Page 16 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Cecilia tells me that Lord Edmund Carmody has called twice this week.”

“He has called once. The second was a card.”

“You did not receive him.”

“I did not.”

“He will keep calling, Stirling.”

“He may call as often as he likes. I am not at home to him.”

“He is a Carmody. One is generally at home to a Carmody.”

“One is at home,” said Stirling, more sharply than he had meant, “to those whom one chooses to be at home to. I do not choose Carmody.”

She looked up at last.

Her pale quick eyes rested on him without surprise.

“No,” she said. “I had observed that you did not. I wonder, sometimes, what he has done to deserve it.”

“Nothing yet.”

“Ah.” A small wintry smile. “You anticipate.”

“I have known him since Eton, Mama. I anticipate accurately.”

She let the silk fall into her lap.

For a moment she was not the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp in her chair by her son’s fire; she was a small white-haired woman who had buried a husband and married off a difficult daughter, had two more daughters to dispose of, and a son she did not, in her private heart, understand.

“Stirling.”

“Mama.”

“Have a care.”

He inclined his head.

He did not ask her what she meant. He had a fair idea, and he did not, this afternoon, wish to hear it spoken aloud in his father’s library by his father’s widow in his father’s chair.

*****

She left him at five. He stood a long while at the window, watching the square turn the colour of pewter, and at last he went to the desk and answered his man of business about the Hertfordshire timber in three lines, none of which he afterwards remembered writing.

He rang for Hobbs. He would ask for the carriage at seven; he would dine at his club. He did not, he told himself with some firmness, wish to dine in his own house tonight.

The bell-pull was answered, as it happened, not by Hobbs, but by Price, who had been passing the door with a tray of empty cups from the Dowager’s drawing room and had stopped, with the practised neutrality of an upper housemaid, to receive his order.

“My Lord.”

“The carriage at seven, Price. And tell Hobbs that I shall not be in to dinner, but will be dressing to suit going to my club.”

“Very good, my Lord.”

She turned. She had her hand on the door when he heard himself speak again, and was sorry for it before the words were out.

“Price.”