Page 35 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Everything happened.

“One,” he said, and his voice was exactly what it had been. “Two. Three.”

Another half-turn. The clock on the schoolroom mantel ticked through it. Madeleine could not, afterwards, have said whether they made four turns, or six, or ten; she knew only that she counted, somewhere behind her ribs, the moments of his hand at her waist as a miser counts coins he will not be permitted to keep.

“I have it,” Lady Sophia said, with sudden triumph from the hearthrug. “Along. Along. I see. May I do it now?”

The Marquess stopped.

He stopped on the three of a bar — not on the one, which would have been correct — and he let go of her waist with a quick clean release that was, Madeleine felt, more deliberate than any release she had ever been given on a ballroom floor. He stepped back. He let go of her hand. He bowed.

“Miss Wharton. Thank you.”

“My Lord.”

“Sophy. Come here.”

Lady Sophia came. Madeleine went back to the piano. She sat down. She put her hands on the keys. They were not, this time, steady; she observed it with the distant interest of a person noting the weather of another country, and she made them steady, by force of will, before she struck the chord.

She played. Lady Sophia, with her brother, took up the step from the beginning; and made it, this time, almost without bobbing; and crowed, when the first complete circuit of the floor was done, with the particular satisfaction of a child who has acquired a grown-up accomplishment in an afternoon.

“I can do it. Stirling, I can do it. I shall do it at Cecily’s Ball and no one shall know I have only learnt it today.”

“They will know, Sophy, because you will tell them, within ten minutes.”

“I shall not!”

“You shall. But you waltz tolerably. Miss Wharton, we are obliged to you. Sophy, make your curtsey. We will not detain Miss Wharton any further.”

Lady Sophia made her curtsey. The Marquess of Greyscarp made his bow — to his sister, properly, and to Madeleine, properly, with the exact degree of inclination owed to a gentlewoman in his employ — and he did not, this time, meet her eyes. He went to the door. He opened it. He stood aside to let Lady Sophia run through, with the ordinary courtesy a man showed to a child, and he paused for the space of a breath with his hand on the latch.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord.”

He did not turn his head.

“Thank you,” he said, very quietly, to the doorframe; and went out, and closed the door behind him.

Madeleine sat for a long minute at the piano with her hands lying on the closed lid of it — she had shut the lid without remembering doing so — and she did not move, she did not weep, she did not in any other particular betray the fact that for three minutes in a schoolroom at the top of three flights of stairs, the unbridgeable gulf had, between a Marquess and a paid Governess, ceased entirely to exist.

Below her, in the library, the Marquess of Greyscarp shut the door of that room behind him with the same care, and stood with his back to it, and looked at his own right hand, which was not, he observed with a sort of cold wonder, quite steady; and he did not, for some minutes, trust himself to ring for anything at all.

Chapter Eight

Her next half-day was the second Wednesday of the month, and it fell, that April, on the fifteenth — three days after the waltz, which Madeleine had spent in the steady employment of not thinking about it.

She had not thought about it during Lady Sophia’s geography on Monday. She had not thought about it during Lady Sophia’s needlework on Tuesday. She had not thought about it on Tuesday night, lying under the eaves with the quiet interior weather of the house going on around her, and she had not thought about it on Wednesday morning when she rose at six, as she always rose, and dressed in her grey kerseymere gown, and went down to take a cup of tea in the housekeeper’s room with Mrs Holland, who had taken — for reasons of her own — a sober liking to her.

“You’ll be going out, Miss Wharton.”

“I am to meet my sister, Mrs Holland. She is in town two nights, on an errand for our aunt.”

“Holborn, you said.”

“A coffee house in Holborn. Beatrice did not wish to come to Grosvenor Square.”

“No,” said Mrs Holland, who had been forty years in service and had grown wise about a great many things, “she would not, would she.”