Page 67 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“I do not ask, Madeleine.”

“I know you do not.”

“I shall write you a letter to Bloomsbury when I have news, or if Beatrice has news.” She set the egg down again and looked up. “You will be careful.”

“I shall be careful.”

“I do not mean of the carriages.”

“I know what you mean,” said Madeleine. “I shall be careful of that also.”

She went up the stairs, and she packed.

She did it as she had packed in April for Hawksmoor Hall and as she had packed in June at Greyscarp House early in the morning with her hands not quite steady; and she did it now with her hands absolutely steady. That was, she thought, a thing she would once not have believed of herself, and which she credited, privately, to days of not weeping and to a sheet of schoolroom paper folded in a writing case on the chest under the window.

The Bath coach took her up on the Wednesday morning at a quarter past eight, and set her down at the Bull and Mouth at a quarter past ten on the Thursday morning.

There was one stop at Marlborough, at which she did not get down, and one change at Newbury at which she did, and a clergyman’s daughter from Devizes inside who slept against her shoulder for the last forty miles and who apologised, when she woke, with the particular blush of a woman who had not, in her own assessment, been brought up to sleep upon strangers. Madeleine said that she had not minded it at all, and meant it, helped the girl down with her bandbox in the inn yard, then stood for a moment amid the noise, the soot, and the cries of porters. Then she took up her own valise and walked out into Aldersgate Street to find a hackney.

Mrs Frampton’s house in Doughty Street was the fourth from the corner on the east side, with a railing of plain iron, and a door painted a green which had been fashionable in 1805 and which had not, since, been repainted. It was a narrow house of three storeys and a basement, a single dormer above, and a brass plate at the door saying ‘Frampton’ in small italic lettering.

Her aunt opened the door herself.

“Madeleine,” she said. She was a tall woman of sixty‑two, with Madeleine’s father’s nose and straight grey eye but none of Madeleine’s father’s gift for losing money. She had married a clerk in the Treasury, who had died in 1809 and left her a small competence and the lease of the house in Doughty Street, where she had been living ever since, on a sum that would have ruined a less competent woman in three quarters. She did not embrace her niece in the street. She drew her in by the elbow and shut the door behind her, and then, in the narrow hall with the staircase rising at one side and the door of the front parlour open at the other, she put her hands on Madeleine’s shoulders and looked at her for a long moment, and said, “You are thinner.”

“I have been on the road.”

“You have been on more than the road. Come in. Patty will set a kettle on. Patty!”

Patty, who was the only servant and who did the work of three, came up from the cold cellar at the call.

Mrs Frampton made Patty known to Madeleine (whom she remembered, she said, from when Miss had been a child of eight in a dress with a blue sash).

Patty went off to make the tea, whilst Mrs Frampton led Madeleine into the front parlour, where she explained that she had given Madeleine the small front bedroom on the second floor, which had a window that faced the street and the gas lamp at the corner.

Madeleine felt rather swept along by it all, even as she took off her bonnet and set her valise on the floor beside her. Her aunt never stopped talking, so Madeleine simply sat down and accepted the cup of tea which was handed to her when Patty brought it in.

“You are not to look for a place this week,” said her aunt.

“Aunt —”

“You are not to look for a place this week. You will eat three meals a day at my table, and you will sleep eight hours a night in that bed. At the end of the week, we shall see what you look like, and then we shall see about a place. I have known three Governesses in my life, Madeleine, and all three of them came to me looking as you look now, and all three of them I sent into the country for a fortnight before I would let them sit down to write a letter to an agency. You are family, and you shall have at least the fortnight.”

“I cannot accept a fortnight of your —”

“You can accept what I give you,” said her aunt, fixing her with clear grey eyes, “or you can quarrel with me about it, in which case you shall accept it anyway and we shall both be the crosser. Drink your tea.”

Madeleine drank her tea.

She slept that night for nine hours, which she had not done since April; then in the morning she sat down at the small escritoire in the front parlour, with the window open onto Doughty Street, and the sound of a costermonger’s cry coming up from the corner, and wrote two letters.

The first was to Lady Sophia.

She had written one already, from Bath, on the Tuesday evening, and she had sent it; but she wrote now a second, to tell Lady Sophia that she was come up to London on family business and was staying at her aunt’s house at number forty‑one Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, and that any letter sent to that direction would reach her. She also assured the girl that she had been very glad of the news of Lady Sophia’s French, and that she trusted that Lady Sophia was persevering with the irregular verbs which were, she would remind her, not to be learned by being looked at, but by being written out. She signed it ‘your affectionate Miss Wharton’, sealed it with a plain wafer, and set it aside for the post.

The second letter was very short, and it took her the better part of an hour.

41 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury