Page 3 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She made herself cross the room.

She did not know, afterwards, why she did this; perhaps because she could not bear to walk out under the eyes of all of those people without first having walked in.

She went to the table where the tea was being poured and accepted a cup from Lady Carstairs’ daughter, who took it back from her almost at once, with a murmur about its being cold, and turned away to fetch a fresh one, and did not return. Madeleine stood holding nothing, in the middle of the drawing room, for what felt to her like a very long time and was probably the space of half a minute.

Then she walked out.

She did not weep in the carriage. She did not weep on the stairs in Half Moon Street, or in the small cold bedroom at the back of the house that had been allotted to her, or that night at supper, where her mother — who had not been at Lady Carstairs’, and who would never now go anywhere — asked her how the afternoon had been and she had said, ‘Pleasant enough, Mama. The hyacinths were very fine.’

She did not weep at all, in fact, in the eighteen months that followed. She had used up, it seemed, whatever tears were allotted to her, in the half hour she had spent alone with her father in the study before the doctor came.

There were none left now. It was a kind of economy.

*****

It was nearly two years after her father’s death, in the August of 1815, following her twentieth birthday, that her mother came into the parlour with a letter in her hand and a face Madeleine had not seen since Hertfordshire.

Her uncle had taken his wife and gone to their country house, not long after Madeleine and her family had arrived in London, leaving them in the cold house in Half Moon Street. Madeleine thought that her mother missed her brother, even though he had been rather cold since Lord Penworthy’s death – but she did not speak of it. He sent a small allowance, but did nothing more for them. Today, Madeleine was filled with dread by the look on her mother’s face, so much worse than her sad quietness at most times.

“Madeleine.” Lady Penworthy’s voice was very small. “Your uncle writes that he cannot continue — that is, the allowance, the house — he has been very good, but his own affairs, he… he needs to sell this house —” She sat down rather suddenly on the edge of a chair. “Oh, my dear. What are we to do?”

Madeleine did not answer at once.

She rose, and crossed to the side table where the morning’s Post lay folded, and opened it, and turned past the births and the deaths and the shipping news to the back, where the small advertisements were printed in three close columns.

‘Wanted, in a gentleman’s family —’ she read. ‘A respectable young woman of education —’ she read. ‘Governess, to instruct two daughters in French, the use of the globes, and the rudiments of music —’

Her mother was watching her.

“Madeleine,” Lady Penworthy said. “Madeleine, no.”

“Mama,” said Madeleine, without looking up, “fetch me the ink.”

Outside, on Half Moon Street, a hackney was passing. The light through the window was the colour of weak tea.

Chapter One

April 1818

The hackney set her down at the corner of Grosvenor Square because Madeleine had asked it to. She had no wish to be deposited beneath the portico of Greyscarp House like a parcel of fish, with the footmen looking on and the square itself, in its April finery, taking note. A Governess walked. A Governess always walked the last hundred yards, that her boots might be a little dustier and her position a little plainer when she rang the bell.

She paid the driver — money that she could not really spare — and stood a moment on the pavement, settling the strings of her bonnet and the strings of her resolve. The square was at its best hour. The plane trees were greening, the railings freshly blacked, and somewhere behind one of those tall windows a piano was being abused by a child with more determination than ear. Two ladies passed in pelisses the colour of pistachio ice, and did not see her. That was the great consolation of grey kerseymere: one was, in the most literal sense, beneath notice.

Greyscarp House rose at the north side of the square, four bays wide, the stone freshly Portland-washed, the door a deep glossy black with a brass knocker shaped like a hawk’s head.

Of course, a hawk. Hawksmoor.

She remembered, with the small sharp inwardness of a needle pricking through linen, that the family arms bore a hawk regardant.

She had seen them on a fan once, three years ago, painted in gold on dark blue silk, snapped open by a lady at her own come-out Ball.

A footman opened the door before her hand had quite reached the knocker. He had been watching, then. He took her in with the practised glance of an upper servant — pelisse plain, bonnet plain, gloves mended at one fingertip, but voice, when she gave her name, irreproachable.

“Miss Wharton, for her Ladyship the Dowager,” she said.

“You are expected, ma’am. If you would follow me.”

Ma’am, not Miss. That small courtesy nearly undid her. She followed him into a hall that smelled of beeswax and hothouse hyacinths, and her boots, which she had thought clean, looked at once unforgivable against the black-and-white marble. A great staircase rose at the back of the hall, curving up into shadow. To her right, double doors stood half-open on a room of pale-yellow silk. To her left, a longer corridor, hushed as a church, with portraits ranged along it in dim gilt frames.