Page 32 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

A Governess did not refuse.

“At three o’clock, Hodges. Thank you.”

She had a little under an hour.

She used it: she heard Lady Sophia through the rest of her French; she set her to copy out a passage of The Vicar in her best hand, which would keep her occupied and quiet; and she went, herself, to her own little room under the eaves, stood in front of the small clouded glass above the washstand, looked at the woman who looked back at her, and made, with great deliberation, no changes whatever. She did not smooth her hair.

She did not pinch her cheeks.

She did not exchange her grey stuff gown for the other grey stuff gown, which was cleaner but not, in any particular that mattered, different. She put on, instead, a fresh white collar, because the one she was wearing had a small smudge of ink at the point, and she went back up to the schoolroom and sat down at the pianoforte and opened the lid.

The pianoforte was a good one — better than a schoolroom pianoforte had any business being.

She had wondered, on her first day, about it; she had decided, on her second, that it had been put there because somebody in the house had once loved music, and she had not asked which somebody, and nobody had told her.

She tried a chord.

It was in tune.

She tried a scale. Her hands, she observed with a small detached interest, were perfectly steady, which was more than could be said for her thoughts.

At three o’clock precisely the door opened.

“Stirling!”

Lady Sophia was on her feet, and across the room, and had her brother by the hand before he had quite shut the door.

“Sophy. Mind my coat.”

“Your coat is perfectly safe. Mama says we are to begin at once. Mama says you are not to dawdle. Mama says — “

“Mama,” the Marquess of Greyscarp said, with the grave patience that was, Madeleine had come to recognise in a fortnight, the exact tone he used to his youngest sister and to no one else in the house, “has said a great many things this morning, and we shall do most of them. Miss Wharton.”

She had risen from the piano stool.

She made her curtsey.

“My Lord.”

“You are very good to oblige us.”

“Not at all, my Lord.”

He had not, she noticed, looked at her quite directly.

He had looked at the corner of the room beyond her shoulder, and at the music propped on the stand, and at Lady Sophia, who was pulling at his cuff; and he had said the necessary thing in the necessary voice, and there was, between the two of them, the careful space of two people who had agreed, without ever having spoken of it, not to look at one another for longer than was strictly required.

She sat down again.

“What shall I play, my Lord?”

“Anything in three beat timing. Slowly, if you would. We are teaching a beginner.”

“I am not a beginner.”

“You are a beginner at the waltz, Sophy. You have never waltzed in your life.”

“I have waltzed with Nurse. In the nursery. When I was small.”