Page 17 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“My Lord.”

“Lady Sophia. Did she — was the day —”

Price paused. She did not turn her head.

She was a Welshwoman of forty whose face had been trained, over twenty-two years of service, to express precisely nothing, and she was not about to alter that training now.

“Lady Sophia took her tea at eleven, my Lord. And again, at four. She fell asleep over the atlas after luncheon. Miss Wharton covered her with the shawl from the schoolroom sofa and did not wake her.”

“I see.”

“She has eaten her supper, my Lord. All of it.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

A small silence. Price waited. Stirling, who had not at first realised that he had a question in him, found that he had one more, and that he could not, in conscience, leave it unsaid.

“And Miss Wharton?”

“My Lord?”

“She has — settled, I hope. She has what she requires?”

“She has taken a tray in her parlour, my Lord. She rang once, for hot water. She has asked for nothing more.”

“Thank you, Price.”

“My Lord.”

The door closed behind her with the particular softness of a door closed by a servant who knew that she had been asked a question her master ought not, by the rules of his house, to have asked.

Stirling stood by the desk for a long moment.

He looked down at the letter to his man of business, which he had signed ‘Greyscarp’ in the firm even hand his father had taught him at twelve.

A tray in her parlour. Hot water, once. Nothing else.

He had given her, by the terms of her engagement, a schoolroom, a bedroom, a parlour, and sixty pounds a year. He had given her, by the unwritten rules of his house — rules his mother had now, very properly, set out for her in a yellow drawing room — silence in the corridors and invisibility on the stairs.

He had given her, by the lights of his world, everything a woman of her sort could reasonably expect to receive from a man of his.

He had given her, also, an interview in the library that he should have conducted in the drawing room, and an inflection on her name that he had not intended, and unbeknownst to her, half an hour this morning, in which he had heard a board creak on the second-floor landing and stood still to listen for the next one, thinking of her.

He went up to dress for his club.

He passed, on the first-floor landing, the drawing-room door, which was closed; then continued to the second-floor landing, where the door to his own apartments stood ajar as Hobbs had left it; and he did not, by the smallest movement of his head, glance up the narrow uncarpeted stair that rose, at the end of the corridor, to the schoolroom floor.

He was rather proud of himself for that, until he reached his dressing room and discovered, on examining the matter with the cold honesty he reserved for his ledgers and his conscience, that he had been counting the stairs as he passed them.

Eleven to the schoolroom door. He had known the number since he was eight years old. He had not, until this evening, had occasion to count them as a man counts the distance to a thing he has been forbidden.

He stood in the middle of his dressing room with his cravat half undone and said, aloud and to no one:

“This will not do.”

Hobbs, entering at that moment with the black coat over his arm, inclined his head with the perfect deafness of a valet of thirty years’ standing, and laid the coat across the back of the chair.