Page 8 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

He came around the desk to open the door for her himself, which was a courtesy he ought not to have shown her.

She wished he had not. As he reached past her for the handle she caught, faintly, the scent of him — clean linen, something like sandalwood, the smoke of a good fire — and she stood very still and looked at the brass handle and not at his sleeve.

“Miss Wharton,” he said, low.

“My Lord.”

“In 1813,” he said, “you told me, when I returned you to your mother, that you did not care for dancing, and that you were sorry to have wasted my set. Do you remember?”

She had forgotten.

She remembered now.

“I do, my Lord.”

“I told you that you had not wasted it.”

“You were very civil.”

“I was telling the truth.”

He opened the door.

The hall was as it had been - marble, beeswax, hyacinths, a footman who had arranged not to be in the corridor at this exact moment and would now reappear from the direction of the back stairs in approximately ten seconds.

“Good day, Miss Wharton.”

“Good day, my Lord.”

She walked down the long corridor with the portraits, and across the black-and-white hall, and out into Grosvenor Square when the footman opened the door, and she did not let herself breathe properly until she had reached the railings on the south side of the gardens, where she stopped, and put one mended glove against the cold iron, and stood looking at nothing.

Sixty pounds a year. Her own room and parlour. A child of twelve who had lost her father.

And a man who remembered the colour of her ribbons near five years on.

She thought of her sisters, of Beatrice in their aunt’s cramped house in Bath writing the same desperate letters she had written, of Georgiana teaching pianoforte to vicars’ daughters in Hampshire for thirty shillings a quarter, and soon to be companion to an older lady. She thought of her father, four years dead, and the sound of her mother’s weeping in the dressing room the night the bankers came. She thought of the word complication.

‘I think,’ he had said, ‘that we had better not, you and I, be much in the same room.’

She drew her glove from the railing and walked on, into the bright April afternoon, and told herself, with the calm and practised firmness of a woman who had been telling herself such things for four years, that she would not think of him again until she had to.

She managed it as far as Brook Street.

Chapter Two

The schoolroom at Greyscarp House was, as she had said in the library, at the top of the stairs — three flights of them, the last narrow and uncarpeted, the kind of stair that announced one’s arrival to anyone who cared to listen.

Madeleine had been shown up at half past ten by the same upper housemaid who had unpacked her trunks the night before, a thin Welshwoman named Price who did not speak unless spoken to and seemed to have made a private resolution, like Madeleine, to give nothing away.

“Lady Sophia is in there, Miss,” Price said, with a slight emphasis on Miss that Madeleine chose not to examine. “I’m to bring tea at eleven if you ring.”

“Thank you, Price.”

The door was already a little ajar.

Madeleine stood a moment on the landing — her own door, the small private parlour she had been promised, was four paces behind her, and her bedroom four paces beyond that — and took the measure of what she could see through that door.

The schoolroom appeared to be a long, low-ceilinged room, with two dormer windows giving out onto the slate roofs of Grosvenor Square.