Page 46 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

The mouth shaped it. The roof did not fall in. The clock on the mantel, which was not a small gilt French clock like the one in London, but a larger English one of his grandfather’s, went on telling the slow forenoon. Somewhere in the house a door shut. He heard, very distinctly, the small far sound of his sister’s voice on the stair, calling something to the woman beside her, and the steady answering voice — low, even, Governessed — of the woman whom he had no right, in any conceivable disposition of the world, to love. Everything about his life, and his position in society made that clear to him – and he wished to damn every single one of those things.

He let go of the chair.

He went to the side table where the decanters were and poured himself a small measure of brandy at eleven minutes past noon, which was not a thing he did, and drank it standing, then set the glass down. He thought, with the precision of a man making an inventory, of what he had done in the last seven weeks.

He had attended Lady Honoria at home on three Tuesdays. He had ridden with her in the Park. He had taken her to the opera and sat through Don Giovanni in a box that smelled of orange peel and her mother’s lavender water, and he had spoken to her father in his study in Berkeley Square on the second of June and obtained the father’s consent, in principle, to an arrangement which both fathers had wished for since the children were in leading strings.

He had not, in any of these proceedings, lied — except by the steady continuous omission of telling Lady Honoria, or her father, or his own mother, or himself, that the thing he was undertaking he could not, now, in honesty, undertake.

True honour, he had been raised to believe, lay in keeping faith with what had been promised on one’s behalf. He had been promised, on his behalf, since he was twelve. He had been waiting, since he was twelve, to be the man who paid the promise. He had thought, until this morning, that paying it was the same thing as virtue.

He stood at the window for a long time. He did not go down to the garden. He did not, he found, trust himself in the garden today. He would walk in it tomorrow, when she would be in the schoolroom; he would walk in it alone, and decide what was now to be done, and how it was to be told, and to whom; and what he was to say to Lady Honoria, who had done him no injury, and to her father, who had done him no injury, and to his mother, who had done him only the ordinary injuries of a long affection.

He would decide all of that tomorrow. Today he stood at the window of his library, in the house his fathers had built, and watched a curtain stir in a June breeze, and acknowledged, without any further avoidance of the fact, that he was a man in love; and that the woman he loved had told him, in April, in a breakfast room with the door ajar by an inch, that she would not be alone with him again; and that she had meant it; and that she had been entirely, painfully, immovably right.

Chapter Eleven

He did not, in the end, decide it on the Friday. He rode out at seven with the steward and was gone until past three; he came in with the dust of the lower meadow on his boots and the inventory of fence and ditch and tenant in his head, and he sat to dinner with his mother and Cecilia, and answered when he was spoken to, and did not, particularly, decide anything. Lady Honoria and her father, the Duke of Daventry, were to come down on the Saturday by four. The matter, he had told himself riding back along the avenue, would be decided by Saturday morning, in the cold practical hour before the carriage came up the drive; but he had ridden the last mile at a walk and not believed himself.

*****

Saturday dawned grey. The high blue of Thursday had gone, and a low even cloud lay over the Park by half past seven, and by ten the gardener’s boy was carrying the lemon trees back under the eaves of the orangery against what he and Stevens had between them named, with the certainty of country men, a coming storm. Madeleine had Lady Sophia at the schoolroom table over a piece of plain hemming, having put the Italian aside because Lady Sophia was restless and would not have answered to it.

She had heard, in the course of the morning, the small ordinary inventory of news that runs in any country house upon the day a guest is expected — a chaise sent to the village for minor supplies, Mrs Galt twice on the back stair, a pair of boys with the long airing of a bedroom carpet in the gallery below — and she had set herself to hearing it the way she had taught herself to hear any news that touched the Marquess - as a matter wholly external to her, requiring of her nothing but the steady governance of her face.

By two the air in the schoolroom had gone close and heavy, and Lady Sophia, who had been quiet for an hour, put down her needle and spoke somewhat hesitantly.

“Miss Wharton, may I go down for a quarter of an hour? Only to the terrace. It is going to thunder. I should like to be out before it does.”

“Five minutes, Lady Sophia, and not beyond the steps. Take your shawl.”

“It is too warm for a shawl.”

“Take it nevertheless.”

Lady Sophia went. Madeleine heard her boots on the side stair, heard the small slam of the garden door which Mrs Galt would, in time, scold somebody for, and went to the window and looked down. She could see, from the schoolroom, the corner of the terrace and the upper part of the gravel walk, and she watched Lady Sophia appear at the head of the steps with her shawl in her hand and not on her shoulders, and stand there a moment looking at the sky, and then go down the three shallow steps and out of sight along the walk in the direction of the yew arch.

The first drop hit the window at a quarter past two. Madeleine saw it strike — a single dark coin on the pane, and then a second, and then the slow gathering pattern of a rain that meant business — and she was on her feet and at the door of the schoolroom before she had quite decided to be. She caught up her own shawl from the back of the chair. The sky outside the passage window, which she passed at a walk that was very nearly a run, had gone the colour of pewter.

She came out at the side door as the rain came in earnest.

It came as it does in June after a hot week, in great heavy unhurried drops, and within ten seconds of her stepping out of the door, the gravel was dark with it and the air was full of the green smell of wet stone and beaten grass. She put her shawl up over her head, which did no good, and went along the walk calling out, in the steady carrying voice she had learned to use in London, when a child had got too near a horse.

“Lady Sophia — Sophia —”

There was no answer for a moment. Then there was Lady Sophia’s voice, high and pleased, from inside the yew arch.

“Miss Wharton! It is raining!”

“Yes. Come — come at once —” She caught the child at the arch. Lady Sophia was already wet through, her hair coming down on one side, her face bright with the unjustifiable delight of a child in a storm; and Madeleine put her shawl, which was now of no real use to anyone, around the small shoulders and turned her by the elbow back towards the house. “Run, Lady Sophia, do not argue, run.”

Lady Sophia ran. She was off up the walk and up the three steps and across the terrace and in at the long library window, which was standing open as it had stood open on Thursday, before Madeleine had reached the steps herself.

Madeleine came up onto the terrace at a walk, because she would not run, and because the rain was now coming down in such weight that running and not running were the same wetness. She stopped at the top of the steps to put her hand to her hair, which had come loose at the nape, and to push the wet of it back from her temple; and she saw, at the open library window, three paces along the terrace from her, the Marquess of Greyscarp.

He was in his shirtsleeves. He had Lady Sophia by the shoulders. He was saying something to her — Madeleine caught only:

“— to Nurse, at once, do you hear, and dry stockings —”