Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
The corridor leading to Cassie’s bedroom seemed unnaturally long, the walls pressing in on either side as Hudson allowed himself to be towed forward by his sister’s insistent hand.
His sleeve had already suffered at least one permanent crease from her enthusiastic grip, but he made no effort to free himself.
There was something in her expression tonight—a brightness that had been absent for weeks—that made even the most frivolous indulgence seem necessary.
“You promised,” Cassie reminded him for the third time since they’d left the dinner table. “And a duke never breaks his word.”
“A duke,” Hudson replied, “reserves the right to change his mind when his sister attempts to drag him bodily through the house.”
“Too late now,” Cassie announced, flinging open the door to her bedroom with enough force to make the hinges groan.
Warmth enveloped him as he stepped across the threshold.
Augusta was already there. She sat on the low footstool by the hearth, one of the illustrated volumes from the nursery shelves open across her knees, its pages gilded along the edges, its spine cracked from generations of small, careful hands. She looked up as they entered.
“I told you he’d come,” Cassie said triumphantly. “He pretends he doesn’t like stories, but he used to read to me every night when I was little.”
“I was summoned,” Hudson said, meeting Augusta’s eyes. “Apparently, my attendance is not optional.”
He settled into the armchair nearest the fire, his back straight, his shoulders rigid beneath his day coat.
He’d had every intention of retreating to his study after dinner, of putting the proper distance between himself and Augusta, of restoring the order that had been disrupted by the afternoon’s unscripted intimacy.
Cassie, meanwhile, had flung herself onto the bed with the abandon of the very young. Pippin, who had been snoring on the hearth rug, heaved himself upright with a groan and ambled to the bedside, where he placed one enormous paw on the coverlet and cocked his head hopefully.
“You may come up,” Cassie told him, patting the space beside her. “But if you snore, you’ll have to go back to the rug.”
Pippin, understanding the warning, launched himself onto the bed with a force that made the frame creak.
He turned three times, pawed experimentally at a pillow, and collapsed with his head in Cassie’s lap, one ear flopped forward, the other angled toward Augusta as if to ensure he wouldn’t miss a word.
“Miss Norton?” Cassie prompted, her eyes fixed on the volume. “You can start now.”
Augusta looked at the volume flicking to a page marked with a silk ribbon. “Chapter seven,” she read. “The Princess and the Glass Hill.”
Her voice changed as she read. The narrative voice remained her own, clear and measured, but when the princess spoke, her register lifted, softened, and acquired a lilt that made the character immediately distinct.
The villain, a magician with a voice like broken glass, emerged gruff and comic, delivered with a growl that made Cassie giggle.
Hudson found himself watching Augusta’s face rather than the book. The way her lips shaped each word, the small furrow that appeared between her eyebrows at moments of tension, the flash of her smile when a line pleased her.
The firelight caught the line of her jaw, the curve of her throat above her collar, the sweep of her lashes as she glanced down at the page. Her free hand moved as she read, tracing shapes in the air, bringing the story to life with gestures so natural she seemed unaware of them.
Hudson shifted in his seat, tugged at his collar, then fixed his gaze on the ceiling for a count of five. His coat felt suddenly too warm, the room too close.
He should stand, should excuse himself, should find some reason to be anywhere but here, watching the firelight play across a woman’s face.
But Cassie’s eyes were wide and fixed on Augusta, her hand stilling on Pippin’s fur as the story reached its climax. And Hudson could no more leave than he could stop the beating of his own heart.
“But why didn’t she just run?” Cassie interrupted, sitting forward. “If the magician was so horrible, why did she stay in his tower?”
Augusta paused, one finger marking her place. “She was frightened,” she said. “And sometimes when we’re frightened, we can’t see the way out, even when it’s right in front of us.”
“But—”
“The princess didn’t know she was brave yet,” Augusta continued before Cassie could protest. “It took finding the sword to show her what she was capable of. Shall I read the next part?”
Cassie nodded, settling back against the pillows. “But promise she escapes in the end.”
“I promise,” Augusta said, and returned to the story. “The princess thought long and hard—”
“Do you think she could have gotten on a ship?” Cassie interrupted again. “Maybe she could sail far away.”
“I am certain that would have been possible,” Augusta said with a smile.
“I wonder if ships are peaceful. I doubt it, seeing as the sea can get so stormy,” Cassie remarked. “Have you ever been on a ship, Miss Norton?”
Augusta hesitated. “No,” she answered softly. “Never…”
Gradually, Cassie’s questions slowed. Her eyes closed, opened, closed again, her breathing deepening as the story wound toward its end.
By the time Augusta reached the chapter’s end, Cassie was deep asleep, one cheek pressed against the pillow, her face relaxed.
Augusta closed the book quietly.
Hudson was already on his feet, crossing to the bed in three strides.
He bent, slid one arm beneath Cassie’s shoulders, the other beneath her knees, and lifted her with the practiced ease of long habit.
She barely stirred, only turned her face against his shoulder with a small sigh that caught him somewhere beneath his ribs.
Pippin watched with one suspicious eye as he pulled the quilts to Cassie’s chin, tucking them around her shoulders with a precision that would have surprised anyone who knew him only by reputation.
He stood over her for a moment, one hand resting briefly on the coverlet, just above the place where her small fingers curled.
A movement at the edge of his vision drew his attention. Augusta had risen from the footstool and was moving quietly around the room, setting the book on the nightstand, adjusting the wick of the lamp to dim its light.
She looked up and caught his gaze. Without a word, they both turned toward the door.
Hudson paused to extinguish the bedside lamp, then followed her into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind them with a soft click that seemed to seal them into a new and dangerous intimacy.
The corridor was dim, lit by a single wall sconce that cast more shadow than illumination.
Hudson’s back pressed against the door, as if he could shield his sister from the complicated world beyond her bedroom through the simple act of standing sentinel.
Augusta stood an arm’s length away, her profile outlined in gold by the distant light.
Hudson spoke first.
“Thank you,” he said softly. “For today. For…” He gestured toward the closed door. “I haven’t seen her that happy in a long time.”
The words felt inadequate—a child’s translation of an adult emotion—but he could not find better ones. Happiness was too small a word for what he’d seen on Cassie’s face.
Augusta’s smile appeared, then faded all too quickly while he was still admiring the curve of her lips.
“It was my pleasure,” she replied. “And my duty, after all.”
“Your ease with children,” he said, watching her face. “Where does it come from?”
Her hands folded in front of her, fingers interlacing with a precision that suggested practice.
“Well… I suppose… After my father remarried, my sister and I were sent to different households. I always wished…” She paused, her chin dipping for just a moment, a gesture so brief Hudson might have imagined it.
“I always wished she had been beside me. I suppose I always imagined myself with a sister, or a child, later on…”
She said it quietly, without self-pity, without the performative sadness that Society ladies deployed so artfully. Just a simple statement of fact, more devastating for its restraint.
Hudson went still. Of course, he had known that Whitfield had sent his daughters away when they were young, uninterested in raising them himself.
He had also known that Augusta had tried to search for her sister after Whitfield was arrested last month.
But hearing Augusta’s greatest wish like this…
some part of him ached to grant it to her.
“I understand the feeling,” he said finally, the admission dragged from a place he rarely acknowledged.
“I was away at school when Cassie was born. Then managing the estate, then the title…” Each phrase emerged more clipped than the last. “She grew up in the gaps between my responsibilities. I was not there enough.”
The confession hung between them, heavier than he had intended.
He had not meant to say it. He had not, in fact, known he thought it until the words left his mouth. But something about Augusta’s presence pulled honesty from him like a splinter, painful and necessary.
She turned to face him more fully, her expression intent. “Small steps matter,” she said. “Today was a small step. Cassie will carry that memory.” Her voice softened. “The moments we’re fully present with the people we love… those are the ones that shape us, not the absences.”
Hudson looked at her for a long beat. “You are quite wise for your years,” he said, his voice cracking ever so slightly.
She brushed it off with a small shake of her head. “Hardly,” she said, but the flush that crept up her neck suggested the compliment had landed.
They were standing close now, closer than they had been a moment before, though Hudson could not have said which of them had moved.
Close enough to see the softness of her lips, the glow on her skin, and the few freckles across her nose.
Close enough to see the delicate curves under her bodice move with each breath and to smell her sweet scent.
“Augusta…” Hudson muttered, desperate to taste her name.
Her eyes darkened, and her lips parted slightly. Hudson’s gaze dropped to her mouth, then back up, a movement he had not authorized but could not now retract.
Neither of them stepped away. The moment stretched between them, taut as a wire, his head tilting a fraction, her chin lifting in unconscious answer.
“I’m trying to be good for you, my sweet, but you are making me want to be very, very bad,” he whispered.
He could see the pulse beating at the base of her throat, could track its acceleration as his hand rose, seemingly of its own accord, to brush a strand of hair from her cheek. Her skin was warm beneath his fingers.
Her breath caught. His own lungs seemed to have forgotten their purpose. He made to incline his head toward hers, hypnotized by the inviting plumpness of her lips.
“Ahem, Your Grace.” The housekeeper’s brisk footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor, followed by her voice, pitched to carry without shouting. She rounded the corner, her candle held at shoulder height, and Hudson stepped back quickly.
He cleared his throat, the sound unnaturally loud in the suddenly charged air.
“Where will you take your dinner this evening, Your Grace?” Mrs. Beale asked. “The dining room or the study?”
Hudson’s answer emerged in the clipped, formal tone he reserved for estate business. “The study,” he replied. “I have correspondence to attend to.”
“Very good, Your Grace.” Mrs. Beale nodded, then turned her attention to Augusta, who had taken a half-step back and was now smoothing her skirt with hands that were not quite steady. “And you, Miss Norton? Shall I have a tray sent up to your room?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Beale.” Augusta’s voice was admirably level. “I’ve already eaten.” She inclined her head to Hudson, then to the housekeeper. “Good night to you both.”
She turned toward the governess’s corridor. A different wing, a different world.
Hudson stood rooted to the spot, watching the straight line of her back, the careful set of her shoulders, until she turned the corner and disappeared from view.
Mrs. Beale cleared her throat. “Shall I send Milton with the post, Your Grace? It arrived while you were out.”
Hudson nodded, not trusting his voice.
The housekeeper inclined her head and withdrew, leaving him alone in the corridor, the echo of her practical questions filling the space where something impossible had nearly happened.
He stood there for a long moment, his hand pressed against the door to Cassie’s room, feeling the wood beneath his palm.
Then he turned and walked toward his study, each step measured, each breath carefully even, as if the simple mechanics of movement might restore the order that had been so thoroughly disrupted.
But the memory of Augusta’s face… Her eyes dark with wanting, lips parted in unconscious invitation…
It followed him down the corridor and into the night, a ghost he could not exorcise.