Page 27 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

It was not a smile aimed at her. It could not have been. It was a smile aimed at the house, at the high pale front of it, at the idea of a schoolroom and a child at its window; and it was the smile, Madeleine thought, of a man who liked very much to know where every door of a house gave on to, and who counted the windows on his way in.

“Who is that?” she said, before she meant to.

Lady Sophia detached her chin from the sill long enough to give the gentleman on the pavement a single comprehensive look.

“Oh,” she said. “Lord Edmund Carmody.”

“Lord —”

“Lord Edmund Carmody. He is Lady Honoria’s cousin. He calls when she calls, sometimes, to fetch her away. Mama does not like him.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“She does not, Miss Wharton. She is civil to him because she must be, because of Lady Honoria, but she does not like him. I have heard her say to Stirling that he has a tongue.”

“Lady Sophia, that is not a thing —”

“It is what she said. I am quoting again. I am being very accurate today. You should be pleased.”

Madeleine did not answer.

She had stepped back another half pace from the window — without meaning to, without any clear reason, by the simple instinct of a woman who had seen a smile she did not like and had moved out of the line of it — and she stood now with a cool watchfulness gathering at the base of her throat.

The door of the house had opened. Lord Edmund, on the pavement, drew off his other glove with the same deliberation, and went up the steps and inside, the door closed behind him, and the carriage moved off.

“He will not stay long either,” Lady Sophia said. “He never does. He comes to take her away. He thinks it is gallant. Lady Honoria thinks it is a nuisance, but she does not say so, because she is Lady Honoria. ‘And as she had no patient,’ — that is the vicar’s wife, Miss Wharton, may I go on? — ‘as she had no patient —’ ”

“Patience, Lady Sophia. He says ‘patience’.”

“ ‘— as she had no patience,’ I beg his pardon, ‘for cookery books —’ ”

The word was not spoken clearly – somehow, Lady Sophia managed to make it half way between patient, and patience, and not quite either.

“Patience. Please enunciate correctly. Try again.”

Lady Sophia tried again.

Madeleine heard her, and corrected her, and made her say the word a third time for the rhythm of it; and all the while a small obstinate corner of her attention was three flights below her, in the yellow drawing room she had only once entered, where a man with a slow particular smile had just been shown in.

It was not, she told herself, any concern of hers. She had no acquaintance with Lord Edmund Carmody. She did not know anything of him, beyond, she realised in that instant, a very faint memory of his existence from her one Season five years ago. He had stood on the pavement of Grosvenor Square and looked up at a window, as any idle gentleman might look up at any window, and there was no earthly reason that the cold finger which had laid itself across the nape of her neck should still be there.

There was no earthly reason.

There it was, all the same.

They read on.

The vicar acquired his children. Lady Sophia, who had a weakness for catalogues of any kind, became reconciled to the long enumeration of the family virtues, and made her own running commentary upon them, and Madeleine, with the steady patience of a Governess who had learnt that the best of teaching was done in the margins, let her commentary stand and only corrected, now and then, a pronunciation.

A quarter of an hour passed. Twenty minutes. Madeleine did not look at the clock.

A door opened, below. Voices in the hall — too distant to make out, but a man’s voice, light and unhurried, and a woman’s, lower and a little clipped. The Dowager was seeing them off in person, which was unusual; the Dowager, as Madeleine had been instructed on her second day, did not see callers off in person except as a particular mark of distinction.

She must, Madeleine thought, have decided to mark Lady Honoria.

Footsteps in the hall.

The front door, which had a small distinctive complaint in its hinge when it was held open too long.