Page 68 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

Friday

My Lord,

I am in London. I am at my aunt’s house, the direction of which is at the head of this sheet. I have had your letter.

I am not yet ready to receive you. I shall write again when I am.

I remain, my Lord, your obedient servant,

M. Wharton.

She read it over twice. She did not soften it; she did not amend it. She thought, with the clarity that some time at the cottage near Bath and one night in Doughty Street had given her, that he had asked for word by any hand at any time, that this was the word she had, and that he had not asked her for anything more, so she folded the sheet and sealed it, then she carried it down with Lady Sophia’s to the hall, and gave them both to Patty for the post.

*****

He had it that afternoon. He had been at his desk in the library at Greyscarp House since ten — Grosvenor Square in late July was thin of company and full of dust‑sheets, and the house had the hushed and curiously enlarged feeling of a great room from which most of the furniture has been removed, the long corridors echoing his step in a way they had not in May. Hodges brought the letter in upon the silver salver with the other items of post, set it down at his elbow, and went away again.

He looked at it for a moment before he took it up. He knew the hand instantly. He had seen it in the margin of Sophia’s exercise book, once, where she had set a small note for the pupil — ‘very neat; the loop of the y once again’ — in a writing of which he had thought, on the only occasion that he had ever seen it, that it was a hand which would not convey a lie. He took up the letter now, and he broke the seal.

He read it once. He read it a second time, more slowly, and at the second reading he set the sheet down upon the blotter and sat for a long moment with his fingers upon it, in much the same posture in which Madeleine had sat, in the cottage near Bath, with her hand flat upon Lady Sophia’s letter, then he rose and went to the window.

The library window at Greyscarp House gave him a late July view which was a poor thing of dusty plane trees and empty streets. A single nursemaid went by, carrying a small child with the resigned step of a woman whose family had not gone to Brighton. He stood with his hand on the sill where the small book had been in April, looked out of the window, and made himself read the letter through again from memory, sentence by sentence.

‘I am not yet ready to receive you.’

He thought, with the controlled calmness which he had been forcing himself to maintain since the morning when he had ridden back from Hertfordshire to a schoolroom with no shawl on the chair, that ‘not yet’ was a phrase he had no right to read more into than it said; and he thought also that it was the first word he’d had from her, that it was not ‘no’, and that he had no business asking for more than that.

He went back to the desk, took out a sheet of paper, and wrote, in a hand which he made himself keep level:

Madam,

I have your letter. I shall not call until you send word to ask it of me. I am at Greyscarp House and shall remain in London.

Greyscarp.

He sealed it. He rang for Hodges. He gave it to be sent by hand to Doughty Street that afternoon, and Hodges, who had been with the family for thirty years and who had carried, in his time, a great many notes between a great many doors, took it without comment and went away again with the care of a butler who has understood that his master is not, this summer, to be questioned about correspondence.

*****

The note was at Doughty Street by five. Madeleine read it standing in the hall, by the light from the fanlight over the door, with Patty waiting nearby to know whether there was an answer required which she might need to carry. It was only a few moments before Madeleine spoke.

“There is no answer, Patty, thank you.”

She went up the stairs with the letter in her hand, and put it into the writing case with the other two.

She did not, that evening, allow herself to think about it. She sat with her aunt in the front parlour after dinner and read aloud from the ‘Edinburgh Review’, an article about the iron trade - which was not, in itself, of the smallest interest to either of them, but which they got through with the companionable patience of two women who had agreed, without saying so, that the reading aloud of an article was the kind of innocuous small domestic act that holds a house together on a Friday in July.

At a quarter past nine her aunt set down her work.

“Madeleine.”

Madeleine paused in her reading aloud.

“Aunt.”

“You are not to tell me anything that you do not wish to tell me. I have lived sixty‑two years, and I have learned at last to ask no questions. But I shall say this one thing.” She looked across the hearth with a straight grey eye. “Your father lost the family’s money in late 1813, and your mother died of it a little more than two years later, and your sisters and you have made what you could of what was left, and what you have made of it has been a credit to my brother that he did not live to see. I do not know what has brought you to my door, and I shall not ask. I shall only say that this house is yours as a place to live for as long as you have need of it, that no man, of whatever station, sets foot in it to see you without your leave; and that if any man wishes to set foot in it, he shall do so by the front door, and at an hour at which I am in the room, and not otherwise.”

Madeleine sat very still.