Page 7 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

The question caught her under the ribs, stealing her breath.

She did not at first know how to answer it.

Entitled was not a word she had used about herself in two years. She’d had wages, and a half-day, and clean sheets once a fortnight; ‘entitled’ was a word that belonged to other people.

“A position, my Lord,” she said carefully, “if I am suited to it. And honesty, if I am not.”

“Then I will be honest.” He laid his hand flat on her letter. “I think that you are suited to it. I think that my mother will dislike you on sight, because you are too well-born and too well-spoken and you will make her feel that she has hired her own cousin. I think that Sophia will love you within a week, because you are not afraid of her. And I think —”

He stopped.

She waited.

She found, to her own dismay, that she was holding her breath.

“I think,” he said, more slowly, “that we had better not, you and I, be much in the same room.”

The fire snapped.

Above them, the sound of the pianoforte ceased.

She felt her face go quite cold and then quite hot, and she was grateful — fiercely, ferociously grateful — for the breadth of his desk and the propriety of her gloves and the fact that her hands, in her lap, were still folded one upon the other as though she were a portrait of a young woman being interviewed for a position, and not a young woman being told, in the politest possible English, that the Marquess of Greyscarp had noticed her.

“My Lord,” she said. Her voice was even. She did not know how. “I think that is a condition with which any Governess in this house would be obliged to comply.”

“Just so.”

“Schoolrooms are at the top of the stairs for a reason.”

“They are.”

“And libraries,” she said, very steadily, “are not generally on a Governess’ daily round.”

“They are not.”

He was looking at her with that same clear attention, and she understood, suddenly and completely, that he was as discomposed as she was, and was managing it better only because he’d had thirty years of practice in not showing what he felt.

It was an odd intimacy, that recognition. She would have preferred almost anything else.

He stood.

She rose at once.

“I shall speak to my mother when she returns,” he said. “I expect that she will write to you tomorrow. The terms — sixty pounds a year, your own room and parlour, a half-day Wednesday and a full day on the first Sunday of each month — I trust they are acceptable.”

Sixty pounds. She had been offered forty in Yorkshire and taken it. Sixty pounds was — not generosity, exactly; it was correctness. It was what a Viscount’s daughter ought to earn, and what no one had thought to give her, before.

“They are very acceptable, my Lord.”

“You would come down — when?”

“I can be ready in a fortnight.”

“A week would be better. Sophia is —” he hesitated — “Sophia is presently being instructed by her sister’s lady’s maid, which is satisfactory to nobody, least of all the maid.”

“A week, then.”

“Thank you.”