Chapter Twenty-Four
Perhaps it was her husband’s insolence that had done it, but Augusta found herself fired up all afternoon.
She could hardly focus on the letter regarding Lady Wallingford’s latest update, sent by Dr. Pinkton before her spell and intercepted by Milly, faithful as ever.
The words all blurred together before her, her husband once again having robbed her of her abilities.
Not that it mattered so much. She was only a wife now.
Which was why, when Ginny called for her that afternoon, she accepted without delay. It was time for her to leave her stuffy room, to rejoin society and go about the business of pretending that her life had not so completely fallen apart.
She’d made up her mind to remain strong in front of her friend. But upon entering the drawing room and seeing the familiar, open face of her dearest confidant, she immediately tossed that resolve to the wind.
Ginny stood up from her place by the window as Augusta rushed into her arms.
“Oh, dear,” Ginny said, already assessing the damage to Augusta’s countenance. “What has happened?”
Augusta sighed, wondering where she might even begin. How did one sum up their own demise with clarity and good narration?
“I am just so happy to see you,” she said into the fabric of Ginny’s dress. She hoped that that was enough for now.
“Of course. When Lord Brightwater told me to come visit, I practically flew over here.”
Augusta stiffened.
Slowly, she pulled back from the hug, looking at her friend with a fresh wave of suspicion.
Sebastian had told Ginny to come. The man who had orchestrated all of her thoughts and life decisions for the past months had now orchestrated this very moment, and that made her feel that something must be greatly amiss.
What other parts of her life had he sunk his claws into?
Who else had he manipulated in order to get Augusta where he’d wanted her?
The thoughts increased, spiraling one into the other until Augusta thought that she could no longer think one single coherent thought. She pushed away from Ginny with a shove.
“Did you know?”
Ginny looked at her with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry?”
Augusta took a step closer, eyeing every feature on her dear friend’s face to seek out any hint of falsehood. “Did you know about Sebastian and the dowry?”
Ginny’s eyes bounced between Augusta’s, clearly seeking her own answers to the situation at hand. “Augusta, you are speaking nonsense, I believe. Are you alright? What has Sebastian done?”
What, indeed?
Tears brimmed in Augusta’s eyes, though they had probably been threatening to appear for some time now.
“Ginny…” With that, she fell into a heap on the chaise, and the tears spilled freely.
“Oh, heavens,” Ginny breathed, rushing over to her in an instant. “What on earth is the matter?”
“I-” Augusta sobbed. “I’ve been such a God damned fool.”
Ginny sat on the chaise next to her and laid an arm across the back of her shoulders. “My dearest Auggie, what has happened to you?”
The story came tumbling out of Augusta in waves, broken up by bursts of sobbing that made her feel embarrassed and achey.
“Oh, God,” Ginny breathed at the end. “That is just awful. Are you certain of it?”
“As certain as I’ve ever been. God, Ginny, how did I miss all of it? How did I let myself believe that I was actually being loved by someone?”
Ginny’s compassionate expression hardened some.
“Now, you listen to me, Auggie. I won’t have you talking about my very best friend that way.
Of all the nasty lies in this situation, you being worthy of love isn’t one of them.
You have always deserved a love that swept you off your feet.
I am just so very sorry that the man who did it is not who you thought he was. ”
Her words only served to bolster Augusta’s spirits by the slightest bit. Nothing anyone said now could cut through the crushing haze of her husband having taken her for a fool with his friends.
“I just don’t understand,” she said with a sniffle. “I did everything right Ginny. I tried to be soft and quiet and tiptoe around. I married the man my brother told me to. What was it all for? What was the point of it? I feel so much like I’ve walked into a trap and can’t get out.”
Ginny looked at her with so much pitiful sympathy that Augusta almost felt more sorry for her friend than for herself.
“I think…” her friend started, but the sentence died quickly. Finally, she started once more. “I think, perhaps, that there is no ‘right,’ sometimes. You did not ‘do things’ right, you only made the choices you believed to be right. Everything else is…luck, I suppose.”
It was not the answer that Augusta wanted, but it rang true enough. Luck. That was what so much of this boiled down to. It had been the only thing that separated her from the common ladies of the Society. The only thing that separated Reginald, with all of his easy freedoms, from herself.
“I think perhaps I have been a bit myopic,” she said finally. “I have badly misjudged the women of the Society. I now feel so greatly like throwing a brick through a window that I wonder how I ever saw them as lesser.”
Ginny’s eyes widened. “You are not saying that you are going to throw a brick through a window, are you?”
“No,” Augusta said, surprised to find that a part of her did not believe it.
*****
When she arose the next morning, Augusta found a bouquet of flowers on her bedside table. Bright yellow tulips stuffed into a crystal vase. At the base of the vase was a card.
I am sorry.
That was it. Three words for all of her misery.
Disgusted, she steeled herself for breakfast with Sebastian. There was little she could do to get out of it. So, with a book in hand to keep her attention, she wandered downstairs and stepped into the dining room.
Sebastian stood as she walked to the table, taking her own seat a few down from him. A servant set a plate before her. In her peripheral, Sebastian sat again in silence.
Her usual eggs and toast sat on the plate. What would have been so appetizing a week ago now looked gray and bland to her. Instead of eating, she sipped her tea and opened her book, happy to have something to look at that was not Sebastian.
“How did you sleep?”
“Quite well,” she said without looking up.
Another long silence stretched between them. Even as she attempted to read, the obnoxious sounds of Sebastian’s fork scraping against his plate grated on her ears. She wondered at the strangeness of Sebastian’s fall from grace, as his very existence in her space now put her on edge.
He cleared his throat. Her jaw tensed.
“I was hoping to be able to talk this morning.”
Of course he was. What little hope she’d held of getting through this breakfast in peace faded away.
“Then talk.”
“I only wanted to…” he trailed off, leaving Augusta without a clue as to what he wanted.
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, growing more and more suspicious of his attentions.
“Are you attempting to ask me something?” she asked, her hackles raised for the inevitable fight that was about to ensue.
“I suppose I do have some questions.”
“Do you?” she asked coolly, fully intending not to answer whatever he asked.
A pause brought her brief reprieve, but soon his voice once again broke through her reading.
“I do not wish to have you take offense.”
In a fit, Augusta snapped her book shut far too aggressively. “I am supremely tired of this, my lord. Please say whatever it is that is on your mind or leave me alone.”
The blow landed, if the flash of fire in Sebastian’s gaze was anything to go by. Once he had composed himself, he spoke in a steady voice. “I only mean to ask how long you thought you would have gotten away with it.”
She could not think about it without aching and wishing for a reality in which she had gotten away with it. “I suppose we shall never know now.”
“Did you truly believe you would ever be able to have your own practice?”
And what of it if I had?
“No,” she said honestly, sighing. “No. Truthfully, I knew that Reginald would eventually catch me and force me to stop.”
She said no more on it, fearful that her tears would come on before she could stop them.
“And what if someone else had caught you? You would have been run out of society.”
“What a pity that would have been,” she grumbled. Her hands itched to return to her book.
“It is not a joke,” he said, and there was that terrible censure that Augusta could not abide. “You could have lost everything.”
“Everything?” she said with a disdainful laugh. “It might have escaped your notice, but I have nothing. I own nothing. Nothing is mine.”
He gave her a tiresome look. “You know what I mean, Augusta.”
“It is alright, my lord. You do not need to harp upon my foolishness. I already know that you believe me to be a simpleton.”
He choked on his surprise. “I have never called you simple.”
“You did not have to. The very fact that you chose me for your ruse tells me all I need to know. And now you believe me simple because I chose to believe that I could have something that I so clearly cannot.”
“That is not what I have said.”
“Of course not, my lord. You would never say such an ugly thought aloud.”
His jaw clenched as tightly as she had ever seen. “Is this what an alienist does, then? Put words in another person’s mouth and then analyze them? With that model, who even needs the patient?”
“You wouldn’t know, would you?” Augusta bit out. “You are content to sit around your bachelor pad with your money, which you have earned by doing nothing but stealing away other people’s futures.”
Sebastian’s eye twitched at her words, his gaze intense. “Is that what you think I did?”
“It is what I know you did. You and Reginald and all the men like you, you sit around giving orders, but what do you know of work? What do you know of actually wanting something?”
And there they were - the tears. They burned as they fell down her cheeks. She hated them - wanted them to dry up in an instant. She did not want to display sadness when all she felt was fury.
Sebastian sat up straighter. “Work is not something that you ever would have been able to do, no matter how much you wanted it.” He said it with pure vitriol, nearly spitting the words out until Augusta felt numbed to his burn.
Then, something in him softened. With a scoff, he ran his hands through his hair.
“God, I thought we were both sensible people. How did the two of us get so caught up in our own ridiculous schemes?”
“Do not compare what I have done to your lies. They are not the same in the least.”
“I am not saying our sins are equal. Only that neither of us seems good at avoiding the embarrassment and scandal that we so obviously despise.”
Augusta shook her head in disbelief. Feeling as though she could burst, she stood suddenly, tossing her napkin to the table where it landed unceremoniously in her eggs. “I find I am no longer hungry. Good day, my lord.”
She only made it a few steps before the sound of Sebastian’s chair scraping backwards hit her ears.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“I am going to see Ginny,” she lied.
“I will be checking to ensure that that is true.”
She halted at the dining room door and spun around. “Check all you want, my lord. As you appear to have nothing better to do, I am sure that it will keep your little mind busy.”
The rage in his expression only made her strides more confident as she swept from the dining room and out the door, only pausing to grab her overcoat. It was, after all, a long walk to her destination.
As she stormed the sidewalks with more purpose than she had ever experienced in her life, she thought of the Society- the women studying alongside her, all the women who had died before the law had changed to allow them into university, and all the women who would surely die before the law was changed to allow them to work.
And it would change. She was certain of that now in a way she had never been before. If she had to see to it herself, then so be it. Someone was going to listen to her, damn it. Someone was going to let her speak, and it had better be with a megaphone, this time.
It was this thought that led her through the door of the building, down a long hall of offices, and through a door which was labeled, in gold letters, DR. PINKTON.
Inside, the man sat at his large oak desk eating what appeared to be roast beef.
She slapped her hands down on his desk, earning her a startled look from him. His forkful of food remained frozen in his hand, his mouth hanging open.
“I have changed my mind,” she said in a rush. “I wish to speak at the rally.”