Page 31 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Three days went by in this manner, and then four. Lord Edmund Carmody did not call again.

Madeleine half listened, all the same, for the knocker on the door.

What came instead, on the fifth morning — a Tuesday, with the square full of the particular brightness of late April — was Lady Sophia, who had been summoned to her mother in the yellow drawing room after breakfast, and who came back up the narrow stairs two at a time, pinafore flying, and burst into the schoolroom in a state of indignant joy.

“Miss Wharton. Miss Wharton. Cousin Cecily is having her Ball.”

“Lady Sophia. Walk.”

“I am walking. I am walking now. Cousin Cecily is having her Ball on the twelfth, and Mama says I may go down for the first half hour, and stand by the door, and look, and Mama says — Mama says — that since I am to be permitted to look, I had better not look like a perfect savage who does not know one foot from another, and I am to be taught to waltz.”

“To waltz.”

“To waltz, Miss Wharton. Mama has said so. Mama has said it to Stirling. Stirling is to do it.”

Madeleine’s hand, which had been arranging the pens on the table, paused for the briefest possible instant, and then went on arranging the pens.

“His Lordship is to teach you.”

“He is. He said so. He said it this morning at breakfast when Mama said it to him, and he did not say no, and that means yes.” Lady Sophia paused, with the practical realism of a child who had observed her brother for the whole of her short life. “He does not say no to Mama very often. He sighs and then he does the thing.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“It is what I have seen, Miss Wharton.”

“Sit down. You will have your French first.”

“But —”

“You will have your French first, and then we shall see what arrangements his Lordship has been pleased to make.”

Lady Sophia sat down. Lady Sophia did her French, with a great deal of injured sighing and a degree of inaccuracy that Madeleine, for once, did not entirely correct; for her own mind, behind the steady Governess’ face she had spent more than two years constructing, was not on the conjugation of aller at all.

She had not waltzed since she was seventeen.

She had waltzed three times, in fact, in her whole life, all in one Season, all at private Balls, all with young men who had been carefully approved by her mother; and she remembered, with the unhelpful clarity which memory was pleased to bring her at moments like this, the precise feel of a gloved hand at her waist, and the precise small effort required not to look up into the face of the man holding her, and the precise small failure she had made, on each occasion, of not looking up.

She set down her pencil.

She set it down very carefully, as though it were a thing that might break.

“Je vais,” Sophia said, “tu vas, il va, nous — nous —”

“Allons.”

“Allons. I knew that one. I was thinking.”

“Think more quickly.”

The summons came after luncheon, brought by Hodges in person — which was itself a small mark of how seriously the house had decided to take the matter — to the effect that his Lordship would attend Lady Sophia in the schoolroom at three o’clock, and that Miss Wharton was requested to oblige with the pianoforte.

“The pianoforte, Hodges.”

“His Lordship asked particularly, Miss Wharton. He understood that you played.”

She had said so once, in passing, to Lady Sophia, who had evidently said so to her brother.

It was not a thing one could refuse to do because one had not been asked whether one wished to do it.