Page 45 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She could feel his presence, had seen him without looking — a figure in a dark coat at the balustrade above, with one hand resting on the stone, and his head turned this way. He had been there, perhaps, some minutes.

She did not know how long. She did not let herself know.

She bent down to a low clump of lavender by the pool, and broke off a sprig, and gave it to Lady Sophia.

“Smell.”

“Mm. It is stronger than London lavender.”

“It is the sun.”

“Will you sit a moment, Miss Wharton? On Grandmama’s bench. I should like to see you sitting there.”

Madeleine hesitated; but the request was a child’s, and a child’s request had to be answered. She crossed to the bench under the west wall and sat down upon it, with her hands in her lap and her back straight, and Lady Sophia came and stood beside her, and leant a little against her shoulder, and was quiet for the first time that morning.

The fountain ran. A bee went past, low, on its way to the lavender. From somewhere beyond the wall a wood pigeon was at its slow soft repetition.

Madeleine sat with her eyes on the water in the pool, which was as still as a held breath, and she felt, against her shoulder, the small warm weight of the child who would, in a fortnight, be the soon-to-be sister-in-law of the soon-to-be new Marchioness of Greyscarp, whom she did not like; and she let herself, for the space of a single minute, look up at the terrace.

He was looking at her. He did not look away when she met his eyes — he did not have the time, or the dishonesty, to look away — and she saw, in his face, an expression which she had not seen there before, and which she recognised at once and without any possibility of mistake, because she had felt the same expression upon her own face a hundred times in seven weeks and had governed it down a hundred times into the cool composure of a paid woman doing her work.

She held his eye for perhaps two seconds. Then she looked down at Lady Sophia’s hair, and put her hand very lightly upon Lady Sophia’s shoulder.

“We must go in, my dear. The sun is hot.”

“Five minutes more.”

“Three, then.”

She did not look at the terrace again.

She let the three minutes pass, with the fountain running and the bee about its business, and then she rose and took Lady Sophia’s hand and led her back up the gravel walk and through the opening in the yew; and when they came up the three shallow steps to the terrace he was not there. He had gone in.

She saw the long window of the library standing open, and a curtain stirring in it, and she walked past it with Lady Sophia’s hand in hers and her face composed, and she did not turn her head.

*****

In the library, three paces back from the window, Stirling stood with his hand on the back of a chair and looked at the empty rectangle of light that gave onto the terrace, and did not move for some minutes.

The chair was a chair he knew.

The room was a room he had been in a thousand times. He had stood at this window as a boy of nine and watched his grandmother go down the steps to her garden with her workbox under her arm; he had stood at it at eighteen, when he had been told that he was not to purchase his colours, and had looked at the same view with his hands behind his back and his jaw set and the sharp bitter taste of duty in his mouth; he had stood at it at twenty-five, the spring his father died, and felt the weight of the title come down upon his shoulders like a wet cloak. He had stood here again, just three years past, when his grandmother had gone to God, and mourned the fact that she would never see this garden again. He had stood at this window all his life. He had not, in any of those standings, known what he knew now.

He knew it as a man knows a fever, by the irreducibility of it. He had told himself, for seven weeks, that what he felt for the Governess of his sister was a thing of the London spring, a fineness of feeling brought on by a low voice in a library at midnight and the dangerous pleasure of being honestly spoken to by a woman who asked nothing of him but a position in his household, and who owed him nothing but lessons.

He had told himself it would pass when he removed to Hertfordshire. He had told himself that the air at the Hall, and the riding, and the formal company of Lady Honoria and her father — who were to come down on Saturday — would set it to rights. He had told himself, riding down yesterday on the chestnut, that he would not even, particularly, see Miss Wharton at the Hall: she would be in the schoolroom, and he would be in the library or the stables or out about the estate with the steward; and in this manner he would let the fortnight do its work, and announce his long expected betrothal at the end of it, and behave thereafter as the Marquess of Greyscarp should behave, which was as a man who had made a sensible choice and did not regret it.

He had told himself this for the better part of two months. He told it to himself again now, standing at the library window, with the curtain stirring against his sleeve, and he discovered that it would not, any longer, say itself. He could not force the words into being.

Some mechanism in him had broken.

He had seen her sit down upon his grandmother’s bench, with the cypresses behind her and the sun in the pleat of her grey gown, and his sister leaning against her shoulder; and he had felt — not a stirring, not an admiration, not any of the polite words that he had been using to himself for seven weeks — but the plain unornamented fact, set down in him as a stone is set into a wall, that he was in love with her.

It was a fact that he had attempted to deny, for many of those weeks, and failed, categorically, in that denial.

He said it to himself, standing there. He said it under his breath, the way a man tries a foreign word, to see if his mouth will shape it.

“I am in love with her.”