Page 29 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Miss Wharton,” he said.

“My Lord.”

“Forgive me. I am wondering whether we have met.”

“I do not believe so, my Lord.”

“You are quite certain.”

“Quite certain, my Lord.”

“Curious.” He smiled. It was the smile Madeleine had seen from the window, and it was, at close quarters, no kinder. “I have an excellent memory for faces. It is the one accomplishment which my tutors did not despair of. And I would have said —” He paused. He let the pause sit in the room. “— that I had seen yours before. At Lady Wexford’s, perhaps. Four Seasons ago. Or five.”

Madeleine felt, with great precision, the small cold finger move from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.

She had been at Lady Wexford’s, five Seasons ago.

She had been seventeen.

She had been in her first Season, in a white muslin with silver knots, with her father living and her family solvent, and she had stood in a doorway for half an hour beside her sister Beatrice and watched the dancing, and she had been introduced to, among, that night, a great many people, a young Lord called Carmody, who had bowed without interest and gone away.

He had not, that night, looked at her twice.

He was looking at her now.

“I do not believe so, my Lord,” she said again. Her voice held. She did not know how, but it held. “I have not been in society in some years.”

“Ah.”

“My circumstances did not permit.”

“How unfortunate.”

“My Lord.”

“Honoria,” Lord Edmund said, without taking his eyes off Madeleine, “did you not say that there was a portrait in the hall below which you particularly wished to show me? The grandfather, was it?”

“The great-uncle,” Lady Honoria said, with the smallest fraction of impatience. “Edmund, we are keeping the carriage.”

“The carriage will wait. The great-uncle, then. Lady Sophia, your servant. Miss Wharton —”

He paused, just inside the door. He smiled again. It was a different smile this time. It was, Madeleine realised with the distant clarity of a person watching a thing happen to another woman, the smile of a man who had remembered, in the last thirty seconds, exactly who she was, and who had decided, with the cool pleasure of a man putting a coin into a waistcoat pocket against a rainy afternoon, to keep the knowledge to himself for the moment.

“— your servant,” he said.

“My Lord.”

He bowed.

He bowed beautifully — with the precise depth one gave to a gentlewoman, not the half-inch one gave to a Governess — and the Dowager, whose face had not in the smallest particular altered, spoke.

“Shall we, Lady Honoria?”

They went out, and the door closed, and the three sets of footsteps went down the narrow stair, and after a little while the front door opened and shut, and after a little while longer the carriage’s wheels turned on the cobbles of the square.

Madeleine stood where she was.

She stood with her hands folded and her eyes on the point on the floor and she did not move, because if she moved she would, she thought, sit down, and she had been engaged at sixty pounds the year not to sit down in the presence of her pupil without reason.