Page 21 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He did not write. She knew that he did not write. She read the sonnet, twice, and then she read another, and another, and she did not, for any of them, take in a word she read, because every part of her that was not holding the book was listening to the small absence of sound from the desk and the small particular sound of a man breathing carefully in a chair in which he was not, in fact, working.

It was not ten minutes. It was, by the clock on the chimneypiece when at last she looked up, nearly an hour.

She closed the book.

“My Lord.”

He turned at once.

“Yes.”

“I must go up.”

“Yes.”

She rose. She set the book down on the table — and he rose, too, and crossed the room in three strides, and stopped, with the table between them, and put out his hand.

She thought, for a single small instant in which her heart did something that was neither a beat nor a stillness, that he meant to take her hand.

He did not. He picked up the book.

He held it a moment, looking down at it. Then he turned it in his hand and held it out to her, across the table, with the spine towards her palm.

“Take it.”

“My Lord, I cannot — “

“It was my father’s. He did not read it. I have not read all of it. It is—” and now he did smile, a small, tired, wry smile that did something to his mouth which she would not, she had resolved an hour ago, allow herself to remember, “— it is wasted on this shelf, Miss Wharton, and you will read it at an angle, which is the only way it deserves to be read. Take it.”

“If I take it —”

“You will return it when you have finished with it. You will return it to this room, at this hour, and to no one else. Will that do?”

She looked at the book. She looked at his hand on the book. She did not look at his face.

She took it. Her fingers brushed his, for the briefest possible passage of skin on skin — a quarter of an inch, perhaps, of the side of his thumb against the side of her knuckle — and she felt it travel up her arm and settle, with the small definitive click of a key turning, somewhere under her breastbone where she had thought there was no longer any lock to be turned.

She drew her hand back. She held the book against her with both hands, as a child holds a doll.

“Goodnight, my Lord.”

“Goodnight, Miss Wharton.”

She crossed the room. At the door she paused — she did not know why; she did not turn — and she said, to the dark triangle of hall:

“It was the second quatrain you forgot, my Lord. E gli occhi porto. Not the first.”

A pause.

“I had not forgotten it,” he said, behind her. “I had stopped.”

She did not answer that. She went out, and she pulled the door to behind her — not quite shut, because to shut it would have been to admit that it had been open — and she went up the eleven creaking stairs to the schoolroom floor with the Canzoniere held against her ribs, and she did not let herself run, and she did not let herself look back, and she did not let herself, when at last she had closed her own door behind her and set the book on the little table by the bed, do anything at all but sit down on the edge of the mattress and press both hands flat against her mouth.

Below her, the Marquess of Greyscarp stood for a long time at the window of his library, with his hand resting on the sill where the little book had been, and looked at his own dim face in the glass, and did not, for some minutes, recognise the man who looked back.

Chapter Five

The schoolroom window faced the square.