Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hudson paced the length of the gallery for what felt like the hundredth time in two days, his boots making no sound against the carpet but his thoughts producing enough noise to fill the silence three times over.
The house felt different, hollow in a way that defied his usual vocabulary for describing space.
Cassie had been avoiding him. He was certain of it. And Augusta…
Augusta had perfected the art of being present while remaining utterly, infuriatingly out of reach.
Two days. Two days of finding the schoolroom vacant when he’d timed his morning walk to coincide with Cassie’s lessons.
Two days of Augusta’s voice carrying from behind closed doors that fell silent the moment his footsteps approached.
Two days of catching the scent of her hair in corridors she had vacated moments before he arrived.
It was deliberate. He was not a man given to paranoia, but even he could recognize a coordinated retreat when he witnessed one. The question was why.
His mind kept returning to the garden. To her mouth against his, her hands in his hair, the sounds she’d made when she had climaxed.
He had replayed those moments so many times they had taken on the quality of a dream—too perfect, too intense to have actually occurred in the sober light of a spring morning.
Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps she regretted it. Perhaps the reality of what they had done had dawned on her with the clarity that daylight inevitably brought, and she had decided that discretion was infinitely preferable to whatever madness had possessed them both.
He had reached the west wing, Cassie’s territory, the part of the house where his sister’s presence was most clearly felt in the scattered evidence of an eleven-year-old’s enthusiasms: a half-finished sketch of Pippin propped on a side table, a silk ribbon dangling from a doorknob, a small stack of books balanced precariously on the newel post of the staircase.
He paused, listening. From behind Cassie’s closed door came the murmur of voices.
He knocked firmly three times.
“Come in,” Cassie called, her voice bright with an energy that had been conspicuously absent from the house for the past forty-eight hours.
He opened the door and found them seated by the window, a basket of embroidery silks between them, their heads bent over what appeared to be an ambitious rendering of a rose garden on a pillowcase. Cassie looked up first, her smile fading slightly when she saw him.
Augusta did not look up at all. Her fingers moved with practiced precision through the linen, her needle flashing in the afternoon light, her entire being focused on the rose taking shape beneath her hands with an intensity that was excessive for embroidery.
“Hudson,” Cassie said, setting her own work aside. “We’re making cushion covers. Miss Norton says my stitches are improving, though I maintain that French knots are the invention of a particularly sadistic individual with a grudge against children.”
“A view I share,” Hudson said.
His eyes were on Augusta, who had still not acknowledged his presence. The line of her neck, exposed where her hair was swept up in its usual style, held a tension he could read from across the room.
“I’ve missed you at dinner,” he added, addressing this to the top of her head. “Both of you.”
“We’ve been taking meals in the schoolroom,” Cassie said. “Miss Norton says it’s more efficient. Less walking, more time for lessons.”
“Efficient,” Hudson repeated. The word tasted wrong in his mouth. “I see.”
Augusta looked up at last, meeting his gaze with a directness that made his breath catch.
For one suspended moment, they stared at each other across Cassie’s sunlit bedroom, the air between them charged with everything they had done and everything they had not said.
Hudson could not decide whether he wanted to drown in those eyes or flee the room entirely.
Both options held considerable appeal.
He was on the verge of choosing flight when his gaze drifted past Augusta to the bed behind her. The bed where a dark stain, unmistakable in its color and consistency, spread across the white linen in a pattern that sent a jolt of pure fear through his system.
Blood. A significant quantity of it, by the look of things, dark enough to have dried to a rusty brown at the edges.
His body moved before his mind had fully processed what he was seeing. Two strides took him to the bed, his hand reaching for the stained sheet, his brain already calculating: wound, accident, injury, how badly, how recently.
“Your Grace, don’t…” Augusta was on her feet, her embroidery falling to the floor, her hand outstretched as though she could physically halt his progress through the air.
Cassie made a small, distressed sound that might have been his name, and then both of them were between him and the bed, a united front of female obstruction that would have been almost comical if not for the genuine alarm on their faces.
Hudson stopped and looked from his sister’s flushed cheeks to Augusta’s carefully controlled expression. Then he looked back at the blood on the sheets and felt something cold and hard settle in his chest.
“What happened?” The question emerged more roughly than he had intended. He turned to Augusta, who stood with her hands clasped before her, her chin lifted in that way she had when she was preparing for battle. “Was there an accident? Is she hurt?”
“Cassie is perfectly well,” she replied. Her voice was steady, but he caught the slight tremor beneath it, the effort it cost her to maintain her composure. “There was no accident. No injury. She is in excellent health.”
“Then explain that,” Hudson said, pointing to the stain. “Because from where I’m standing, it appears that my sister has lost enough blood to warrant medical attention, and neither of you saw fit to inform me.”
Augusta pursed her lips but said nothing.
The silence stretched between them, taut with something Hudson could not immediately name.
He watched a muscle jump in Augusta’s cheek, watched her throat work as she swallowed, watched the way her fingers twisted together, and realization dawned on him with the slow, sickening certainty of a ship striking a rock.
She was hiding something. She knew exactly what had happened to his sister, and she had chosen not to tell him.
“Miss Norton,” he said, each word precise, measured, honed to a cutting edge.
“I employ you to care for my sister. To keep her safe. To ensure that when she is injured or ill or in any way compromised, I am made aware of it immediately. Not after the fact. Not when I stumble across evidence of it by accident.”
He took a step toward her, close enough now that he could see the rapid pulse at the base of her throat, the way her breath had quickened.
“So I will ask you one more time. What. Happened?”
Augusta’s eyes met his. There was something in them—a plea, a warning, a complexity of emotion he could not begin to unravel—but then she looked away. “I cannot answer that question, Your Grace.”
His anger flared hotter.
“You cannot,” he gritted out, “or you will not?”
“Both,” she said quietly.
Something broke in him, some final thread of patience, some last vestige of the careful control he prided himself on maintaining.
“Get out,” he said. The words emerged low and harsh, scraped from somewhere deep inside him. “Now.”
He watched the color drain from her face.
“Miss Norton, wait!” Cassie called, lunging for Augusta’s sleeve.
But Augusta was already moving, her steps quick and measured, her back straight beneath the plain gray wool of her dress.
She did not look back at Hudson. Did not acknowledge his presence in any way that he could detect.
She simply walked through the door and closed it behind her with a gentle click that was more devastating than a slam.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Hudson stood with his hands clenched at his sides, his breath coming in sharp bursts that burned his lungs.
“You shouted at her,” Cassie said. Her voice was small, accusatory, the voice of a child delivering a verdict she had not asked to render. “You shouted, and now she’s gone, and it’s my fault, and I hate you.”
Hudson turned to find her standing amid the scattered evidence of their interrupted embroidery, her small fists clenched, her lower lip trembling.
“Cassie,” he began, but she cut him off with a gesture so reminiscent of Augusta that it stole the breath from his lungs.
“It’s my blood on the sheets.” The words emerged in a rush, tumbling over each other in their urgency.
“It’s mine. I got my courses, Hudson. My monthly courses.
That’s what the blood is. It’s not an injury.
It’s not an accident. It’s what happens to girls when they become women.
I was embarrassed, and I made Miss Norton promise not to tell you because I didn’t want you to worry and I didn’t want you to look at me differently.
But now you’ve made her cry, and it’s all my fault.
If she leaves, I will never forgive you, not ever, not if you live to be a hundred and I live to be a hundred and one! ”
She stopped, breathing hard, two bright spots of color high on her cheeks.
Hudson stared at her. The words rearranged themselves in his mind, forming a picture so different from the one he had constructed that he briefly felt as though the floor had tilted beneath his feet.
Courses. Monthly courses.
Augusta had known. She had known, and she had kept Cassie’s confidence exactly as Cassie had asked her to, exactly as any decent adult entrusted with a child’s secret ought to do.
And he had accused her of negligence. Of betrayal. Of failing in the very duty he had hired her to perform.
“I didn’t know,” he said. The words sounded inadequate even to his own ears. “Cassie, I’m sorry. I saw the blood, and I… I thought the worst. I should have asked differently. I should have listened.”