Page 71 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“This,” she said, “is a ticket to Lady Sefton’s musicale, which is given tonight at her house in Belgrave Square. It is a small affair — the town is thin at this time of year, and Maria Sefton makes a virtue of giving her July party for those of us who are still here — and there will be perhaps forty people there, of whom thirty know my son and twenty‑five have heard the whisper that ran about the clubs ten days ago. I have spoken to Maria Sefton myself, on Thursday afternoon, and she has been informed of the truth of the matter, and she has put me down for an additional name on her list, which is yourself.”

Madeleine looked at the card. She did not take it up.

“My Lady. I cannot —”

“You can. You will come as my guest. You will come upon my arm. You will be introduced by me, in Maria Sefton’s drawing room, to such persons as I see fit, as Miss Wharton, granddaughter of the late Earl of Wexford, and as a young woman whose acquaintance I have the honour of claiming. You will stand beside me for one hour, and you will hear what is said, and you shall say what little needs to be said in reply, which will be very little, because Maria Sefton’s drawing room on a July evening is not a room in which much needs to be said by a young woman who is standing beside me. And at the end of the hour, we shall go home, and the whisper of the clubs will be a whisper no longer, because it will have been heard, by the persons who matter to its hearing, to be untrue.”

“My Lady. I am a Governess.”

“You are not a Governess this evening. You are the granddaughter of an Earl, which you were upon the day you were born and which you have not, by any subsequent circumstance, ceased to be. You are a young woman whom I am pleased to call my friend. That is all that needs to be said in Belgrave Square tonight, and that is what I propose to say.”

“And — and your son.”

The Dowager Marchioness looked at her for a long moment, the line between her brows deepened by the smallest fraction, and she said, with the particular care of a woman who had thought the matter out:

“My son will not be at Lady Sefton’s tonight. He has not been invited, by my request, and Maria Sefton, who has known me forty years, has been so good as to agree to it. I am not bringing you out, Miss Wharton, to set you in a room with him. I am bringing you out, with your leave, to undo a wrong that was done to you in a room in which he was not present and which it is not in his power to undo. He has done what is in his power, which is the notice in the Morning Post, and the small letter which I am told he sent to Bath. The rest is mine to do, and I should have done it three weeks ago.”

Madeleine’s hands had not moved upon her lap. She was aware, with the clarity of a woman who had not, through everything thus far, wept, that her eyes were wet; and she did not, with the dignity which her mother had taught her in her childhood, and her ten weeks in the Greyscarp House schoolroom had taught her since, raise her hand to them.

“My Lady,” she said.

“You may say no.”

“I —”

“You may say no. I have not come to require anything of you. I have come to ask, and to ask once. Mrs Frampton, you will tell me, I hope, if I have overstepped.”

Mrs Frampton, who had been seated in the chair by the cold fire with her hands very still upon her work, raised her eyes.

“My Lady,” she said, “I do not think that you have overstepped. I think that you have done a thing this morning that few women of your station would think to do; and I shall say, with my niece’s leave, that if she chooses to accept your invitation, I shall be glad of it, and if she chooses to refuse it, I shall be glad of that also, and that whichever she chooses, this house is hers.”

“That is handsomely said.”

“It is meant.”

The Dowager Marchioness inclined her head.

“Miss Wharton?”

Madeleine sat for a short interval, and looked at the card on the small table between them, which was a piece of pasteboard of about three inches by two, with Lady Sefton’s monogram in the corner and the details written in below in a careful hand. She thought as she looked at it, with a steadiness that surprised her, of a yellow drawing room, of a schoolroom three flights up, and of a child of twelve who had wept upon the Dowager Marchioness’ knee for forty minutes together. She thought also that the Marquess would not be there, and that this had been arranged not as a concession to her but as a recognition of what she had said in April, that she would not be alone with him again, and that she had meant it - she now thought, upon considering it, that the woman in the grey pelisse opposite her had heard her say it, or been told that she had said it, without having been in the room.

She took up the card.

“I shall come, my Lady.”

“You shall come.”

Her voice held a note of what sounded very much like relief.

“On the condition —”

“Yes.”

That relief was paused, and the grey eyes met hers in a manner that looked almost anxious.

“On the condition that I come as I am. I have no London gown that is fit for Lady Sefton’s drawing room. I shall not be dressed as your guest at the expense of your wardrobe. I shall come in my own dress, which is the grey silk I wore in April, and which will not, I hope, disgrace you.”

The Dowager Marchioness regarded her for a moment, and then she said, with the smallest movement at the corner of her mouth which might, in another woman, have been a smile: