Page 2 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

That was the phrase, gentle and absolute, in which the catastrophe was wrapped.

Her father — careful, mild, scholarly Papa, who had never raised his voice and who had always smelt faintly of bergamot and old books — had put nearly everything into a speculation in the Americas, through a man named Hollis, and Hollis had absconded, and the speculation had been worth, at the last accounting, somewhat less than the paper the contracts were printed on. There were other debts behind it: a mortgage Madeleine had not known existed, a loan against the Park itself, a string of smaller obligations strung like beads on a thread that had finally, in the study on a Wednesday afternoon in October, snapped.

The verdict at the inquest was ‘misadventure’. Dr Garrick, who had known her father thirty years, swore it had been the heart, and the coroner — a kindly man with a daughter Madeleine’s age — accepted his word and signed the paper and shook her mother’s hand and looked, as he did so, as though he were doing the family the last good turn anyone would do them.

It was not enough.

Within a month the ton had decided otherwise.

Madeleine did not know, at first, how she knew this.

There was no announcement, no editorial, no whispered confidence; nobody in the world of her acquaintance was so vulgar as to say the thing. It travelled by other means — by the angle at which a calling card was left, by the inflection in a condolence note, by the names that did not appear at the funeral, by the small grey silence that fell when one entered a shop in the village and the shopkeeper’s wife discovered that she had urgent business in the back.

By Christmas, Madeleine understood.

By Easter, her mother did.

By the time they removed to the small house in Half Moon Street that Lady Penworthy’s brother and his wife had reluctantly opened to them, at least for the short term, the understanding was complete: Lord Penworthy had not died of his heart.

Lord Penworthy had, in the privacy of his study, before an open ledger, done a thing for which a Christian gentleman was not buried in consecrated ground, and had only escaped that judgement because his physician had loved him.

It was not true.

Madeleine was certain it was not true. She had seen him. There had been no pistol, no phial, nothing but his face on his arm and the wick still smoking.

But certainty, she learned that winter, was not the currency in which the world traded.

*****

The drawing room was Lady Carstairs’, in Bruton Street, on an afternoon in early March when the rain had at last stopped and half of London had come out to congratulate themselves on the weather. Madeleine had not wanted to go. Her aunt had insisted.

“One does not hide, Madeleine. Hiding is confession.”

So she had put on her grey poplin — her only good gown that was not full mourning, though the half-mourning was scarcely better — and let the maid arrange her hair, and walked the three streets on her aunt’s arm with her chin level and her gloves clean, and presented herself at Lady Carstairs’ door because Lady Carstairs had been one of her mother’s bridesmaids and could not, surely, refuse the card.

Lady Carstairs did not refuse the card.

Lady Carstairs received them with a small tight smile and a remark about the weather, and then turned to speak to someone else.

The room was full.

Madeleine saw, across the carpet, Eliza Marchmont.

Eliza had been her dearest friend since they were nine years old.

They had shared a Governess one summer in Hertfordshire when Eliza’s parents had taken a neighbouring house; they had written, every fortnight, through every Season since. Eliza had cried at Madeleine’s father’s funeral — Madeleine had a letter from her, four pages, ink blotched at the corners, that she still carried folded inside her glove because it was the last kind thing anyone outside her family had written to her. Eliza was wearing pale blue and standing near the fire with two other girls Madeleine half-knew, and when she turned and saw Madeleine across the room, her face did a small, terrible thing.

It was not cruel. That was what Madeleine remembered. It was not even unkind. It was only that Eliza’s face composed itself, very quickly, into the expression one wears when one has noticed nothing — when there is, in fact, nothing to notice — and she turned a quarter-step to the left and addressed a remark to the girl on her right, and did not look towards the door again.

Madeleine stood quite still.

She was aware, with a clarity that seemed almost detached from her body, of the room around her: the heat of the fire, the smell of hyacinths in a bowl on the side table, the small clean sound of a teaspoon against china. She was aware of her aunt’s hand tightening on her arm. She was aware that two women near the window had stopped speaking and were now looking, very carefully, at the carpet.

Eliza laughed at something. It was her real laugh — the laugh Madeleine had heard a thousand times, in gardens and at picnics and in the schoolroom at Penworthy Park. It rang out across the drawing room as though nothing in the world were the matter.

“Madeleine,” her aunt said quietly. “We are leaving.”

“Yes,” Madeleine said. “In a moment.”