Page 70 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

She turned when Madeleine came in.

“Miss Wharton,” she said.

“My Lady.”

“I have presumed,” said the Dowager Marchioness, “upon your aunt’s hospitality before I had the right to ask it, and I beg her pardon, and yours.”

“My aunt,” said Madeleine, “is upon the stairs.”

“Then I shall beg it again, in a moment, of her in person.”

Mrs Frampton came in.

She had the unhurried dignity of a woman who had lived in Doughty Street for nine years and who was not, for any title, going to come into her own front parlour at a pace not her own. She made the Dowager Marchioness her curtsey with the exactness of a woman who had made curtsies in far better rooms in 1782 and had not, since, forgotten the trick of it.

“Lady Greyscarp.”

“Mrs Frampton. I am Anne Hawksmoor, Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp, and I must apologise that I have come without an introduction, and without warning, to call upon your niece. I shall not stay above twenty minutes. I beg you will not be put out.”

“I am not put out,” said Mrs Frampton. “I shall ring for tea.”

“I would rather,” said the Dowager Marchioness, “if you will permit me — no tea, Mrs Frampton, I thank you. I have come on a particular errand, and I shall not pretend that I have not. May I sit?”

“You may sit.”

She sat. She set her gloves upon her lap with the action of a woman not in the habit of having her gloves anywhere but on a hall table; and she looked across the worn Turkey carpet at Madeleine, who had taken the chair opposite.

“Miss Wharton. I will be blunt. I have been an old fool.” Madeleine did not speak. “I have been, this past fortnight, an old fool of a particular kind, which is the kind that listens to what is said in her own drawing room by men of family, and does not listen to what is said in her own schoolroom by a child of twelve. I am told — I have been told, in the last three days, by my middle daughter, who has the eyes of an owl and the discretion of one only when she chooses, and by Sophia, my youngest, who wept upon my knee on Tuesday evening for forty minutes together and would not be put to bed until I had heard her — I have been told a great many things which I should have known without being told.” She paused. “I have also been told, by my son, the truth of what passed, with the Duke, in the breakfast room at Hawksmoor Hall in April. He did not tell me at the time. He told me on Thursday morning, in the library, when I went down to him and asked him.”

Madeleine set her hands one upon the other in her lap.

“I do not,” she said, “know what your Ladyship wishes me to say.”

“I do not wish you to say anything at all,” said the Dowager Marchioness. “I have come to say a thing or two to you, with your aunt’s leave, and then I have come to make you an offer, and you may take it or refuse it as you choose. May I go on?”

“You may go on.”

“The notice that appeared in the Morning Post of the twentieth was not put in by my son. It was put in, by a method I do not propose to dwell on in your aunt’s parlour, by Lord Edmund Carmody, with, I am ashamed to say, my agreement. Lord Edmund, who deceived me in that and other matters, has had reason for some months to dislike my son, and has had reason for rather longer to dislike any young woman who could not be made to look at him. The notice was a lie. The correction, the next morning, was the truth. The whisper that had run about the clubs the week before was also a lie, and was also Carmody’s, and was framed for the express purpose of placing you in a position from which the only egress was the public road to Bath.” She paused, and her grey eyes, which were Stirling’s eyes and were not, this morning, severe, rested on Madeleine. “I should have known it at the time. I did not. I confess it to you now.”

“My Lady —”

“I have not finished. I confess also that when Carmody came to call in April, and sat in my drawing room for forty minutes and drank my tea, I gave him an audience he had not earned, and credit he had not earned, and that I did so because he is the second son of an Earl and you are the daughter of a man who was unhappily situated in the matter of the Argentine bonds, and that the calculus by which I drew the one conclusion from the other was the calculus of a woman who has lived many years in the world, and has not yet, it seems, learned to see what is in front of her face. I am ashamed of it. It was a false premise on which to judge his honesty, and your value. I tell you so.”

The clock upon the chimneypiece, which did not keep time, struck the half hour at six minutes to nine.

“My Lady,” said Madeleine, when she could trust her voice, “you are very good to say so. I am not — I am not in a position to —”

“You are in the position,” said the Dowager Marchioness, “of a young woman of twenty‑two whose conduct, in three months under my roof, has been such that I cannot recall, in the four Governesses Sophia has had before you, a single one whose departure was regretted by Sophia for more than the length of a wet afternoon.”

Madeleine felt all at sea – it hurt to imagine Lady Sophia miserable because of her actions.

“I…”

But the Dowager did not let her continue.

“Sophia has not stopped crying for ten days. I do not regard the tears of a child of twelve as a settlement of the matter. I do regard them, in this case, as evidence; and the evidence, taken with the rest, is that I have lost from my household a young woman whom I ought, from the first, to have known the worth of, and that I have lost her to the malice of a man whom I ought, from the first, to have shown the door.”

She drew a small, folded card from the reticule upon her lap, and she laid it upon the table between them.