Page 74 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

And then, from the further drawing room beyond the open double doors, a man came through.

He had not been there ten seconds before. Madeleine was certain of it; she had looked, when they came in, at every face in both rooms with the involuntary thoroughness of a woman who had been told that he would not be there. He had not been there.

He was there now. He was in black evening dress with a white figured silk waistcoat, his hair was the rich dark brown that his mother’s had once been, and was, this evening, brushed back from the brow with the precision of a man who had dressed with care and had then ridden, Madeleine saw at the second glance, hard, for he wore breeches suitable for that, and boots – most out of place in a drawing room like this.

He came down the length of the drawing room between the gilt chairs at a pace which was not hurried and was not slow, and which had, in it, the quality of a thing decided upon some hours before, and now merely being done.

He passed Lord Edmund Carmody without looking at him. He stopped before Madeleine’s chair.

“Miss Wharton,” said the Marquess of Greyscarp.

Madeleine rose. She had not, until she was standing, known that she meant to rise; she found that she had risen, in the ordinary courtesy of a woman who is addressed by name in a drawing room, so she stood with her hand upon the back of the gilt chair, glad of its support, and looked up at him.

“My Lord.”

“Will you give me your hand?”

There was, in the drawing room, the particular silence of a room of forty people who have all, at the same instant, ceased to pretend that they are not listening. The soprano at the pianoforte had set her hand upon the music stand and had not turned the page. Lady Sefton had risen from her chair at the front. The Dowager Marchioness, beside Madeleine, had not moved at all.

Madeleine gave him her hand. It was the smallest movement — her right hand, in its white glove, set into his — and she felt, through the two thicknesses of glove, that his hand was not steady, and that he had known, when he came down the length of the room, that it would not be steady, and had come anyway.

He did not bow over her hand. He turned, with her hand in his, to face the room.

“Lady Sefton. Ladies and gentlemen. I beg your pardon, and Miss Linwood’s, for the interruption; I shall be brief.” His voice was perfectly level. “I am told that a remark has just been made in this room concerning a young woman of my household. The young woman is Miss Madeleine Wharton, granddaughter of the late Earl of Wexford, daughter of the late Viscount Penworthy, and, until very lately, Governess to my sister Lady Sophia Hawksmoor. She has been, in that office, a model of every quality that a young woman of her birth and her character could bring to it; and she has been the object, in the past few weeks, of a campaign of slander conducted with deliberate intent by a person now in this room.”

He did not look at Carmody. He did not need to. Every face in the room had already turned, by the smallest fraction, in the same direction.

“I have,” he went on, “no interest in the slander, except that it has touched her, and that it has been believed by persons whose belief in it was procured by methods I am not prepared, in Lady Sefton’s drawing room, to characterise. I have an interest in correcting it. I correct it now. Miss Wharton has done me, in the course of these three months, the honour of refusing my addresses upon two occasions, with reasons that did her credit and that I had not, at the time, the wit to overturn. I have come this evening to ask her, in the hearing of this room, whether she will do me the still greater honour of receiving them a third time, and of considering them. I do so because every other manner of asking has been made impossible by the conduct of the gentleman behind me, and because I will not have her name spoken in any room in London in any way that is not respectful, as is the way in which I am about to speak it.”

He turned his head, then, very slightly, towards her. His grey eyes were catching the light, and looked almost silver, and were not, this evening, the eyes that she had seen in the breakfast room at Hawksmoor Hall; they were the eyes of a man who had come here after receiving little or no warning, and had come into a drawing room without knowing what he would say in it and had said it anyway.

“Miss Wharton. I do not ask you for an answer here. I should not so impose. I ask only that you permit me to call upon you, in your aunt’s house, at any hour she will name, and to put the question to you as it ought to be put. Will you allow it?”

Madeleine was aware of her aunt beside her, very still. She was aware of the Dowager Marchioness on her other side, who had laid one hand very lightly upon the gilt arm of her chair and was not looking at her at all. She was aware of the room, which was, collectively, holding a breath that had begun perhaps eight seconds before and had not yet ended.

She was aware, most particularly, of his hand on hers.

“My Lord,” she said, in a voice which carried no further than was needful, “you may call.”

“You are very good.”

“My aunt,” said Madeleine, “is in the row before you. She will name the hour.”

“Mrs Frampton,” said the Marquess, without taking his eyes from Madeleine.

“Eleven o’clock on Monday, my Lord,” said Mrs Frampton, in the unhurried voice with which she had received the Dowager Marchioness in her parlour that morning. “Doughty Street. The number is forty‑one.”

“At eleven on Monday I shall be at your door.”

He released Madeleine’s hand. He bowed to her — not the minimal civil bow of a drawing room, but the deeper bow of a man making, in public, a promise — and then he turned, walked four paces back along the row of gilt chairs, and stopped before Lord Edmund Carmody, who had risen.

Carmody was a man of about thirty‑five, with a high colour and the particular pallor at the lip of a man who had, ten minutes before, been the wittiest person in the room and had not been prepared, in the next ten minutes, to be anything else.

“Carmody.”

“Greyscarp.”

“You will retract what you said ten minutes ago concerning Miss Wharton.”