Page 78 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I should not,” said Madeleine, looking down at their joined hands upon the seat, “have minded if you had stopped.”

“I should have minded. I had given my word to your aunt that I should not see you before the church.”

“You are a man of your word, my Lord.”

“I am trying,” he said, “to be.”

The carriage came up the hill at Highgate, and the houses thinned, and the hot sooty dust of London gave way to the green and brown earthy dust of the Hertfordshire road; and Madeleine looked at him, at last, with the private enjoyment of a woman who would not, now, have to look away.

He was looking at her.

He had been looking at her, she understood, since the carriage had turned out of Oxford Street.

He had been looking at her with the intense attention from those grey eyes that she had felt upon her in the breakfast room at Hawksmoor Hall in June, and in the drawing room at Lady Sefton’s in July, and at the altar rail at half past nine that morning.

There was, in his looking now, neither apology nor question, but only the fact of a man who had at last understood that he might look as long as he liked.

She did not look away.

“Madeleine,” he said, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“I have nothing very particular to say. I find I should only like to look at you for a little while, if you will allow it.”

“I will allow it.”

He raised her hand, then, the gloved hand with the gold ring under the kid, turned it, set his lips very lightly upon the inside of her wrist where the pulse beat above the line of the glove; and then laid the hand down again upon the seat between them. He did not release it; and as the carriage rolled north out of London in the heavy gold light of an August afternoon, neither of them, for a long quiet hour together, looked away.

Epilogue

May 1820

The Italian garden at Hawksmoor Hall had been, in the spring of 1818, partially a low ruin of broken urns and overgrown box, with a fountain that had not run since the old Marquess’ time and a sundial whose gnomon had been carried off, Madeleine suspected, by a gardener’s boy in 1809 for some purpose of his own.

It had been restored slowly, over two summers, under Madeleine’s direction and with Stirling’s quiet acquiescence in every choice she made.

On the eleventh of May, 1820, in the warm clear middle of the morning, it was a place of pale gravel and clipped box and four stone benches in a square, with the fountain running, and the sundial mended, and a great pot of rosemary at each of the four corners of the parterre.

Madeleine sat upon the bench that faced south, in the loose white muslin which the modiste had made for her in March, in preparation for the time of her not being able to be laced, with a Norwich shawl across her shoulders and her feet upon a footstool which Sophia had carried out from the morning room without being asked.

She had a small volume of Petrarch open upon her lap, which she was not reading.

Instead, she was looking at the fountain, and at the way that the water came up out of the bronze mouth of the fish and fell back into the basin in an unhurried twist which caught the light.

She was six months gone with the child, and was, that morning, neither tired nor sick, which was a state of affairs which she had learned, in the last three months, to receive as a kind of small private grace.

Sophia came up the avenue at a run.

She was fourteen, and had let down her skirts in February, and had, in consequence of letting down her skirts, been obliged to learn not to run; but the avenue was long, the morning was warm, and there was no one to see her but Madeleine, who did not count.

Sophia came through the wrought-iron gate of the garden with a letter held high in her hand, her cheeks pink and her hair slightly disordered at the temple, and she stopped at the edge of the parterre to put one hand upon her side until she had enough breath to speak.

“Madeleine. Two letters. One from Beatrice and one from Georgiana. They have come in the same post, and you must read them both at once.”

“I cannot, dearest, read them both at once. I have only the two eyes.”

“Then read Beatrice’s first, because Beatrice’s is the longer.”