Page 63 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Madeleine went up the stairs.

The room she had been given, the room she had lived in before, was the small back bedroom over the kitchen, with a window that gave on to the garden. She sat on the edge of the bed.

She turned the letter over in her hands once, then she broke the wafer.

Hawksmoor Hall

Monday

Dear Miss Wharton,

I am writing this in bed because Nurse will not let me sit up at the table after eight, and it is now a quarter past, but I have a candle and I shall be very careful of the sheet. We are at the Hall again, because Mama said the air in Town was bad for me, which it was not, it was bad for her, but I did not say so. Cecilia is here also, but she is cross all the time, and will not say why, but I think I know why. I shall not put it in a letter, because Mama says one ought not to put things in letters that one would not say at table, only I am going to put a great many things in this letter that I would not say at table, and so I am sorry, Mama, but I am twelve and I am not at table.

Miss Wharton, please come back.

I know you cannot. I am not stupid, although Cecilia says I am. I know that you went away because of the notice in the paper that said Stirling was to marry Lady Honoria Morely, and I know that the notice was put in by Mama and not by Stirling, because I was on the landing when Stirling came back from Hertfordshire.

I heard him at the bottom of the stairs, and he was using a voice that I have not heard him use, ever, not even when I broke the Sevres cup. He said, ‘You will write to the editor by this morning’s post, Mama,’ and Mama said something I could not hear, and Stirling said, ‘Today, Mama.’

Then he came up the stairs three at a time, which he never does, and he went into the schoolroom where you were not, because you had gone, and I know that you had gone because I had been there at eight and the door was open and the desk was empty and your shawl was not on the back of the chair where it always was, and your note to me was on the table, with your note to him.

So I know that the betrothal was broken before you left, Miss Wharton, and not after.

I know it because the notice was put in on the Thursday and Stirling came back from Hertfordshire on the Saturday morning very early and went straight to Mama and made her write to the paper, and you were already gone by then.

You did not see him make her do it.

You went away thinking that he meant to marry Lady Honoria, but he did not mean to, and he never did mean to, and I am writing to tell you so, because I do not think that anybody else has told you, and I think it matters that someone should.

Madeleine set the letter down on the counterpane.

She put her hands together in her lap.

She looked out of the window, where the garden looked as peaceful as always, and she did not, for some moments, see it. The light at the window was the steady mid‑morning light of a Bath July, and it fell across the foot of the bed and across her own hands and across the sheet of schoolroom paper with the careful round hand on it. She looked at the light and not at the paper, and she made herself breathe in and out twice before she took the paper up again.

I know also, that you would not have left if you had known. I do not mean that as a wickedness, Miss Wharton.

I mean it as a fact.

You would have stayed because of me. I do not mean that you would have stayed because of Stirling, although I think that you might have, only that is not a thing I shall write down because Mama is right that one ought not to write down everything one thinks, even when one is writing down rather a lot of it.

I mean that you would have stayed because of me, because you do not leave a pupil in the middle of Tuesday’s French, which you did, and I have not done a French exercise since the eleventh of June which is a Thursday three weeks ago and the day before everything went wrong.

Cecilia says that I shall have a new Governess soon. Mama says that I shall have a new Governess by August.

I have said to both of them that I shall not learn anything from a new Governess and they have both said that I shall, but I shall not, because I have decided, and you taught me, Miss Wharton, although you did not mean to teach me this, that a person may decide a thing and hold to it even when everyone in the house is against her.

You taught me that by being it, on the Wednesday in April when Lord Edmund Carmody came, and Mama would not have you in the drawing room and you did not cry, and on the Wednesday in May when Mrs Holland spoke to you on the back stairs and I do not know what she said but I saw your face afterwards and you went into the schoolroom and you set me the next sum You taught me by being it those days, and on every day of every week I have known you.

I am twelve, Miss Wharton.

I am not a baby. I notice things. You taught me to notice them and now I have noticed them and I cannot un‑notice them, and one of the things I have noticed is that this house has been wrong since you left it, and that nobody in it is saying so, and that I am the only person who is going to say so, and I am saying it.

Please come back.

I know that you cannot come back as my Governess because Mama will not have it, and I think also that you will not have it, and I think that I understand why, although I shall not write that down either. But please write to me. Please tell me about where you are.

Mrs Holland told me that you were in Bath at your aunt and sister’s house and I have got the direction from her by asking three times in three different ways which is a trick I learned from you, although you did not mean to teach me that either.