Page 15 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

The needle went in, came out.

The Dowager did not lift her eyes.

“May I ask why?”

“Because if I had told you who she was, you would have refused to see her. And because, having seen her myself, I did not think that you would refuse her once you had.”

“That is a calculation, Stirling, not a reason.”

“It is the reason I had.”

She allowed that. She drew the silk through, snipped it with the small silver scissors that had been her mother’s, and selected a new colour with the deliberation of a woman who knew that her son was watching her hands and not her face.

“She is a creditable young woman,” the Dowager said. “I will give you that. She has her mother’s composure. Her father’s — well. We need not speak of her father.”

“No.”

“Sophia laughed this morning.”

“Price told me.”

“Price tells you a great deal, I find.”

“Price is paid to.”

There was a small dry sound, which in another woman would have been a laugh. The Dowager set a stitch.

“I have made the situation clear to her, Stirling.”

“I do not doubt it.”

“She is to remain in the schoolroom. She is not to be seen in the public rooms. She is not —” a small pause, in which the needle hesitated and then resumed, “— to be found in the library.”

Stirling, who had been standing by the mantel, turned his head a quarter of an inch.

“Was she found in the library, Mama?”

“She was interviewed in the library, Stirling. By you. At your express invitation, I am informed.”

“By me. Yes.”

“It was not, perhaps, the room I should have chosen.”

“It was the room in which I happened to be.”

“You happen to be, at various times, my dear, in a great many rooms in which you might also happen to choose not to be.”

He let that pass. He had been letting his mother’s small barbs pass for five years, since the afternoon at Hawksmoor Hall when he had stood by his father’s bed and listened to the rattle of a breath that did not come again, and had understood, before the doctor had said it, that he was now the Marquess of Greyscarp and would be answering to that name and that woman for the rest of his natural life. He had inherited, that afternoon, a title, a seat, a quantity of debt his father had not seen fit to mention, three sisters in varying states of grief, and a mother who had loved her husband in her own arid fashion and now proposed to manage her son with the same patient determination.

He had not, in five years, refused her anything that mattered to her. He had also not, in five years, given her anything of himself that she had not asked for.

“I shall remember it, Mama,” he said.

“I should be glad if you would.”

The needle went in, came out. The fire crackled softly. From somewhere above — the second-floor landing again, he thought; perhaps she was going down to the housekeeper — came the brief small footfall of a woman who walked as though she had been told, much of her life, to walk lightly.

The Dowager did not appear to hear it. Or, if she heard it, she did not appear to find it worthy of a remark. She set another stitch, and another, and at length she said, without raising her eyes: