Page 38 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine did not answer.

“Maddie.”

“He has been,” Madeleine said, “entirely correct. He has been more than correct. He has been — he has taken pains — to be correct. That is the only thing I can tell you, and it is the truth, and I am telling it to you because you asked.”

“He has taken pains.”

“Yes.”

“A man who is entirely indifferent does not take pains. A man who is entirely indifferent does not have to.”

“Bea.”

“I am not scolding you. I am telling you what I have just heard. You have spent two years, Maddie, you have spent two years being so careful that the wallpaper does not notice you, and you have come in here this morning and sat down with me and told me, in four sentences and a pause, that a Marquess of thirty has noticed you very particularly indeed; and you do not know it because you have not let yourself know it; and I am your sister and I am letting you know it, before someone less kind notices first.”

Madeleine put her hands in her lap. She put them there because she did not, at that moment, know what else to do with them.

“He will not —”

“No. He will not. Men in his position do not. I know that. You know that. Mama, God help her, knew that thirty years ago when she married Papa, which is a topic upon which we shall not embark this morning. They do not, Maddie. They never do. And that is precisely the danger. Because a man in his position who does notice, and who will not, has only two courses open to him, and they are both ruinous to the woman he has noticed. He may distance himself, in which case she is dismissed within the month on a pretext. Or he may not distance himself, in which case she is dismissed within the quarter in disgrace.”

“He has done neither. He will do neither. He is —”

“He is what.”

“He is a kind man, Beatrice. He is a kind man who has been told all his life what to do, and he does it, and he has the sense to know that he does it, and the — the decency to be a little ashamed of it. He will not let it touch me. He will not. I know it as I know my own hand.”

“And you.”

“I.”

“You, Maddie. Forget him for a minute, which God knows I am not asking you to do for longer than a minute. You. Are you —” She stopped. She was, for the first time that morning, choosing a word with effort. “— in danger of yourself?”

Madeleine sat very still.

The room around them went on.

A clerk at the next table turned a page of his newspaper.

The girl at the counter clattered a tray.

Outside the bow window, a coal cart went by with the slow grinding sound of a coal cart in Holborn at half past eleven on a Wednesday morning in April, and somewhere a church bell, the half hour, struck once and was done.

“Yes,” Madeleine said.

It was the first time she had said it.

She had not said it to her own face in the small clouded glass under the eaves, and she had not said it to her hands on the keys of the schoolroom piano, and she had not said it, three nights ago, into the pillow at one o’clock in the morning when she had woken without knowing why; and she said it now, to her sister, across a deal table in a coffee house in Holborn, and it sounded — when it came out — astonishingly small. It sounded like a fact. It sounded like the weather.

“Yes. I am in danger of myself. I am not in any other danger, Beatrice. He has been correct. He will be correct. The danger is mine, and I know that it is mine, and I am — managing it.”

“Are you.”

“I am managing it as well as it can be managed. I do my work. I keep to the schoolroom. I do not — I have not — there is nothing to manage into, Bea. There is no place for it to go. It will subside. These things subside. They have to.”

“Do they.”

“They must. There is no alternative.”