Page 79 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Sit down, Sophia. You are not to run on the avenue. Dr Hodges said so on Tuesday.”

“Dr Hodges did not say so. Dr Hodges said I was not to run upstairs. The avenue is perfectly level.”

“The avenue is half a mile.”

“Yes,” said Sophia, sitting down upon the other end of the bench and folding her hands with a severe propriety which lasted three seconds. “Read it, Madeleine. Beatrice is to be married.”

Madeleine, who had been on the point of unfolding the letter, looked up.

“To whom?”

“To Sir Walter Carshalton, of Hampshire. He is a widower, and has two little girls, and is, Beatrice says, six-and-forty, and is very kind and not at all clever, which Beatrice says is what she finds she wants. She says it is to be in September at the church in Bath where your Mama was married, and that Mr Carshalton has a very pretty house called Linleywood, and a great many hothouses, and that the little girls are called Maria and Eliza and are seven and five, and that they have written to her in round hand and signed themselves ‘your loving daughters that will be’, and that she cried when she read it, which Beatrice says is not at all like her.”

“It is not at all like her.”

“Read it, Madeleine. Truly. I have not read all of it; I read only the first page and ran.”

Madeleine read it. Beatrice had written four close pages in her fine straight hand, and there was, in the writing, the unmistakable easing of a woman who had, at twenty-eight, after six years of being the tall fair Wharton girl whose father had failed in the bonds, found at last the place that fitted her.

She had met Sir Walter at Lady Carshalton’s, who was his late brother’s wife, in October; she had agreed to spend three months in his house before Christmas, helping with the little girls who were motherless.

She had not, she said, ‘expected anything to come of it, and was perfectly resolved that nothing should’, and was therefore, she wrote, ‘the more astonished, my dearest Madeleine, when on the Sunday following Easter he asked me, in the orangery, whether I should like to remain at Linleywood always; and I find that I should’.

“She is happy,” Madeleine said.

“Is she?”

“Yes. Read it, dearest, when I have done. It is in every line.”

“And Georgiana?”

Georgiana’s letter was a single sheet, written in haste, with a great deal of underscoring. Georgiana had been invited — ‘invited, Madeleine, by name, on cream paper, with the Sefton arms at the top’ — to a house party at Lady Sefton’s at Heron Court for the second week of June. There were to be twenty persons. There was to be no mention, Georgiana wrote, of ‘anything that was not perfectly proper to mention’.

There was to be Lady Sefton’s nephew, who was three-and-twenty and had a small estate in Leicestershire and was ‘not’, Georgiana said, ‘very clever either, but is, I am told, very steady, which one is given to understand is more useful’; and there was to be, ‘and this is the thing, Madeleine, this is the thing’, no whispering.

‘I had thought’, Georgiana wrote at the foot of the sheet, ‘that I should go through my life being the second of the Wharton girls whose father failed in the bonds. I find that I am to be permitted to be only Georgiana, which is, I assure you, quite enough for me.’

Madeleine folded the letter and set it upon Petrarch, then put her hand upon her side, where the child had, in the last minute, given one small definite kick of opinion; and Sophia, who saw the gesture and knew it, said,

“Is it kicking?”

“It is.”

“May I —”

“You may.”

Sophia put her hand very carefully upon the muslin above Madeleine’s hand, and waited, with the grave attention of a girl of fourteen who had been told in April that she was to be an aunt and had not, since, quite stopped being astonished by it; and the child kicked again, obligingly, and Sophia drew her hand back with a little private smile, then folded it in her lap and said nothing at all for perhaps ten seconds, which was, for Sophia, a tribute.

Stirling came down the terrace steps with the morning post in one hand.

He was in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, which he would not have been three years before in any garden in May; he had taken his coat off in the library half an hour before, Madeleine knew, because she had heard him do it through the open window.

He came down the gravel path between the parterres at the pace of a man who had, for two years, been learning to walk unhurriedly upon his own land.

He came to the bench and looked at the two of them, at Sophia with her hands folded and Madeleine with the letters upon her lap.

“You have heard from your sisters?”