Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Augusta woke with a start, the remnants of a dream clinging to her like smoke.
Warm hands, the smell of brandy, the hard edge of a bookshelf pressed against her spine.
She lay perfectly still, staring at the canopy above her bed, willing her pulse to slow.
The book sat on her bedside table where she had left it, half-hidden beneath a volume of improving essays that fooled no one, least of all herself.
Memoirs of a Courtesan.
She dressed with the grim efficiency of a soldier preparing for battle, selecting the plainest gown she owned. The woman in the mirror looked severe, composed, entirely incapable of melting into a duke’s arms at midnight.
Good.
When she arrived in the breakfast room, she found Cassie sitting alone at the table, her tongue caught between her teeth as she cut a slice of toast into progressively smaller triangles.
“Good morning, Miss Norton!” Cassie abandoned her architecture.
“Hudson’s already gone out. He said he had early business.
He took his horse, not the carriage, which means he’s in a mood, because he only rides when he’s cross or thinking too hard.
” She studied Augusta’s face with the frank appraisal of the very young. “You look different.”
“I am perfectly well.” Augusta took the chair nearest the window, the one that put the maximum distance between herself and the empty seat where Hudson usually sat. “I read rather late, that’s all.”
“Was it a good book?”
Augusta’s fingers tightened around her teacup. “It was… erm, educational.”
“I like books about pirates best,” Cassie said, apparently satisfied. “Or explorers. Or pirates who are also explorers! You know how I pretend that the schoolroom is my ship and the globe is my treasure map… Do you think that’s silly?”
“Not at all,” Augusta said, smiling. “I used to imagine I was a botanist, collecting rare plants from the .”
“A pirate botanist,” Cassie corrected, as though this were the only logical conclusion. “We should be pirate botanists together.”
They continued in this vein through breakfast and into the morning’s lessons, but Augusta found her attention splitting far too easily.
Every creak of the floorboards sent her gaze to the door. Every distant footstep set her pulse skittering. The schoolroom, which had always felt comfortably removed from the rest of the house, now seemed perilously close to Hudson’s study.
And to the library, with its accusing bookshelves and its lingering memories.
At luncheon, Hudson was again absent.
“His Grace sends his apologies,” Mrs. Beale announced, setting the soup tureen down with her customary precision. “He was called to his club. He may not return for dinner.”
“Oh,” Augusta said simply. She spooned broth into her bowl and watched the steam curl upward.
She was not quite certain what it was that she felt. She decided to believe it was relief. Of course, it was relief.
The afternoon ambush came without warning.
She was descending the main staircase, her arm full of exercise books and a volume of Ovid that Cassie had decorated with pencil drawings of sea monsters in the margins. She heard the footsteps before she saw Hudson.
She stopped, one hand white-knuckled on the banister.
He appeared at the foot of the stairs, head bent over a stack of correspondence. His coat was damp at the shoulders. She could see the tiny cut on his jaw where he’d nicked himself shaving, and the slight crease between his eyebrows that appeared when he was lost in thought.
He looked up.
The air between them went taut. Augusta’s grip on the banister tightened until the wood creaked beneath her fingers. His eyes found hers and held, and for one suspended heartbeat, neither of them breathed.
Then the mask settled over his features, smooth and impenetrable as glass.
“Miss Norton.” He inclined his head. “Good afternoon.”
“Your Grace.” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears.
His gaze dropped to the exercise books in her arm. “I see that Cassie is keeping you busy.”
“Yes. She’s very bright.”
“Indeed,” Hudson said. “If you’ll excuse me…”
“Yes, of course.”
They moved at the same instant, Augusta continuing down, Hudson stepping aside.
And misjudged the geometry entirely.
His hand shot out and caught her elbow as she stumbled, the contact brief and electric, his fingers pressing through the thin fabric of her sleeve. The exercise books slid in her arm, and she clutched them tighter, using them as a barricade. Then he moved past her, taking the stairs two at a time.
She stood alone on the stairs, her pulse hammering in her throat and the ghost of his touch burning through her sleeve like a brand.
Three days. For three days, she had managed to avoid him. Only for an accidental touch to make her body betray her, her skin flushing, her breath quickening, her treacherous heart slamming against her ribs as though trying to break free and go to him of its own accord.
She set the books on her bedside table and sank onto the edge of her bed.
She pressed her face into her pillow and tried not to think about the way his voice had sounded when he said her name in the library, low and rough and hungry, as if the word itself were something he wanted to taste.
The garden on the fourth morning was stripped bare, all its vanity gone, leaving behind the honest bones of stone and evergreen. The last roses clung stubbornly to the trellises, their petals edged with brown, and the ornamental pond reflected a sky the color of pewter.
Augusta sat on the stone bench nearest the water, her hands folded in her lap, watching Cassie attempt to teach Pippin to fetch. The exercise had been going on for a quarter of an hour and had produced no discernible result beyond mutual entertainment.
“Fetch, Pippin!” Cassie hurled the stick with impressive force for a girl her size. It arced through the grey air and landed ten yards away on the frosted grass.
Pippin watched its trajectory with scholarly interest, then rolled onto his back and wriggled, all four enormous paws paddling at the sky.
“He’s broken,” Cassie huffed, abandoning the effort and dropping onto the bench beside Augusta. Her cheeks were bright from the cold, her blonde curls escaping their pins in every direction. “I think he understands perfectly well what I’m asking. He simply doesn’t see why he should do it.”
“Perhaps he has his own ideas about what constitutes a proper game,” Augusta suggested. “Not everyone follows the same rules.”
Cassie tilted her head, and something shifted behind her eyes, a sharpness that reminded Augusta of Hudson. “Is that what’s happening with you and Hudson?”
Augusta’s lungs seized. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve been avoiding each other.” Cassie said it with the innocence of a child. “You eat in your room. He eats in his study. You moved my lessons to the nursery, which is the farthest room from his study. I measured the distance. It’s forty-seven paces.”
Pippin, apparently considering the conversation concluded, padded over and collapsed at their feet, resting his massive head on Augusta’s slipper with a sigh.
“I assure you, Cassie, there is nothing—”
“It’s all right if you’ve quarreled.” Cassie pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
“He quarrels with everyone. He quarreled with Lord Ridgewell last Christmas because James said Father Christmas wasn’t real, and Hudson was worried I might overhear.
I’ve known since I was seven, but he still won’t admit it.
” She ticked off on her fingers. “He quarreled with Mrs. Beale about how to fold serviettes. With the stable master about whether horses dream. With the vicar about whether blue is a better color than green, which isn’t even a real argument.
It’s just a preference.” She shrugged, a gesture so like Hudson that Augusta’s chest ached.
“He cares about things. Too much, sometimes. It comes out sideways.”
Augusta smoothed her skirts, buying time. “We haven’t quarreled.”
“Then what?”
The question landed with the precision of a thrown knife.
Augusta had no answer. At least, none that she could give to an eleven-year-old.
Before she could formulate a response, Pippin erupted to his feet with a bark that rattled the bare branches overhead. A squirrel had made the fatal error of descending to lawn level, and the dog launched himself across the grass with a speed that seemed impossible for an animal of his size.
“Pippin, no!” Cassie shouted.
But the dog was already in full flight, barking with a volume that surely carried to the neighboring parish.
The squirrel, demonstrating the survival instincts that had preserved its species throughout millennia, shot up the nearest oak with inches to spare.
Pippin skidded to a halt at the base and barked upward, his one ear perked up, his tail beating the air. He had already forgotten what he was barking at; the principle of the thing was what mattered.
“He never catches them,” Cassie sighed, sliding off the bench. “Come on, we’d better fetch him before he tries to climb.”
They crossed the lawn together, Cassie calling encouragement while Augusta attempted to project a semblance of calm authority. Pippin, hearing their approach, abandoned his quarry and bounded toward them, his tongue lolling out, apparently delighted by the new game.
“He’s like Hudson, really,” Cassie said, scratching behind the dog’s ear. She threw her arms around Pippin’s neck and buried her face in his fur. “You’d protect Miss Norton too, wouldn’t you, Pip? You’d guard her, same as you guard me. The same way Hudson protects us.”
The dog answered by nosing her off-balance and washing her face with his enormous tongue until she collapsed in the grass, shrieking with laughter.
Augusta watched them, the girl and her ridiculous, enormous, wholly devoted dog.
This was why she was here. This was what she was meant to do. Live a life with this little girl who depended on her for reasons that she could not, for the life of her, understand.
She couldn’t avoid Hudson forever. It was unsustainable.
She would find him. She would be calm, collected, and professional.
She would explain that what had happened in the library was a lapse in judgment.
A moment of weakness, brought on by lateness and proximity and the unsettling intimacy of firelight.
She would assure him that it would not happen again.
She would be the governess he had hired, nothing more.
She would not think about the way his hand had felt against her jaw. She would not think about the low rasp of his voice in the firelight, or the way his eyes had turned molten when she’d told him she was curious, or the devastating, world-ending press of his mouth against hers.
Resolving to avoid the man was easy to say, but actually doing it was an entirely different feat. As such, Augusta remained confined to the places where she had to be, in the hopes of being less obvious.
As with all things, this could not last forever, and her success thereof came to a sudden halt on a stormy evening when she made her way to the kitchen for a cup of milk.
She rounded the corner.
He rounded it from the other side.
The collision drove the breath from her lungs. She hit the solid wall of his chest and shoulders, and would have staggered backward if his hands hadn’t closed around her upper arms, his fingers pressing into the wool of her sleeves.
The contact was a spark to kindling. Heat flared up her arms, across her collarbone, and down to the pit of her stomach.
They stood inches apart, frozen. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest, could smell the sandalwood and smoke that clung to his skin, could see the pulse beating at the base of his throat above his loosened cravat.
“Miss Norton.”
“Your Grace.”
It felt as though the world had shrunk to contain nothing more than the pair of them.
She leaned toward him. It was involuntary, gravitational, the helpless pull of a compass needle toward true north.
His grip tightened, then released.
He stepped back.
The sudden absence of his hands left her arms cold, the air rushing in to fill the space between their bodies. He dragged one hand through his hair, disrupting its careful arrangement, and his breath came out in a controlled exhale.
“I should go.” She turned before he could speak and deliberately walked back down the corridor toward the staircase, the milk forgotten.
She made it to her room, closed the door, pressed her back against it, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up and her forehead resting on her arms.
Her body was mutinous, flushed, restless, thrumming with an energy that had nowhere to go.
She could feel her pulse everywhere: in her throat, in her wrists, in the hollow between her collarbones.
The places where his fingers had pressed still burned, a phantom heat that no amount of cool air would extinguish.
She rose, crossed to the washstand, and splashed water on her face. It dripped from her chin onto her bodice, and she watched the dark spots spread through the grey fabric, blooming like ink on blotting paper.
The book sat where she’d left it, half-hidden beneath the volume of essays. She hadn’t opened it since the previous night. She didn’t open it now.
She didn’t need to.
The passages she’d read were already seared behind her eyelids, vivid and merciless, and when she closed her eyes, it was not the courtesan’s anonymous lover she pictured but Hudson.
Hudson’s hands, Hudson’s mouth, the devastating low register of his voice saying, I could teach you a thing or two that those pages never will.
Augusta lay back on her bed, one arm across her eyes, and surrendered to the only honest thought left in her head.
She wanted him. Not the idea of him, not the fantasy spun from French novels and fire-lit libraries, but the man himself.
Stubborn, guarded, fierce in his protection, tender in the moments he forgot to hide it.
She wanted his hands in her hair and his voice in the dark and the weight of his body against hers.
She wanted all of it. And the wanting was not going to stop simply because she willed it.