Page 48 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He had stepped forward. He had not, perhaps, meant to.

She saw it in his face — the slight, startled recognition of a body moving in advance of a decision — and she saw him stop, with his hand half raised, perhaps eighteen inches from her, perhaps less, the rain running off his hair now into his collar, his shirt was clinging dark to his shoulder. He was the Marquess of Greyscarp standing on his own terrace, and she was a paid Governess with her hair down on her neck, and the gulf between those two things was a gulf she had measured every day for seven weeks and could measure now in the count of her own pulse; and across the gulf he was looking at her with the expression he had not been able to govern in the garden on Thursday, and which he was not, now, even attempting to govern.

She did not step back.

That was the thing, afterwards, she could not forgive herself for.

She did not step back.

He took a final step forward, then he bent his head, and he kissed her.

It was not — afterwards she could not, in honesty, say it was — a kiss of any duration. It was perhaps for the count of two. His hand did not go around her; he did not take her by the shoulder or the waist; he put his right hand, very lightly, at the side of her face, where the wet of her hair had come down, and he set his mouth on hers, and for the count of two she stood under his hand in the rain on the terrace at Hawksmoor Hall and did not move at all.

Then, her mind caught up with what was happening, and she moved.

She put her hand flat against his chest, against the wet linen, and felt for one half second the warmth of him through it and the unsteady fast thundering of his heart, and she pushed — not hard, she had no need to push hard — and he stepped back at once, as though her hand had been a pistol, and stood three feet from her with his face the colour of the stone behind him.

“Miss Wharton. Forgive me. Forgive me. I did not — I —”

“Go in.”

“I had no right. I have no right. I beg of you —”

“Go in, my Lord.”

He went. He turned at once, in the obedience of a man who has been struck, and went in at the library window, and she heard, distinctly under the rain, the small sound of his palm coming down once upon the doorframe as he passed it, the way a man strikes a thing when he cannot strike himself.

She did not, immediately, move.

The rain went on.

It came off the lead above her in its thin silver line.

A pigeon, somewhere in the wood beyond the lake, gave its slow soft call as though nothing in the world had altered. Madeleine stood at the head of the three shallow steps with her hand on the wet stone of the balustrade, her hair coming down, and the taste of rain — only rain, she would tell herself afterwards, only rain — on her mouth, and she did not, for perhaps half a minute, think anything at all.

Then she thought: Lady Sophia. Lady Sophia was upstairs with her nurse and her stockings, and Lady Sophia, who noticed everything, would be at the schoolroom door in a quarter of an hour wanting her copybook, and Madeleine, who was paid sixty pounds a year to be at the schoolroom door before her, was standing on the terrace in the rain like a woman in a novel.

She went in.

But she did not go in at the library window.

She would not, she decided, ever again go in at that window. She walked the length of the terrace in the rain to the small side door by which she and Lady Sophia had come out on Thursday, went up the side stair, along the second-floor passage, went into her own small room with the grey light from the window and the writing table, and shut the door. She set her back against it for the count of ten, and she did not weep, because a Governess did not weep at four in the afternoon with a child expecting her in a quarter of an hour.

Madeleine changed her gown.

She had only the two, the grey and the lavender, and the lavender was for Sundays; she put on the lavender, because the grey was wet through to the petticoat, and she set the grey over the back of the chair to drip, and she put up her hair again with hands that were, she observed with a sort of distant interest, perfectly steady.

She bathed her face in the basin, looked at herself for one second in the small glass above that basin, and saw a woman of two and twenty with a flush on her cheekbones that she did not care for, and looked away.

Then she went down the passage to the schoolroom. Lady Sophia was there, in a dry day dress and dry stockings, with her hair brushed and a different, dry shawl about her shoulders, sitting at the table with the copybook open at the appropriate place. Lady Sophia looked up when Madeleine came in, and looked at her — the long unhurried look of a child who has decided, at twelve, to be a noticer of things — and then looked down at the copybook again.

“I am sorry I ran out, Miss Wharton. I should not have.”

“You should not. We shall say no more of it.”

“Are you very wet?”

“I have changed my gown.”