Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
“Good morning, Miss Norton!” Cassie had already claimed the newspaper’s society column and was holding it at arm’s length, her chin lifted at precisely the angle her brother adopted when reading.
Augusta could not help but smile as she sat down at the breakfast table. “Morning, Cassie. Reading the paper, I see?”
Cassie shrugged, though her nose twitched in amusement.
Augusta poured her tea.
It was not getting any easier. Three seats separated her from Hudson. Three seats and a tablecloth and a newspaper and the memory of his hands on her arms in the corridor, his voice in the dark…
She took a sip, and the tea burned her tongue.
“Muffin?” Cassie asked, already pushing the basket toward her.
“Thank you.”
The clock near the fireplace ticked. The paper crackled as he turned a page. Beneath the table, Pippin, who had taken up his customary position against Augusta’s ankles, snored contentedly.
The newspaper crackled again. She did not look up, though her skin prickled along the back of her neck, down her arms, and across her collarbones.
She took a bite of the muffin. Chewed. Swallowed. Reached for her tea again.
“A hot-air balloon ascent exhibition!” Cassie’s voice cracked through the fragile quiet like a rock through glass.
The newspaper flattened against the table under both her palms, her chair legs scraping across the floor as she shot forward, her shoulders hunched with excitement.
“Hyde Park, this Saturday.” Her finger traced the paragraph, her reading accelerating with each word as though her mind was outrunning her tongue.
“Enormous crowds expected, demonstrations of the principles of aerostatic navigation, an attempt upon the altitude record—” She was nearly breathless now, the newspaper trembling in her grasp.
“Ascents every hour from ten until four.” She looked up, her face incandescent. “We must go.”
Augusta set down her teacup. “You will need your brother’s permission,” she said, doing all she could to keep her voice level.
A day out of the manor, she decided, would do her good too.
Cassie turned to Hudson with the swiftness of a weathervane in a changing wind. The newspaper had not lowered. A beat passed, then the paper dipped.
Hudson’s face gave nothing away.
“It’s a public exhibition,” Cassie said, looking at him pleadingly. “And Miss Norton and I have been studying atmospheric pressure and the principles of lift and buoyancy for weeks.”
That was generous. They had spent one afternoon with a diagram in a geography text and an enthusiastic discussion of why boats floated while stones did not. Augusta studied her muffin.
“Think of it as… as showing what I am learning in a way where I can really see it,” Cassie finished, her voice ringing with the conviction of the deeply, sincerely invested.
Hudson’s thumb stilled on the saucer. His gaze moved from Cassie to Augusta briefly, then back to his sister.
“And precisely what do you imagine could go wrong,” he asked calmly, “when suspending an eleven-year-old several hundred feet above London in a basket held aloft by fire?”
“First of all, the basket isn’t held up by fire.
It’s held up by warm air, which expands and becomes less dense than the surrounding atmosphere.
” Cassie ticked the correction off on one finger, her face scrunching up as she recounted what he could only assume were Augusta’s words.
“Secondly, I’ve already estimated how much weight it could carry, as Augusta showed me in Philosophical Transactions, and it looks safe.
” She paused for breath, then continued without waiting for permission.
“Besides, if it were dangerous, they wouldn’t have scheduled it in Hyde Park.
They’d have done it somewhere with fewer witnesses. ”
Hudson’s lips twitched, and his eyes glinted with amusement.
Augusta could feel his attention turn toward her before he moved.
“The exhibition is public and supervised,” she said, keeping her voice quiet enough that Cassie had to lean forward to catch the words.
“Not a private ascent. The operators are professionals. And the event has been advertised openly, which suggests it has received the proper permissions.” She paused. “There is no reason for concern.”
The last sentence, she directed at her plate. She could not quite bring herself to meet his eyes. Not with the memory of the kiss still raw between them, not with Cassie sitting three feet away, watching them both with the sharp attention of a girl who noticed everything and forgot nothing.
But she felt it the moment his gaze settled on her face. Her fingers tightened around her teacup.
Hudson traced one finger around the rim of his cup once. Twice.
“Very well,” he agreed.
Cassie jumped out of her chair. Her hands came together with a sharp crack, the newspaper sliding to the floor. “We’ll see everything!” The sound was halfway between a laugh and a shriek. “We’ll make notes and sketches, and—”
Hudson raised one hand. “I will be accompanying you.”
Cassie froze, her mouth still open on the half-formed syllable of her next word. “You?”
Hudson folded his paper along the creases with exacting precision and placed it beside his plate. “If either of you is to be suspended above London by experimental engineering, I intend to supervise it personally.”
“You never wanted to come before.” Cassie’s voice had gone small, and the rawness of it hit Augusta square in the chest. “Not to the museum. Not to the Crystal Palace. Not even the pantomime at Christmas.”
Hudson lowered his gaze and cleared his throat. “Balloon ascents are a particular interest,” he said, as though this had been the case for decades rather than the handful of minutes since breakfast had begun.
Augusta pressed her lips together.
“We can see the chimney smoke from above,” Cassie said, her voice rising again, the bright architecture of her excitement rebuilding itself on this new and miraculous foundation.
“And the river! It curves completely differently from the air than it does on maps. Miss Norton said so. And the roof structures, we studied them in architecture last week, but from the ground you can’t really tell—”
She was still talking when she rounded the table and threw her arms around her brother’s neck.
Hudson went rigid. His hands lifted from the table, hovered as though he had forgotten the mechanics of the gesture, and then settled against her back, his fingers spreading wide against her shoulder blades. He held her carefully, his eyes closing above her blonde head.
Three seconds passed. Perhaps four. Then Cassie pulled away, already talking again, already halfway to the door.
“I need the encyclopedia! Volume seven, the one with the diagram of the Montgolfier brothers. And I’ll write a list of questions for the balloon’s operator, and we’ll need to bring our own pencils because the exhibition ones are always terrible—”
Pippin lurched to his feet, leaving Augusta’s ankle cold, and thundered after Cassie with the urgency of a creature who understood that wherever she went, interesting things followed.
The door banged shut behind them, suddenly leaving Hudson and Augusta alone, separated only by the quiet table.
Augusta should stand. She should follow Cassie. She should say something brisk and professional about lesson plans or pencil supplies or the proper outerwear for an exhibition. Instead, she looked at Hudson.
He was already looking at her.
The mask was gone, as though Cassie’s embrace had stripped it away and he had not yet slipped it back on. What remained was unguarded in a way that made Augusta’s breath catch. The crease between his eyebrows meant he was struggling with something he could not say.
“That was well done,” she said, her voice coming out rougher than she had intended. “She’s been wanting you to…” She stopped. The words were too honest. She folded her hands in her lap.
“To what?” Hudson asked it quietly, without an edge, the way he spoke in the moments when he forgot to be careful.
To choose her. To stop holding yourself apart from the people who love you. To sit in a basket suspended by fire and heated air because your eleven-year-old sister asked you to, and to pretend you’ve cared about balloons your entire life, because pretending is its own form of devotion.
“To join her,” Augusta said instead.
His gaze held hers. The summer light fell across the table between them, catching the steam from the teapot, the gleam of the butter knife, the sharp white edge of his collar against his throat. She could see the steady pulse there.
He held her gaze a moment longer, then the mask slid back into place. Smooth, impenetrable, utterly convincing.
“Saturday, then,” he said, and reached for the newspaper that Cassie had abandoned on the floor, bending to retrieve it with the unhurried grace of a man who had already decided the conversation was over.
Augusta stood. Her chair scraped across the floor, too loud, too sudden, and she pressed her palms flat against the table for one steadying breath before stepping away.
“Saturday,” she agreed.
She walked out of the morning room without looking back, her spine straight and her hands clenched at her sides. Only when she reached the staircase and the heavy door had clicked shut behind her did she allow herself to stop, to press one hand against the cool wall, to close her eyes.
Hudson’s face when Cassie had hugged him. The way his hands had hovered, uncertain, before settling with such careful gentleness against her back. The way his eyes had closed.
She pressed her forehead against the plaster.
From the floor above, Cassie’s voice floated down the stairwell, breathless and bright. “Miss Norton! I can’t find volume seven!”
Augusta opened her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and pressed her palms flat against her skirts until the trembling stopped.
“Coming,” she called, then climbed the stairs, leaving the morning room and its dangerous silences behind.
But she could still feel his gaze on the back of her neck—that phantom weight, that impossible heat—all the way up the stairs, and long after she’d turned the corner and disappeared from view.