Page 69 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Aunt,” she said, after a moment.

“That is all,” said her aunt. “Read me the next paragraph.”

Madeleine read the next paragraph. Her voice was perfectly even. She read to the end of the article, and then set the ‘Edinburgh Review’ down upon the small table at her elbow. She sat for a moment with her hands folded in her lap and looked at the fire, which was not lit, the evening being warm, but in the grate of which a small bouquet of dried lavender had been set by Patty in the way of a woman brought up with a garden where lavender was grown, and ever after fond of it.

Madeleine got up at last, and kissed her aunt upon the temple, and went up to bed.

She slept.

Not far away, in Grosvenor Square, the Marquess of Greyscarp sat in his library with the curtains undrawn and the lamps not yet lit, watching the light go out of the city outside; and he did not, that night, ring for anything at all.

Chapter Eighteen

Madeleine woke at half past six to the cry of the milkmaid at the corner, and the unfamiliar small creaks of a house that was not the cottage near Bath, not Greyscarp House, and not a house in which her duties began at eight.

She lay for a moment looking at the strip of grey London sky between the curtains, and she thought that a Saturday in July in Bloomsbury was as good a day as any to sit at a writing table and not write a letter. For that was what would happen – it was not possible to write, when one had no idea what should be written.

She got up, washed, and dressed in the grey muslin she had worn at Hawksmoor Hall, and which Patty had brushed and hung the night before with the unfussy competence of a woman who had been doing other people’s linen for thirty years; and then went down to the front parlour, where her aunt was already at the table, in a morning cap that had been freshly laundered and a shawl that had not.

“You will eat,” said Mrs Frampton, “two pieces of toast and an egg, and you will drink your tea hot.”

“Aunt —”

“Two pieces of toast and an egg.”

Madeleine ate two pieces of toast and an egg.

She had drunk half the second cup of tea, and her aunt had read aloud the rather dull paragraph in the Morning Post which was an account of the Regent’s progress at Brighton, when Patty came up with her face composed in the particular flat expression of a servant who has just answered the front door to a person she has not been told to expect.

“If you please, ma’am,” said Patty.

“Yes, Patty.”

“There is a lady at the door.”

“A lady,” said Mrs Frampton.

“Yes, ma’am. She did not give a card. She said her name was Lady Greyscarp, and asked if Miss Wharton was within.”

Madeleine set the cup down upon the saucer with the precise and careful action of a woman who has caught an item of china at the moment of slipping, and fears that it will still fall if she keeps holding it. Her aunt looked across the table at her, but did not speak for the space of three breaths.

“Show her into the parlour, Patty,” said Mrs Frampton at last, with the unflustered courtesy with which she would have received the Archbishop of Canterbury or the chimney‑sweep. “We shall come.”

Patty went. Mrs Frampton set down her napkin.

“Madeleine.”

“I do not know,” said Madeleine, “why she has come.”

“No,” said her aunt. “Nor do I. We shall find out. Take a moment, child.”

Madeleine took a moment. Truth to tell, she needed it rather badly. She drew a steadying breath, set her hand upon the back of her chair, and discovered, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was not afraid. She had been a great many things in the past fortnight, but she was not, at this moment, going to be afraid of a woman she had only three times spoken to in a yellow drawing room, once in a schoolroom, and had once heard ring for fresh tea three flights below.

She went out into the hall.

The front parlour of Doughty Street was not the yellow drawing room at Greyscarp House. It was a square room with a worn Turkey carpet and a clock upon the chimneypiece which had been her uncle’s and which had not, since 1809, kept time within a quarter of an hour; but standing in the middle of it, with her bonnet still upon her head and her gloves still in her hand, was the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp.

She was a tall woman, in a travelling pelisse of grey silk that had been ordered for her in May and that had, Madeleine saw with the eye of a woman who had once dressed for a Season of her own, been put on this morning with particular care. Her hair beneath the bonnet was iron grey, parted in the centre, and her face was the face that Madeleine remembered — narrow, fine, with the faint vertical line between the brows which was not, in this light, severity, but consideration.