Page 73 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

That was the whole of the conversation between Doughty Street and Belgrave Square. The Dowager Marchioness did not, Madeleine understood, propose to use the carriage as a room in which to rehearse what would be said in the next room; she sat very still in the corner with her gloved hands one upon the other in her lap, and looked out at the gas lamps of Oxford Street as they passed, giving Madeleine the great kindness of leaving her to her own thoughts.

Belgrave Square was brightly lit. Lady Sefton’s house had three carriages at the door already, and a fourth coming up behind them; and there was the soft ordinary murmur of a London evening at the foot of the steps, the coachmen calling gently to their horses, and the footmen at the door taking cloaks, and the high thin sound of a violin tuning, three rooms in.

“Take my arm, Miss Wharton,” said the Dowager Marchioness.

Madeleine took her arm, in that instant grateful for the stability it provided.

They went up the steps together, and Mrs Frampton followed half a pace behind, with the dignity of a woman who had not been in Belgrave Square in more than nine years and was not going to give any sign of that. At the head of the stairs Lady Sefton herself was standing, in lilac, with her hand out.

“Anne.”

“Maria. I have brought Miss Wharton, of whom I spoke to you on Thursday, and Mrs Frampton, her aunt, who has been so very good as to accompany us.”

“Miss Wharton. Mrs Frampton. You are very welcome.”

“My Lady.”

“Come in.”

They went in.

The drawing room was set up for, as the Dowager Marchioness had said, a small affair — perhaps forty people, with the gilt chairs set in three short rows before the pianoforte and the music stand, and another dozen standing in the further drawing room beyond the open double doors, where the candles were lit upon the side tables and a tray of negus had been set out. Madeleine had been in such a room once, in 1813, when she was eighteen and her father was alive and the Argentine bonds had not yet been heard of in St James’; and she found, with a sense of private surprise, that her feet remembered the carpets, her body the manner in which a young woman with a right to be there might stand.

The Dowager Marchioness did not look about her. She walked Madeleine the length of the room with the unhurried step of a woman who had taken thirty Seasons of such rooms in her stride, and she stopped before a stout lady in puce who was the Countess of Salford.

“Lady Salford. May I make known to you Miss Wharton, granddaughter of the late Earl of Wexford, of whom I have spoken to you; and her aunt, Mrs Frampton, of Doughty Street.”

“Miss Wharton. Mrs Frampton. I am charmed.”

“My Lady.”

“I knew your grandfather,” said Lady Salford, with the particular firmness of a woman who has been told, not long before her arrival, exactly what is required of her, and who is not displeased to oblige. “He was a man of great judgement. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“You are very kind, my Lady.”

“Not at all. Anne, you will sit by me — I have kept the chair.”

“In a moment, Maria. I have one or two more presentations to make.”

There were, in fact, more than one or two more presentations to make. Madeleine was made known, in the space of perhaps six minutes, to Lord and Lady Castlereagh’s cousin, to a Mrs Drummond Burrell who was a patroness of Almack’s and who looked at her once, very steadily, and inclined her head; to old Sir Henry Wexhart, who had been at school with her grandfather and who took her hand in both of his and said he was glad, very glad, to see Wexford’s granddaughter in a London drawing room again. The ordinary murmur of the room, which Madeleine had been aware of from the moment that she came in, as a thing not quite addressed to her and not quite turned away from her, settled, by some adjustment which she could not have named, into the accepting murmur of a room in which a young woman of twenty‑two had been positively received.

She was breathing. She had not, she discovered, stopped doing so.

They sat. The Dowager Marchioness placed Madeleine between herself and Mrs Frampton in the second row, and Lady Salford turned in the chair before them and said something civil about the heat. The soprano, a Miss Linwood of whom Madeleine had never heard, took her place at the pianoforte, and began the first of three airs of Mr Handel’s.

Madeleine heard the first and second airs. She did not hear the third. Between the second and the third there was the small movement in the room that there is between any two pieces — a programme rustled, a fan opened, a footman went by with a tray — and it was in that moment that the voice came, from the back of the room, pitched at the precise carrying note of a man who intended to be heard.

“—Greyscarp’s schoolroom mistress, if you please. I had it on Tuesday from a man who had it from the under‑butler. Imagine the boy’s face.”

There was a laugh — small, uncertain, three or four voices, no more.

Madeleine did not turn. The Dowager Marchioness did not turn. Mrs Frampton’s hand, beside Madeleine on the gilt arm of the chair, closed once, very firmly, upon the carved wood, and opened again.

It was Lord Edmund Carmody.

Madeleine had not, until that moment, known that he was in the room. She knew the voice — she had heard it through the door of the yellow drawing room in April, and when he had spoken directly to her on the stairs and in the schoolroom at Greyscarp House — and she knew, with the sharp cold clarity of a woman who has been waiting for a thing without admitting to herself that she is waiting for it, that he had said it deliberately, that he had said it now, because he had been told, in the last hour, who was in the room. Her stomach churned.

There was a short silence. Lady Sefton, at the front, had half turned in her chair.