Page 75 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“My dear Greyscarp —”

“You will retract it now, in the hearing of every person in this room. You will retract, with it, the notice that you procured to be inserted in the Morning Post of the twentieth of this month, and the whisper that you set going from White’s on the Monday previous, and any and every word you have spoken in any club or drawing room in London on the subject of Miss Wharton since the third of April. You will do so in clear terms and without qualification. If you do not, you will meet me on Hampstead Heath at six tomorrow morning, and you will not, in my judgement, see seven.”

He had not raised his voice. He had not, Madeleine saw, moved his right hand from where it hung at his side. The cold of his voice was not the cold of anger; it was the cold of a man who had at last, after thirty years of being kept from his own choices, made one of his own and meant to keep to it.

Carmody opened his mouth. He shut it. He opened it again.

“My Lord,” he said, in a voice that was not the voice of five minutes before, “I — the remark I made was — I beg Miss Wharton’s pardon. It was — ill said. It was unjust. I withdraw it without reserve.”

“And the rest.”

“The — the notice in the Morning Post was —” He stopped. He drew a small breath. “I had a hand in it. I should not have. I retract it. The — the talk at the clubs was mine. It was — without foundation. I retract it. I have done Miss Wharton a grave wrong. I — I beg her pardon. And yours.”

“You do not have mine. You have hers, only if she chooses to give it. You will leave this house within the next five minutes, and you will leave London within the next five days, and you will not, while I am living, address Miss Wharton or any lady of my household by word or look or letter again. Is that clear?”

“It is clear.”

“Then go.”

Carmody went. He made his bow to Lady Sefton, who did not return it; he made his bow to the Dowager Marchioness, who did not look at him; and he went out of the drawing room with the near unsteady step of a man who has just understood that he has, in the past ten minutes, ceased to be received in any house in London which will matter to him, for the rest of his life.

The Marquess did not watch him go. He turned, instead, to Lady Sefton.

“Lady Sefton. I beg your pardon for the disturbance. I shall not stay. Miss Linwood — I beg your pardon also. The fault is entirely mine.”

“My Lord,” said Lady Sefton, with the dry smile of a woman who had, in 1818, seen a number of things in her drawing rooms but had not, until this evening, seen something quite so dramatic as this, “I shall send you the bill for the third air, should it turn out that you have made it impossible. You are forgiven. Go home.”

“I am obliged to you.”

He bowed once more — to Lady Sefton, to his mother, and, last and longest, to Madeleine — and then walked back down the length of the drawing room between the gilt chairs, and went out.

The Dowager Marchioness laid her hand, very lightly, upon Madeleine’s, and pressed it once, then let it go.

“Sit down, my dear,” she said. “I am sure that Miss Linwood will sing the third air. We shall hear it, I think, with very particular attention.”

Madeleine sat down.

Miss Linwood sang the third air. Madeleine did not, afterward, remember a note of it. She remembered only that her hand, in its white glove, was lying upon the gilt arm of the chair, and that it was, against every expectation she’d had of the evening when she had dressed in Doughty Street at seven o’clock, steady.

Internally, nothing was steady at all.

Chapter Twenty

The banns were called for the first time on the second Sunday following Lady Sefton’s musicale, which was the second of August, at St George’s, Hanover Square, in the eleven o’clock service, by the Reverend Mr Hodgson, who had christened Lady Sophia Hawksmoor twelve years before and who had, in the interval, christened a great number of other children of greater and lesser houses, and who read the names of Stirling Edward Hawksmoor, of this parish, bachelor, and Madeleine Mary Wharton, of the parish of St Pancras, spinster, in the even voice of a clergyman who had not been told that there was anything in the names which was not exactly as it ought to be.

Madeleine sat in the pew with her aunts and with her two sisters, who had come up from Bath together by the Tuesday coach and had been in Doughty Street for four days. Beatrice, who had been, in 1814, the prettiest of the three Penworthy girls and was still, at six and twenty, an attractive, tall fair woman with the straight carriage of her grandmother, sat upright at Madeleine’s left and did not, when the names were read, turn her head; Georgiana, who was twenty-four and dark and who had, since the day of their father’s death, taken upon herself the useful office of being amused by everything, gave Madeleine’s hand one quick press under cover of her prayer book, and let it go.

“There,” said Beatrice, very quietly. “It is begun.”

It was begun.

The second calling was upon the ninth of August, and the third upon the sixteenth, and in the three weeks between the first calling and the wedding, Madeleine saw the Marquess of Greyscarp — saw Stirling, as she had, since the Monday call in her aunt’s parlour, been learning, with the private effort of a woman remaking the use of a name, to think of him — upon six occasions, all of them properly chaperoned, and none of them, after the first two minutes, easy.

He’d come to Doughty Street on the Monday at eleven, as he had said he would; where he sat in Mrs Frampton’s parlour for three quarters of an hour with his hat upon his knee and asked Madeleine, in the steady even voice of a man putting a question he had already, in the hearing of forty people, committed himself to, whether she would do him the honour of becoming his wife.

Madeleine, who had sat up until two in the morning with her aunt, going over what she meant to say, had then, in the event of it actually happening, said almost none of it, except the most important bit – which was ‘yes’.

“I had not thought,” she said, after, “to say it so quickly.”