Chapter 14 #2
Augusta’s stomach dropped. The ground, which had been a distant abstraction, was suddenly below, a hundred feet of empty air. The world began to spin, the edges of her vision darkening, vertigo seizing her with the swift authority of a fist closing.
Hudson’s hand was on her waist before she’d finished drawing breath.
“Look at the horizon.” His voice was low and steady, an anchor thrown into churning waters. “Not the ground. The line where the sky meets the city.”
His arm tightened, drawing her back against his chest. She could feel his steady heartbeat through the wool. His other hand covered hers on the railing, his fingers lacing through hers, and the warmth cut through the dizziness like a blade.
She fixed her eyes on the horizon and breathed. The world steadied.
“Better?” His breath stirred the curl at her temple.
“Yes. I’m perfectly—”
“Stay still.” Not a command, but something closer to a request. “Just for a moment.”
She stayed still, with his arm around her waist, his hand over hers, the wind pressing her against his chest.
“Cassie’s waving at someone,” Lord Ridgewell observed from across the basket, his tone carefully light. “I believe it’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or possibly a pigeon.”
Augusta pulled her hand free.
Hudson’s arm relaxed slowly, and the cold rushed in.
After the balloon exhibition, Augusta found herself walking through the market and thoroughly enjoying the sights and sounds around her.
The confectioner’s cart stood in the lee of a great oak, its striped awning snapping in the wind. Cassie had claimed the center of a bench before the adults finished crossing the grass.
“Three lemon ices,” she informed the round-faced woman behind the cart. “A dish of cream cakes. And whatever they want.” A regal wave toward the approaching party.
Lord Ridgewell settled at one end. Augusta took the spot beside Cassie. Hudson remained standing, shoulder against the oak, arms folded. His posture was casual, but his gaze kept returning to Augusta like a compass needle that couldn’t settle.
“It’s like eating winter,” Cassie declared, cupping her dish. “Only sweeter.”
“My cousin’s son once attempted to eat his weight in lemon ice at Vauxhall. He was seven. He made it halfway before the consequences became apparent, and his mother carried him home in a tablecloth,” Lord Ridgewell said.
“Why a tablecloth?”
“His coat was beyond salvaging.”
Cassie giggled. She licked her spoon clean and turned to Hudson, who had accepted an ice but made no move to eat it, the dish balanced on his palm as though he’d forgotten it existed.
“Hudson, did you ever do anything foolish when you were my age?”
His eyes moved from Augusta to his sister. “Frequently.”
“Such as?”
“I once attempted to fly from the stable roof using a bedsheet and an umbrella.”
“Did it work?”
“I broke my arm. And Grandfather’s favorite umbrella.”
“You never told me that!” Cassie exclaimed.
“It is not the sort of story one shares with their baby sister.”
“He also,” Lord Ridgewell added, “set fire to the groundskeeper’s shed, attempting to build a signal lamp.”
“That was an accident.”
“The man still brings it up at Christmas. ‘The year His Grace murdered my parsnips,’ he says, though they were turnips.”
Cassie’s laughter drew glances from strangers.
Augusta found herself laughing too. The conversations made everything easy, made it possible to forget for a few minutes that she was a woman with a false name sitting beside a man who could never be hers.
Hudson’s gaze found her across the distance. He wasn’t laughing, but his mouth had softened, and his eyes had gone warm and unguarded.
She looked away and took a bite of ice she couldn’t taste.
“Is being grown up very different from being a child?” Cassie asked. “Besides eating vegetables and not climbing things?”
“Enormously,” Lord Ridgewell replied. “You’re expected to pretend you know what you’re doing at all times. The trick is confidence and hoping no one checks.”
“Is that what you do?”
“It’s what everyone does. Your brother is simply better at it than most.”
Cassie turned to Augusta. “Do you get frightened, now that you’re grown up?”
Augusta set her spoon down. “Yes. Though the things that frighten me now are different from the things that did when I was small.”
“What frightens you?”
Her fingers found her mother’s necklace beneath her collar, the habitual touchstone she reached for when the ground felt uncertain. “Losing people I care about. Not being able to protect them.”
Behind her, Hudson had gone very still.
“That’s what frightens Hudson too,” Cassie said, with the devastating certainty of a child who’d been watching far more carefully than anyone suspected.
“I can tell because his face does this—” She clenched her teeth and tightened the corners of her mouth, producing a miniature version of her brother’s most guarded expression.
“He does it when Mrs. Beale mentions me going away to school.”
Silence fell heavily over them.
Augusta kept her gaze on her empty dish, where the glass caught the afternoon light and threw tiny rainbows across the bench.
“Cassie,” Hudson said, his voice very calm. “That’s enough ice for today.”
“I’ve only had two.” But Cassie slid down from the bench, brushed her coat, and announced that she intended to investigate the second balloon before the exhibition closed.
Lord Ridgewell rose with her. “I shall serve as a chaperone and, if necessary, a restraint.”
They set off, Cassie’s hands moving as she explained something inaudible to him.
Augusta stood, and Hudson pushed off the oak. They were alone in the lee of the tree, surrounded by empty dishes and the faint sweet smell of lemon.
“We should follow them,” Augusta said.
“Yes,” Hudson agreed.
Neither moved.
The afternoon light fell across his face, and Augusta watched the muscle in his jaw work, the same expression Cassie had just mimicked. His hand flexed at his side. Her own fingers curled in response, her palm suddenly empty.
“We should go,” she whispered.
They walked together toward the sound of Cassie’s voice, side by side, their sleeves brushing with every other step.