was broken before you left, Miss Wharton, and not after,’ and she put her hand flat on the page over the words, as if to keep them from moving, and she shut her eyes.

She remembered reading the notice in the ‘Morning Post’ that day, in the schoolroom at Greyscarp House. She had read it twice, then she had read it a third time. Then she had folded the paper, very neatly, along the line at which it had been folded by the footman, and had set it back on the table.

She had spent the day trying to be as normal, when everything had changed, but by evening she had known that she had no option but to leave, so she had written the note which said that she had been called away upon a family matter.

The next morning, very early, she had left the two notes – one for the Marquess, and one for Lady Sophia - on the schoolroom table, and, taking her valise, simply left.

She’d had some of her saved wages, less the two pounds she had sent to her sister Beatrice a few months earlier, in a purse pinned inside her bodice, and she had gone, on foot, to the Bull and Mouth, and taken the coach to Bath.

At that point, she had thought that he had asked Lady Honoria on the Friday morning, at the end of that first two weeks in Hertfordshire.

She had thought that he had ridden up to town on the Friday afternoon to put the announcement in. She had thought, travelling down to Bath in the coach, that he had been very prompt about it, and that it was a thing she would, in time, be grateful for, because a man who acts promptly upon his duty is a man who has not been weak, and she had not wanted, on the whole, to think of him as weak.

She had wanted to think of him as a man who had done what was required of him, and who had done it within forty‑eight hours of the night that she had stood with him on a terrace in the rain at Hawksmoor Hall and told him that there was nothing to be said.

That story of what had happened had travelled with her down the road, she had unpacked it in the cottage, and she had been living inside it for ten days.

It was not true.

It had not been true on the morning when she’d read the paper.

He had not put the notice in.

His mother had put the notice in.

He had come back from Hertfordshire on that very day — by Lady Sophia’s account, in time to come straight to his mother and make her write to the editor, ‘today, Mama’ — and he had come up the three flights of stairs to the schoolroom intending, Madeleine understood now with a sharp cold clarity, to tell her so himself; but he had found a folded sheet of paper on the schoolroom table, and her shawl gone from the back of the chair, and no direction.

Madeleine put her hand to her mouth.

She did not weep.

As she had not wept in the last ten days, not in the coach, and not in the back parlour of the cottage on the Saturday evening when Georgiana had set the cold mutton before her, and not in the small back bedroom at night when she had lain with her hands folded on her breast and counted the tops of the row of pine trees that she could see through the window, until she slept.

She had not wept and she did not weep now.