Page 60 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He told him as a man tells a friend a thing the friend will not wish to hear, and must hear quickly, in short flat sentences, without ornament, with the names where the names belonged, and the dates where the dates belonged. He told him where he had heard it — at Brooks’, on the Thursday, from Hetherington, who had had it from Lord Allerby, who had heard it, Hetherington said, ‘everywhere’. He told him what was being said about the betrothal, what was being said about the retraction, and what was being said, with a particular quiet ugliness, about Miss Madeleine Wharton. He did not, when he came to that part, look at Stirling; he looked at the window, and he kept his voice low, until he got through it.

When he had finished, Stirling sat for some time with his hand on the blotter and did not say anything at all.

Eventually, when he did speak, he simply said, “Carmody.”

“I cannot prove it.”

“You do not need to prove it. I know it. Has her name been said”

“Not in the clubs. Not yet. In the drawing rooms — Stirling, you know how these things go. By tomorrow it will be said in the clubs. By Monday it will be in print, in some form. Not her name, perhaps. But enough.”

“How much is enough.”

“Enough that any house she enters as a Governess from this day forward will have heard it before she crosses the threshold.”

Stirling got up from the desk.

He walked to the window. The library at Greyscarp House gave him a view which, that morning, had the particular dusty stillness of a London July, with the plane trees already tired and the sky a flat unhelpful white. Stirling stood with his hand on the sill where, on a night in April that he could still account for minute by minute, a small calf‑bound Petrarch had lain.

He looked out, and he thought, with a cold clarity that he had not previously been afforded in this matter, that he had done every single thing wrong which it was in his power to do, in the order in which it had been possible to do them, and that he had now to undo as many as could be undone before the rest hardened into the shape they would keep. He turned from the window.

“Frederick.”

“Yes.”

“I want three things of you. I ask them of you, because I can trust you to do this, when I have few others whom I could ask. I want the first by this evening.”

“Name them.”

“I want to know who in this house has spoken to anyone outside it. I do not believe it is anyone, but I will know. Speak to Hodges. Speak to Mrs Holland. Tell them that I have asked, tell them that I do not suspect them, and tell them that I require the answer. Second.”

“Yes.”

“I want the ‘Morning Post’, the ‘Courier’ and the ‘Gazette’ watched. If a paragraph appears, in any of them, that touches on this house or on… on Miss Wharton… I want it on this desk within the hour, and I want to know who placed it. The editors will tell you if you ask in my name, and remind them that, if they will not tell you, they will tell my solicitor, who will call upon them in the afternoon. Third.” He stopped for a moment, then went on. “Third,” Frederick waited, “Third, I want Lord Edmund Carmody followed. Not… I do not mean by a Bow Street man. I do not want a scandal of that kind also. I mean that I want to know where he dines this week, and at whose house, and in whose company, and what he says when he is there. Bicknell can do it; he has the connections. Tell Bicknell it is for me, and that he is not to spare the expense, and that I will see him on Sunday.”

“Stirling.” Frederick had not moved from his chair. “Do you know what you are doing?”

“I know what I am doing.”

“You are declaring war on Edmund Carmody. It may not be the middle of the Season, but enough people are in Town that every move will be observed, and commented on.”

“He declared it. I am answering.”

“You are answering,” said Frederick, carefully, “in a way that will be observed with great interest. If you go after him — even by Bicknell, even quietly — it will be known by Wednesday that you are going after him. And if it is known that you are going after him, it will be known why. And the why is the thing that you have, until now, been trying to keep out of the papers.”

Stirling looked at him.

“I am not trying to keep it out of the papers any longer,” he said.

“Stirling —”

“I tried, Frederick. I tried for a week. I retracted the notice my mother put in. I rode forty miles in a day to do it. I came back to a folded letter on a schoolroom table, and I have spent six days since then sitting in this house behaving as though nothing whatever had occurred, because I was advised, by everyone whose advice I asked for, that the surest way to bury the thing was to behave as though there was nothing to bury. I took the advice. I was wrong to take it. Carmody has used the six days I gave him, and he has used them as a man like Carmody uses six days, and we are now where we are. I shall not give him a seventh.”

Frederick was silent for a moment, then he spoke, tentatively.

“What of Miss Wharton.”

Stirling did not answer at once.