Page 80 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I have. Beatrice is to be married. Georgiana is to go to Heron Court.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Lyttelton wrote to me last week. Augusta heard from Beatrice on the Saturday, and wrote to him at his club, and he wrote to me on Monday, and asked whether I had heard yet. I had not. I have been waiting four days to be told, and have been very virtuous about it.”

“You have been insufferable about it. You wrote to me on Tuesday saying that you had ‘news you should keep until I asked’.”

“I did. I am not, you see, a man of my word.”

“You are,” said Madeleine, “every day more nearly one.”

He smiled at that, and knelt down upon one knee upon the gravel beside the bench, which was not, in 1820, a posture a Marquess generally assumed in his own garden, and which Madeleine had, in the last two years, ceased to remark upon; and he took her hand, the left hand with the plain gold band of his grandmother’s upon the fourth finger, and he held it in both of his upon his knee, and he said,

“The bill has had its third reading.”

“Stirling.”

“Yesterday afternoon, at a quarter past five. Carlisle wrote to me by the night post. It will have the royal assent by Whitsun.”

She did not say anything for a moment. The fountain went on in with its steady unhurried fall behind them; Sophia, who knew what the bill was and what it meant and who had, at fourteen, the useful tact of a girl who had grown up in a schoolroom with a Governess who had taught her when to be silent, looked at the rosemary in the corner pot and said nothing.

“It will not bring him back,” Madeleine said, at last.

“No.”

“It will not undo any of it.”

“No. It will only — it will only mean that the next man who is told that the Carron and Forth Canal Company cannot fail will be told it by a director who has put his own name to a paper which says that he believes it. And it will mean that when the company does fail, the man who said that it could not will be answerable.”

“That is a great deal, Stirling.”

“It is enough,” he said, “for one bill.”

She lifted his hand, then, the way he had lifted hers in the carriage out of London twenty-one months before, and she set her lips very lightly upon the inside of his wrist above the cuff of his shirt; and Sophia, who had been raised with the best understanding of manners, looked very steadily at the rosemary.

“There is another thing,” Stirling said.

“Tell me.”

“Mr Hollings has written. He would like to come down on the Friday se’nnight to look at Sophia’s portfolio, and he says that, if she will permit him, he will undertake her instruction until Michaelmas at least, and longer if she wishes it.”

Sophia’s head came around.

“He said ‘undertake’ me?”

“He said ‘undertake the instruction of Lady Sophia Hawksmoor, whose drawings of the hands I have not been able to put out of my mind’. I am quoting, Sophia. I have the letter in my pocket.”

“Stirling, you are not to tease.”

“I am not teasing. Read it.”

He drew the letter from his waistcoat pocket and gave it to her.

Sophia, who had at twelve been able to weep for forty seconds and recover, found at fourteen that she could not quite recover at all, so she stood up and walked three paces to the rosemary and stood with her back to them to read the letter.

Madeleine and Stirling, with the kindness of two people who had been married twenty-one months and had learned to be silent together, let her.