Page 39 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Beatrice did not say anything to that.

Beatrice reached, instead, into the little reticule beside her bonnet, and brought out a small, folded paper, and pushed it across the table under cover of the saucer.

“From Aunt?” Madeleine said, looking at it.

“For you. She wanted to give you something in return, because I gave her money last month, and I told her you sent it. I told her that you had begged me to take it. She did not want to take it. I made her take it. She spent it on candles and on Georgiana’s gown, and on having a wretched thatcher up the ladder again, and she cried over it for one evening, and then she was sensible. It is what she does. But she scrimped and saved to make this possible, so I added to it.”

“Bea, it is more than —”

“It is what you sent at Christmas, and a little of what you sent in February. I have not spent it. And I earned more doing mending this quarter, so I had no need of it; the cottage is paid for the quarter, and Uncle has been generous about the coal. Take it back. Put it in your reticule. Put it in your reticule now, Maddie, because I shall not take it home, and if you leave it on the table the girl will have it for her box, and I should not be sorry for her, but I should be sorry for Aunt if that happened. And… you should have a little something put aside, just in case…”

Madeleine put the bank note in her reticule.

“You will write to me,” Beatrice said.

“I write every week.”

“You will write to me about him. Not in the body of the letter, where Aunt might see it; she opens everything, you know that. At the bottom. After your signature. A line. Two lines. ‘He has been correct.’ Or, ‘he has not been correct.’ Or, ‘I have been wise, Bea.’ Or, ‘I have not.’ I shall know what you mean. I shall not press you for more than that. But I shall know, and you shall know that I know, and that is — that is the only thing I can do for you from a hundred miles away, Maddie, and you shall let me do it.”

“I shall let you do it.”

“And the moment — the moment, Maddie — that you think you cannot manage it, you will write me a letter saying so, and I will come up by the next stage, and we will sit on the steps of Mr Hatchard’s office until he has thought of something.”

“There is nothing for him to think of.”

“There is always something. There is always something for a clever man with a desk to think of, if a woman sits on his steps long enough. Promise me.”

“I promise you.”

They sat a little longer. They spoke of Georgiana, who was four-and-twenty and clever and had no prospects worth speaking of, and they spoke of their aunt’s eyes, which were giving her trouble in the evenings, and they spoke — because they had to speak of something easy before they parted — of the milliner in Bath who had cheated Beatrice over a length of ribbon and been bested, in the end, by Beatrice’s flat refusal to leave the shop until the matter was righted. They laughed about the milliner.

Madeleine heard her own laugh as though it were a stranger’s, and was grateful for it, and laughed again to keep it going.

At twelve they paid the reckoning — Beatrice insisted, and Madeleine let her — and they went out into Holborn and stood for one moment on the pavement under the faded board, with the noise of the street going on around them, and Beatrice took her sister’s gloved hands in her own gloved hands and held them tightly.

“Maddie.”

“Bea.”

“Be invisible. Just until the summer. Just until the Season is over and the house is shut up and you are at Hawksmoor Hall, where there are no callers, who might have known you before… and no Lord whoever-it-is — there is a Lord, is there not, that you wish to avoid, you have not told me, but there always is — be invisible until then. Yes?”

For a moment, the image of Lord Edmund Carmody slipped into her mind, and she almost shuddered – the way he had looked at her, as she’d denied ever meeting him, chilled her every time that she remembered it.

“Yes.”

“And after that we shall — we shall see.”

“After that we shall see.”

Just what they might see, Madeleine wasn’t entirely certain of, but surely, by then, she would have her reactions better under control.

Beatrice released her hands.

Beatrice went east, towards Lincoln’s Inn and Mr Hatchard. Madeleine went west, towards Grosvenor Square; and she walked the long way, by Bloomsbury and Soho and Hanover Square, because she did not, yet, wish to be back inside the house, and because the folded paper in her reticule weighed nothing at all and a great deal at the same time, and because she had said the word aloud to her sister, and the saying of it had not, as she had half hoped, made it any smaller.

It was a little after two when she let herself in at the mews door. Mrs Holland was in her parlour with the accounts. Lady Sophia, abovestairs, had finished her arithmetic and got most of it right.

The house was quiet, in the particular afternoon way that the house was quiet between calls; and — Madeleine heard the small sounds of it as she passed the half-open door on the first landing — the Marquess of Greyscarp was in his library, and did not, as she went up the last narrow flight to the schoolroom, come out.