Page 40 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She was grateful for it. She was, she discovered as she shut the schoolroom door behind her and stood with her back to it, also very nearly equally sorry.

Chapter Nine

She chose not to examine those conflicting feelings too closely at all. To do so would just make things worse.

So she got on with her day, as required.

That was on the Wednesday, and Wednesday became Thursday, then Thursday became Friday, and Madeleine kept the bargain she had made with her sister in Holborn. She kept it through the Friday geography lesson, when Lady Sophia wished to know — apropos of nothing — whether her brother had ever been to Vienna, and Madeleine answered that she could not say, and turned the page to Naples. She kept it through Saturday’s needlework, when Lady Sophia broke a needle and laughed and said, ‘Stirling breaks them too, you know, when he tries to sew on his own buttons,’ and Madeleine said, ‘We do not say Stirling, we say ‘my brother’ or ‘Lord Greyscarp’,’ and Lady Sophia had subsided, looking sidelong, and bent her head to her sampler. She kept it through Sunday, when she went to the small parish church behind the square with Mrs Holland, and ate her piece of cake afterwards in the housekeeper’s room, and answered Mrs Holland’s quiet enquiries about Beatrice with a simple, brief account that satisfied them both.

She kept it, in short, until Monday night.

She had not meant to go down.

She had told herself, with the cool inner voice which was the voice she had cultivated in more than two years of governessing, and which she had learned to obey as one obeys a sensible elder sister, that the library at midnight was a place she had no business in, and that the most recent book she had borrowed — a small octavo of Cowper’s letters, which Lord Greyscarp had set out on the side table four days ago with a slip of paper marking a passage about the Olney garden — could be returned in daylight, by means of a footman, like any other book in any other house.

She had told herself this on Monday morning. She had told herself this on Monday afternoon, when she had finished Lady Sophia’s French and gone to her own room and sat for a quarter of an hour at the little washstand, looking at the small, clouded glass, and not at her own face in it. She had told herself this at supper, eaten alone off a tray as Governesses ate, and at nine when Lady Sophia was put to bed by her nurse, and at ten when the house began the long slow exhalation that meant the family was at last in, and at eleven when she heard, three floors down, a parlour door close, and at half past eleven when the house had been still for thirty minutes and she had not moved from her chair.

At a quarter to twelve she put on her shawl and took up the book and went down.

She did not light a candle on the stairs. The lamp on the first landing was still burning, low, and she went past it with her hand on the wall and her slippered feet making no sound on the runner, and she came down the great staircase as she had come down it three times before this month, with the same small dishonest conviction that this would be the last time. The library door stood ajar. A line of warm light lay along the floor of the corridor and stopped a hand’s breadth from the toe of her slipper, as though it had been measured.

He looked up when she came in. He had been expecting her — she saw it in the way that he did not start — and she saw, too, that he had told himself that he was not expecting her, and that the not-expecting had taken effort, because the book on the small table beside his chair was open at a page he was not reading.

“Miss Wharton.”

“My Lord.”

“You bring back Cowper.”

“I bring back Cowper. I —” she crossed the carpet and set the small book down on the table beside his, with care, the way one set down anything of consequence — “I am very much obliged to you for the marking. The passage about the cucumbers was — it was kind of you. I had not known he was funny.”

“He is not often. He is when he writes to Lady Hesketh.”

“Yes. I see that.”

She did not sit.

She had not sat on any of the other nights either.

She stood with her hand resting, very lightly, on the back of the chair opposite his, and he had risen — he always rose; it was one of the small punctilios upon which the two of them had agreed, without speaking, to dress the impossibility of the situation — and he stood now with his hand on the mantel, and the fire low behind him, and his face in the upper half in shadow.

“You are well, Miss Wharton.”

“I am well, my Lord.”

“Your sister —” He stopped. “I beg your pardon. Mrs Holland mentioned to me that you had been to meet a sister last Wednesday. I had no business asking.”

“You may ask. She is well. She is gone back.”

“Home, I assume? Home being — “

“A village outside Bath. We do not call it home; we call it the cottage. It is what my mother, and now my aunt since my mother’s passing, could afford.”

She had not meant to tell him that.

It had come out evenly enough, with no perceptible weight, and he had received it the way he received everything she said, with the close attention of a man who has decided to hear and not to comment; and there was, in this evenness of his, a thing more dangerous than any compliment.

She felt it. She had been feeling it for an hour, since she had stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at the lamp and known herself to be going down rather than up.