Page 37 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“The Dowager Marchioness is — civil. She sees me on Mondays after breakfast for a quarter of an hour, and she enquires after Lady Sophia’s progress, and she is satisfied with what I tell her, and she sends me away. We do not, I think, dislike one another. We do not, I think, otherwise notice one another.”

“And the brother.”

Madeleine had her cup halfway to her mouth. She set it down. She set it down with a care that, even as she did it, she knew was a fraction too careful.

“The Marquess of Greyscarp.”

“The Marquess of Greyscarp.”

“He is —” She paused. She felt the pause, and she felt Beatrice feel the pause, and she went on, evenly: “He is the head of the family. He is in his thirtieth year. He is — by all accounts, including those of the housekeeper, who is not easily impressed — a conscientious landlord and a good brother. He has been civil to me on the two or three occasions when he has had cause to address me. I do not see him often. He keeps to the library and to his clubs, and I keep to the schoolroom. The house is large enough to accommodate the arrangement.”

Beatrice did not speak. Beatrice picked up her cup, and looked at her sister over the rim of it, and drank, and set it down.

“Maddie.”

“Bea, do not.”

“I have not said anything.”

“You are about to. I can hear you not saying it.”

“Then I shall say it. You have just given me four sentences about him, every one of them perfectly correct, and you have not used his name once. You used the child’s name three times. You used the housekeeper’s name once. You did not use his. You called him ‘the Marquess of Greyscarp’ and ‘the head of the family’ and ‘he’, and you set down your cup before you said any of it, and I am your sister and I have known you for two-and-twenty years, and I know what it means when you set down a cup like that.”

Madeleine looked at the table.

She looked at the small, chipped place on the rim of her saucer, and at the grain of the deal under it, and at the spot of chocolate she had let fall there without noticing.

She put her thumb on the spot of chocolate. She lifted her thumb. The spot stayed.

“I do not,” she said, “use his forename, Beatrice, because he is the Marquess of Greyscarp and I am his sister’s Governess, and one does not.”

“I am not asking you to use it to him. I am asking why you do not use it to me.”

“Because it is not a thing I have any business knowing.”

“You know it, though.”

“Of course I know it. The child says it forty times a day.”

“And it is.”

“Stirling.”

She said it to the table.

She said it as a person says a word in another language they have been told they pronounce wrongly, and braced for the correction. None came.

Beatrice only looked at her, with the steady unalarmed attention with which Beatrice looked at all the slow ruinations of their family, and said, after a moment:

“Has he done anything.”

“No.”

“Has he said anything.”

“No.”

“Has he looked at you.”