Page 65 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

But she sat with her hand at her mouth and looked at the letter in her lap, and thought, with the steady merciless clarity that ten days of not weeping had given her, that she had made the largest mistake of her life, on the strength of a paragraph in a newspaper. The mistake had been made in good faith, but good faith did not unmake it.

She thought also of Lady Sophia.

Thought of the loose board in the schoolroom under the window, which she had not known about, of the letter being written in bed at a quarter past eight at night, with a candle and a careful round hand and a wafer pressed a little crooked, and she thought, I am the only person who is going to say so, and I am saying it – I have made a most terrible mistake. She put the letter down on the counterpane, got up from the bed, went to the window, and stood for a moment with her forehead against the cool of the glass.

She did not know, yet, what she would do.

Although she did know that she would write to Lady Sophia. She would do that today.

Her letter to Lady Sophia would tell her that Madeliene had received her letter, and that she was well. And she would tell her — she would have to think how to put this — that she was grateful for the news which the letter contained, and that Lady Sophia was not to blame herself for the unhappiness of any person in her family. She would also say that Lady Sophia was to do her French exercise on the Tuesday morning even if there was no Governess in the schoolroom to set it for her, because a habit was a habit, and was not to be broken on account of a vacancy.

She would make it clear that Miss Wharton would, in due course, be very glad to hear what passage Lady Sophia had chosen. She would write that letter today, after dinner, when her sisters and aunt had settled in for the evening with mending, or a book to read.

Perhaps she had been lying to herself when she’d thought that she did not yet know what she would do. She might not – but… she did know what things she would most definitely not do. She knew, for example, that she would not, today, write to him.

She could not write to him today.

She could not write to him because she did not yet know what it was that she had to say, and because what she had to say would have, when she found it, to be said clearly, in the smallest possible number of words – words which refused to come to her, even in her imagination.

But she would find them.

She thought, with the steadiness that she was learning, that she was determined that she would find them by the end of the week.

There was a knock at the door.

“Madeleine.” It was Georgiana, on the landing. “There is a letter for you also by the noon post. From London. The hand is not a child’s.”

Madeleine stood at the window with her forehead against the glass for one moment, staring out at the trees and the garden, not seeing them, before she took herself in hand.

Then she straightened, smoothed her hair where it had loosened at the temple, then took up Lady Sophia’s letter from the counterpane and folded it once along the line at which it had come folded, and put it inside the small writing case on the chest under the window, with the wafer uppermost and a little crooked, where she would find it again when she had need of it.

“I am coming, Georgiana”

She went to the door.

Her heart was pounding as she went, and her mind running in circles at the possibilities.

Who was this letter from?

Was it possible… would he have written to her?

She was a fool to hope for it, yet she did.

Chapter Seventeen

The letter on the hall table was sealed with the Greyscarp wafer, and the hand upon it was, most definitely, not a child’s.

Madeleine stood at the foot of the stairs with it in her hand for an interval that Georgiana, who had gone into the back parlour after emptying the marketing basket and putting the kettle on the hob, did her the courtesy of not measuring. She knew the hand. She had seen it twice — once at the bottom of a note about the schoolroom coal allowance, set by him on the salver in the hall in April; and once on the flyleaf of the little volume of Petrarch that had been put back in its place upon the library shelf in May with a single line beneath the printed title, in pencil so faint that she’d had to tilt it to the window to read it, and which she had not, in the end, copied out.

She put the letter into the pocket of her morning gown.

She did not break the seal in the hall nor on the stairs. She carried it up to the small back bedroom and laid it on the chest beside the writing case in which Sophia’s letter now lay with its wafer uppermost. Then she stood at the window with her hands folded before her, again staring unseeing at the garden, while she built up the courage to sit down on the edge of the bed, take the letter up, and break the seal.

It was very short.

Greyscarp House

Monday