Page 5 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

It came out before she had given it leave to. She felt her colour rise, and damned it. She had been two years a Governess: she did not blush at her own remarks. She did not make remarks.

But he smiled. Only a flicker, only the corner of the mouth; he caught it back at once, as a man catches back a horse that has gone a stride too forward.

“Just so,” he said. “Then we are agreed upon at least one point of pedagogy.”

He looked down at the paper before him. She saw, upside down, her own letter of application in her own hand, with a smaller hand — an older woman’s, very upright — annotating it in the margin. ‘Yorkshire. Two years. —’ The pencil note had been struck through.

“You were Governess for the Pendleburys,” he said.

“Yes, my Lord. To their two daughters. The elder is now sixteen and gone to her grandmother in Bath. The younger is eleven.”

“And you left them because—?”

She had prepared for this.

“Mrs Pendlebury felt that Miss Anne might benefit from a French Governess for the next stage of her education. I was given an excellent character. It is enclosed.”

He glanced at the second sheet. He did not, she noticed, read it now. He had, she thought, most likely already read it.

“And before the Pendleburys?”

“Before the Pendleburys, I was at home, my Lord. My father’s affairs were — in some confusion at the time of his death. It became necessary that I earn my own funds.”

There.

It was said.

She had practised it in Yorkshire mirrors until the words came out at the same temperature as ‘the weather is fine for the season’.

He looked up.

The grey eyes were not bored, and they were not kind.

They were something more difficult: they were seeing.

“Miss Wharton,” he said quietly. “We have met.”

She had not meant to acknowledge it.

Near five years was a long time; she had been one of forty girls in white that night; he had asked her for the second set of country dances and made an unremarkable remark about the floor, and she had said something tolerable in reply, and a quarter of an hour later he had returned her to her mother and bowed and walked away. She had thought, perhaps, that he would not remember.

She had hoped that he would not.

“My Lord is mistaken.”

The lie was so smooth that she was almost proud of it.

“I am very seldom mistaken about a face.” He said it without arrogance, which made it worse. “Lady Carteret’s, in May of 1813. You wore white, with — green ribbons, I think. We danced. You told me that your eldest sister had refused to come down because there was a horse foaling at home and she did not trust the groom.”

She closed her eyes a moment. Beatrice. Beatrice and her wretched mare. Of course he would remember the only interesting thing that she had ever said in a London ballroom. She sighed. Honesty was required.

“You are not mistaken, my Lord,” she said. “I had hoped that you might be.”

“Why?”

The word was so simple that it disarmed her.

She looked at him properly, for the first time since she had crossed the threshold. He was perhaps thirty. He had a line between his brows that had not been there in 1813. He had — she remembered now, with a queer little wrench, remembered wondering about it, at the time — an air about him, even then, of a man who had not quite been allowed his own life.