Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Augusta was halfway through explaining the finer points of long division to a visibly skeptical Cassie when Hudson appeared in the doorway of the morning room, a furrow between his eyebrows.
She set down her teacup.
Cassie, who had been using the pause to surreptitiously slide a piece of toast to Pippin beneath the table, froze mid-reach.
“Miss Norton,” Hudson said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
The someone was not at all what Augusta had expected.
She was small. Smaller than Augusta by several inches, with mahogany brown hair pulled into a neat chignon beneath a plain traveling bonnet and eyes of a startling, vivid amber brown.
Augusta stood so quickly that her chair scraped loudly across the floor. The numbers on Cassie’s slate blurred before her eyes. The toast, abandoned, landed on the carpet with a soft thud that neither woman noticed.
“Olivia?” The name was barely above a breath.
The young woman stood in the doorway with her gloved hands clasped before her, and Augusta’s chest cracked open.
“Augusta,” Olivia breathed.
Augusta crossed the room in three strides and pulled her sister into an embrace that knocked her bonnet sideways and elicited a startled laugh from her.
What a lovely feeling, hearing one’s sister laugh.
“I thought…” Augusta began, but her voice failed her, dissolving into something that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh and entirely inadequate to the magnitude of what she was feeling. “I had no way of knowing if you were…”
“I’m here,” Olivia said. Her voice was steadier, though Augusta felt the tremor in her sister’s hands where they pressed against her back.
“I’m well. I’m safe. And apparently,” she added, pulling back just far enough to meet Augusta’s eyes with a smile that held its share of mischief beneath the emotion, “my sister resides in the house of a duke who writes letters of such formidable persuasion that my aunt surrendered me without a single objection. Quite an accomplishment, that. I believe she’s still recovering. ”
The reference to Hudson broke the spell slightly. Augusta suddenly became aware of their audience.
And then Cassie, being Cassie, could contain herself no longer.
“Is that your sister?” she asked, bouncing to her feet with an energy that made the table rattle.
“Because if it is, I have seventeen thousand questions, and you simply must see the stable yard immediately, because we have the most magnificent mare. Her name is Juniper, and she lets me feed her apples if I’m very careful about my fingers.
There’s also a particular tree in the garden that’s perfect for climbing if you don’t mind getting your hem dirty, which Miss Norton says is a small price to pay for proper adventure, and—”
“Cassie,” Hudson interrupted, but his voice carried no real reproach, and his mouth was twitching at one corner.
Olivia, to her credit, looked neither alarmed nor overwhelmed by this torrent of information. She turned to Cassie with a smile that transformed her face.
“I would be delighted to hear all seventeen thousand questions. And to see Juniper. And the climbing tree. Especially the climbing tree.” She glanced at Augusta, a question in her eyes. “If that’s acceptable to my sister, of course. I’ve been informed that governesses are notoriously strict.”
“Notoriously,” Augusta agreed, finding her voice at last. The warmth in her chest had spread outward, filling her limbs with a lightness she had almost forgotten was possible.
“Though I’m willing to make exceptions for sisters who have traveled halfway across the country.
Especially when they arrive with such impeccable timing. ”
The tour, it turned out, was extensive.
Cassie led Olivia through the house with the fervent dedication of a museum curator who had been waiting her entire life for precisely this audience, pausing at each room to deliver her commentary.
“This is the library, where Hudson hides when he doesn’t want to be found, though he’s not very good at it because he always chooses the same chair. Also, he snores, which rather gives the game away.”
Pippin, emerging from some canine reconnaissance mission in the kitchens, took one look at Olivia and abandoned all pretense of dignified reserve, launching himself at her skirts with an enthusiasm that nearly toppled her and coaxed a laugh that sent warmth to Augusta’s heart.
She watched them from the doorway of the gallery as Hudson materialized beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the sleeve of her dress, not quite close enough to touch.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “For bringing her here.”
Hudson met her gaze. “It was the right thing to do.” His gruff tone did nothing to disguise the effect her gratitude had on him.
Augusta could only describe the days that followed as glorious. Olivia had easily settled into the townhouse, as though she had always belonged there.
James arrived on a Tuesday afternoon whilst Augusta, Olivia, and Cassie were engaged in the morally questionable practice of teaching Pippin how to balance a biscuit on his nose.
The dog was doing his best impression of a creature who had never been fed and would perish within moments if the biscuit were not immediately surrendered to his waiting jaws.
Cassie was laughing too hard to maintain the necessary sternness.
Olivia was attempting, with limited success, to look disapproving while her mouth betrayed her with a smile she couldn’t quite suppress.
Into this tableau of canine education and incipient chaos strode James, immaculately dressed in a waistcoat of such a violently cerulean hue that Augusta was momentarily convinced the fabric itself was emitting light.
“Ladies,” he greeted, executing a bow that combined genuine elegance with just enough excess to communicate that he was enjoying himself enormously.
“I see I’ve arrived at a critical juncture in what appears to be a very advanced lesson in canine deportment.
Please, don’t let me interrupt. I find the education of small animals to be one of life’s great spectator sports. ”
Cassie, abandoning all pretense of instruction, launched herself at him with the unrestrained enthusiasm of a child.
“You’ll never guess what’s happened. We have a new guest!
Miss Norton’s sister. She draws horses better than anyone in the entire world, probably, and she knows seventeen different ways to tie a cravat, though she says most of them are impractical for daily wear, which is a shame because the one with the double loop looks magnificent—”
“Cassie,” Hudson cut in, appearing in the doorway. “Perhaps allow our guest to breathe before you overwhelm him with the complete architectural history of your friendship.”
James extricated himself from Cassie’s enthusiastic grasp, his eyes finding Olivia, who had risen from her chair. “You must be the infamous Miss Olivia.”
Olivia’s smile was small but genuine and contained just enough sharpness to suggest she had assessed him in approximately the time it took to blink.
“Lord Ridgewell,” she greeted with a curtsy. “I’ve heard a great deal about you. Mostly from Cassie, whose accounts I have learned to interpret with a certain creative latitude.”
“The only sensible approach,” James agreed. “Cassie’s version of events typically improves upon reality by a factor of at least three. I encourage it. The world is vastly improved by her particular brand of embellishment.”
He extended his hand, and when Olivia placed hers in it, he bowed over it with a flourish that would not have been out of place at Almack’s.
“It is an absolute pleasure to meet the woman who has reduced my oldest friend to a state of such persistent distraction that he has twice failed to respond to correspondence regarding a matter of considerable financial significance, which, for Hudson Rivers, is the emotional equivalent of setting himself on fire.”
Hudson, who had been leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and his expression hovering somewhere between resignation and reluctant amusement, made a sound that was not quite a growl.
“James.”
“Merely establishing the factual landscape,” James said cheerfully. “For the benefit of our new arrival, whom I suspect is forming impressions at a rate that would make a Bow Street Runner blush with inadequacy.”
The afternoon unfolded with the particular chaotic warmth that James’s presence invariably introduced to any gathering.
He produced a deck of cards from a hidden pocket and proceeded to teach Cassie a game that involved a great deal of dramatic gestures and questionable arithmetic, both of which Cassie embraced with the wholehearted enthusiasm of a child who had found her spiritual counterpart in adult form.
Olivia, initially reserved, was gradually drawn into the proceedings by the simple expedient of Cassie’s determination that no one in the room should be permitted to remain uninvolved.
Hudson maintained his position at the periphery, present but not quite participating, his eyes moving between Augusta and Olivia.
Later, after James had been successfully lured into the garden by Cassie for what she had described with suspicious specificity as “a demonstration of my improved climbing technique, which requires an adult witness for verification purposes,” and Hudson had retreated to his study with the air of a man grateful for the reprieve, Olivia cornered Augusta in the library.
“You’re in love with him,” she remarked.
Augusta, who had been attempting with limited success to concentrate on a volume of French poetry that Hudson had left on the side table three days ago and apparently forgotten, set the book down with more force than necessary.
“It’s… complicated,” she said.
Olivia’s expression suggested that she found this response approximately as convincing as Pippin’s claims of perpetual starvation. “Most things worth having are.”
“I don’t know what we are,” Augusta admitted.
The words emerged more quietly than she had intended, with a weight of uncertainty that she had been carrying since that night in the garden, since the ball, since every moment in Hudson’s arms that had felt simultaneously like coming home and stepping off a cliff.
“I’m terrified of ruining it by wanting more than I have any right to ask for. ”
Olivia was silent for a long moment, her fingers tracing the spine of a book she had no intention of opening. When she spoke, her voice had lost its teasing edge, replaced by something warmer and considerably more serious.
“You deserve happiness, Gussie. Whatever shape it takes. Whatever name you give it.” She reached across the space between them, her hand finding Augusta’s.
“Don’t talk yourself out of it because you’re afraid it won’t last. Nothing lasts.
That’s rather the point of good things; they’re precious because they’re temporary. ”
The encounter happened on South Audley Street, three days into what Augusta had begun privately to think of as the good weeks.
Pippin had detected something of interest beneath a wrought-iron gate and was conducting his investigation with focused intensity, so Augusta, Olivia, and Cassie had slowed to a stop on the pavement.
Just then, Lady Barbara rounded the corner. Her gaze moved past Augusta and landed on Cassie with the warm, proprietary smile Augusta recognized from her last encounter with the woman in Hudson’s presence.
“Lady Cassandra, what a delightful coincidence. I was only saying to Lady Featherstone this morning that I had hoped to see you again. I have been meaning to ask, your brother mentioned you had taken an interest in watercolors. My niece is quite accomplished, and I thought perhaps—”
“I don’t like watercolors,” Cassie interrupted. She was not looking at Lady Barbara, but at Pippin.
A brief pause. “Well, perhaps drawing, then. Or—”
“I don’t want to meet your niece.”
“Cassie,” Augusta chided quietly.
“She keeps talking to me,” Cassie said, with the flat, exhausted candor of a child who had run out of patience. “Every time. I don’t know her, and I don’t want to. I don’t understand why she keeps—”
“Lady Cassandra.” Lady Barbara’s voice had cooled by several degrees. “I am attempting to be kind.”
“You’re attempting to talk to my brother through me,” Cassie shot back. “I’m eleven, not foolish.”
The silence that followed was loaded.
“I beg your pardon,” Lady Barbara gasped.
The warmth had vanished entirely now, replaced by something that had been waiting beneath it all along.
Her gaze moved to Augusta with the slow, deliberate assessment of a woman recalibrating.
“You might instruct your charge in the appropriate manner of addressing her betters.”
“She addressed you honestly,” Augusta countered. “I find I can’t improve upon it.”
Olivia, who had been standing slightly behind Augusta with her eyes fixed on the middle distance and her hands folded in the posture of a woman employed to be invisible, said without inflection, “Honesty is rather a virtue. In most circles.”
Lady Barbara looked at Olivia as though she had just noticed the gatepost had spoken.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a precision that made the words into something else entirely. “Are servants offering opinions now?”
“Evidently,” Olivia said, moving to stand in front of Cassie as though she could protect the girl from more attention.
Lady Barbara drew herself up with the particular dignity of a woman who had decided that departure was more devastating than engagement.
“Good day,” she said, and walked away at a pace that communicated with considerable eloquence that she had not been affected in the slightest.
Cassie watched her go. Then she looked up at Augusta with an expression that was equal parts satisfaction and the beginning of guilt.
“Was that very bad?”
“Moderately,” Augusta said.
“Hudson is going to hear about it.”
“Almost certainly.”
Cassie considered this. “It was still worth it,” she decided, and bent back down to Pippin, who had finished his investigation and was now prepared to continue walking.