Page 19 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He turned.

He did not start. He turned with the slow controlled movement of a man who has been struck and does not mean to show it, and his face, in the candlelight, went through three expressions in as many seconds — surprise, and something fiercer than surprise, and then the composed neutrality that she had been told, in a yellow drawing room, was the only face she was to see.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord. I beg your pardon. I —”

“You know your Petrarch.”

It was not a question. It was said as a man says a thing he has just discovered and does not yet know what to do with.

“A — a little, my Lord. My father —” She stopped. She had not meant to say my father. She had meant to say ‘I had an Italian master,’ which was true and tidy and required no further explanation. “My father read it with us.”

“With us.”

“With my sisters and me.”

“Ah.” He set the book down on the sill behind him. He did not, she noticed, take his eyes from her. “Forgive me. I did not — I am not in the habit of being overheard in this room at one in the morning.”

“I am not in the habit of overhearing, my Lord. I had — I came down for a book.”

He looked at her empty hands.

She felt the colour go up her face in one slow disastrous wave, and she was glad of the dimness of the room and the smallness of her candle, and she lifted her chin a quarter of an inch because she would not, she would not, stand in the doorway of his library at one in the morning and blush as though she had been caught at a kitchen door.

“I had not yet chosen it,” she said.

“No.”

A pause. The fire ticked. He had not moved from the window. She had not moved from the door. She was acutely conscious of her wrapper, of the plait of her hair over her shoulder, of the slippers that were too thin for the floor, of the fact that she was a woman of two-and-twenty in her nightclothes in a room with a man of perhaps thirty in his, and that no rule that the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp had ever recited to herself, or to anyone else, permitted what was at this moment occurring.

She should go.

She knew she should go. She had her hand on the door.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord.”

“Will you —” He stopped. He passed a hand over his jaw, and she saw, for the first time, that he had not shaved since the morning, and that his hair was disordered in the way of a man who had pushed his fingers through it more than once. “I should not ask you to stay.”

“No, my Lord.”

“I am asking you. As one reader to another, and not —” a small mirthless breath that was almost a laugh “— and not as anything else. There is a chair by the fire. I will stand at the window. The door will remain as you found it.”

She looked at the door. It stood ajar by some four inches, and from where she stood she could see a triangle of black hall and a single point of brass on the banister. It was not a chaperone. It was not even the appearance of a chaperone. It was a fiction they were both going to agree, for perhaps the next hour, to call one.

“For a quarter of an hour, my Lord.”

“For a quarter of an hour.”

She crossed the room.

She did not look at him.

She set her candle on the small table beside the chair he had named, and she sat on the very edge of the chair as a Governess sits in a drawing room she has been summoned to and not invited into, and she folded her hands in her lap.

He stayed at the window. He kept, as he had said he would, the length of the room between them. He picked up the little volume from the sill.