Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Augusta stood at the window in her chamber and watched the morning light climb the garden wall in thin, golden stripes that did absolutely nothing to improve her mood.
The cup sat on the sill beside her, precisely where she had set it down after the third reading of the scandal sheet, when the words had stopped rearranging themselves into new configurations of horror.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and tried to think past the immediate, bruising humiliation to the problem that mattered.
Cassie.
The girl’s debut was years away, a stretch of time that should have felt like a reprieve. But Augusta had been raised in a vicarage. She understood how gossip worked, how it festered, how the ton nursed its scandals.
They would not forget.
By the time Cassie made her debut, the story would have turned into something approaching folklore: the Duke’s sister, raised by the murderer’s daughter, tainted by association if not by blood.
A child. A child who had done nothing except trust the wrong person.
Augusta’s fingers found the silver locket at her throat, tracing the familiar pattern of the carving. The portrait inside was too faded to make out clearly anymore, but she knew it by heart. It was her mother’s face, delicate and solemn, preserved behind glass no thicker than a breath.
What would her mother have done? What impossible calculus of protection and sacrifice would she have performed, faced with a child who was not her own but had somehow become her responsibility?
The door opened behind her without a knock.
“You’ve been to their offices,” she said. It was not a question.
“I have.” Hudson’s voice was rough. “The information could only have come from someone in this house, Augusta. A note dropped through their letter slot. Anonymous.”
She turned then.
“Who?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it in disordered waves that should have looked careless but instead made him look like a wild thing that had been temporarily contained. “But I will.”
She believed him.
He crossed to the window, standing close enough that she could feel the heat of him through the sleeve of her dress, and looked out at the garden.
“We’re going out for a walk,” he announced.
Augusta blinked. “A walk?”
“Hyde Park. The four of us. Cassie has been indoors all morning, and Olivia looks as though she’s preparing for a firing squad.
Fresh air. Movement. The opposite of sitting in rooms, worrying about things we cannot immediately fix.
” He turned to face her, and the intensity of his gaze made something in her chest twist. “Will you come?”
“Your Grace,” she began and then stopped, because the formality felt absurd under the circumstances. “Hudson, people will talk. They’ve already started. Making a public appearance the day after—”
“My sister,” Hudson cut in, each word precise, “will not be holed up in this house because of something printed on cheap paper by a man whose primary talent appears to be creative libel. Cassie deserves better than that. You both do.”
It was the wrong argument. It was also, unfortunately, the only argument that mattered.
They gathered in the front hall twenty minutes later, Cassie bouncing on her toes.
Hyde Park in the afternoon was exactly as Augusta had feared: crowded, verdant, and thick with the particular social electricity that preceded the Season’s more formal gatherings.
Carriages lined the drive. Ladies in pastel walking dresses strolled the paths in pairs and trios, their parasols tilted at precisely the angle that suggested both fashion and surveillance.
Gentlemen on horseback nodded to acquaintances with the casual entitlement of men who regarded public space as an extension of their drawing rooms.
For the first hundred yards, nothing happened. The day was fine. Pippin trotted ahead with his leash taut, investigating interesting smells with the comprehensive dedication of his species.
Then Lady Seabury passed them on the path with her two daughters in tow, and the world shifted.
Augusta saw it happen in perfect, excruciating detail.
The moment of recognition, the fractional pause, the way Lady Seabury’s smile froze into something that belonged on a museum mannequin.
Her hand came down on her younger daughter’s shoulder, not roughly but with unmistakable purpose, and guided the girl onto the grass, making a detour that would have been comical in its transparency if it hadn’t been so thoroughly, surgically deliberate.
No words were exchanged. None were necessary.
Cassie, to her credit, did not react. She continued walking, her chin lifted, her pace steady. But Augusta, walking half a step behind, noticed when the girl’s fingers tightened on Pippin’s leash. The leather creaked. Her knuckles went white.
It happened again. And again.
A baroness whose daughter had played with Cassie at a musicale three weeks ago now steered her child in a wide arc that took them past a particularly interesting shrub.
A viscount who had been Hudson’s regular partner at White’s raised his hat with a stiffness that suggested his neck had been recently starched.
A cluster of young ladies who fell silent as they approached and did not resume their conversation until they were well past.
Each time, Cassie’s composure held. Each time, the performance grew more brittle.
And then they rounded the curve near the Serpentine, and Augusta saw them: the daughters of the Baroness Finchley, two girls of thirteen or fourteen with identical chestnut curls and matching walking dresses of pale blue.
The elder Finchley girl spotted Cassie.
Augusta watched it happen. The moment of recognition, the automatic smile beginning to form, and then something else. A hesitation, a glance at the Baroness, who was standing three yards away, deep in conversation with another matron, and had not technically issued any instruction.
The girl’s smile faltered, and she looked at her sister.
The younger one, quicker on the uptake or simply more attuned to maternal signals, had already turned away, examining a nearby flower bed with the intense focus of someone who had developed a sudden passionate interest in horticulture. The elder girl followed.
Cassie stopped talking. She did not cry. She did not comment. She simply stood on the path with Pippin’s leash slack in her hand and watched the Finchley girls retreat with an expression that contained more understanding than any child of eleven should have been required to assemble.
Hudson saw it too. Augusta felt him go still beside her.
He crouched beside his sister. “Cass,” he said quietly. “Look at me.”
Cassie looked at him.
“People will forget,” he assured her. Each word was spoken with the careful weight of a man who knew he was making a promise he might not be able to keep. “Not immediately. Not all of them. But enough. This will pass. I give you my word.”
Cassie nodded. A single, jerky movement that contained more trust than any child should have been required to muster.
“Can we still have ices?” she asked, her voice small but steady.
“We can have all the ices in London,” Hudson said. “Starting with Gunther’s and working our way through every confectioner in Mayfair until you’re entirely sick of the things and swear never to touch one again.”
That earned him the ghost of a smile. Not much, but enough.
Cassie straightened her shoulders. “Gunther’s,” she said. “And then Hatchard’s, because I’ve been wanting to buy the book about mining engineers, and if we’re being scandalous, we might as well be thorough about it.”
Augusta watched them: Hudson rising to his full height, his hand still resting on his sister’s shoulder, Cassie already rebuilding her fortification of chatter brick by determined brick. She felt something settle in her chest with the weight and finality of a door closing.
She had to leave. Or else she would destroy the future of the one child who had trusted her completely.
She looked at Hudson, at the straight line of his back, the set of his shoulders, the way his hand still rested on Cassie’s shoulder with a protectiveness that made her chest ache, and knew, with a clarity that was almost physical, that she could not allow that to happen.
No matter what it cost her.
Augusta packed that very night while the house slept. Then she made her way to Olivia’s bedchamber.
Olivia was awake. She sat propped against her pillows with a book open on her knees. She looked up as Augusta entered, and whatever she saw on her sister’s face made her set the book aside without marking the page.
“You’ve decided,” she noted.
Augusta sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath her weight.
“I have to go,” she said. “We both do. Back to Scotland, perhaps? You saw what happened today. Every mother in Hyde Park steered her daughter away from Cassie as though she carried the plague. It won’t get better. It will only get worse.”
Olivia was silent for a long moment. Her fingers found Augusta’s in the space between them, twisting together.
“I will support you, no matter what. But you must tell me that you’re certain about this,” she urged.
Augusta squeezed her hand. “I am. This is about what Cassie needs. And what she needs is for the connection to be severed, completely and publicly, before it destroys her chances entirely.”
“And what about what you need?” Olivia asked quietly.
The question landed between them with the weight of something that had been hovering unspoken since the moment Augusta had pulled her into that embrace in the morning room.
What did Augusta need?
The answer rose in her throat with a clarity that was almost physical.
Hudson.
His hand in hers under the dinner table. His mouth on her neck in the dark. The way he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t watching, as though she were something precious and slightly dangerous.
She did not say that. She could not afford to.
“I need Cassie to have the future she deserves,” she said instead. “I need to know that I haven’t… that my presence in her life hasn’t cost her everything before she’s even had a chance to begin. That’s enough, Livvy. It has to be.”
Olivia studied her face with the particular attention of someone reading a text she had memorized years ago and was checking for revisions. Then she sighed, a soft, resigned sound that contained more understanding than Augusta had any right to expect.
“Scotland, then,” she said. “The two of us. Together.”
“Thank you,” Augusta whispered.
“Don’t thank me,” Olivia said. “Just promise me this isn’t forever. Promise me that someday, when this has all… when it’s settled, we will find our way back to something that resembles a choice. Not an exile, but a choice.”
“I promise.”
Though packing had been quick and easy, the letters took longer.
Augusta wrote a letter to Cassie first. She wrote about courage, about the particular brand of it that Cassie carried in her small frame without seeming to notice its weight.
She wrote about trees that were meant for climbing and a mare named Juniper and the absolute, non-negotiable truth that being loved by Augusta Booth was a permanent condition, unaffected by distance or discretion or the meanness of London gossip.
She wrote I will see you again and hoped, with a fervor that made her hand shake, that it was true.
She sealed it with a drop of wax, pressing her thumb into the soft red pool where a signet ring would normally go.
The letter to Hudson was far more difficult.
She drafted it three times, each version more inadequate than the last, before settling on the approach that felt the least dishonest: gratitude first, explanation second, a request that was not quite a plea placed carefully at the end where he could not miss it.
Your Grace, she began and then struck it out.
Hudson,
Thank you for everything. For Cassie. For Olivia. For the garden, and the library, and every moment in between that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. You have been kinder than I had any right to expect, and more patient than any man of your station should have been required to be.
I cannot stay. You know this, I think, even if you will not admit it to yourself.
What happened in the park today is only the beginning.
Cassie’s future cannot be collateral damage in whatever this is between us.
She deserves a clean slate, a life unmarked by the poison that my name now carries in this city.
This is my choice. I am choosing Cassie’s future over everything else, and I would make the same choice a hundred times without hesitation.
She did not sign it with love. She could not bring herself to write the word, knowing that he would read it in a house she had already left, in a future she had voluntarily abandoned. Instead, she wrote Augusta and left it at that.
She pressed the wax seal with more force than necessary, as though she could physically impress the finality of the gesture into the paper.
Dawn was still an hour away when she and Olivia met in the front hall, dressed for travel, their trunks positioned by the door with the quiet efficiency of a departure that had been planned to avoid witnesses.
Pippin, who had apparently developed some form of canine precognition regarding household upheaval, was sitting between the trunks with his ears drooping and an expression of such profound betrayal that Augusta had to look away.
“No goodbyes,” Olivia said softly. “It’s cleaner this way.”
Augusta nodded. She could not have spoken if she had tried.
The carriage arrived precisely as arranged. A hired conveyance, not one of Hudson’s, procured by Olivia through channels she had not explained and Augusta had not asked about.
The driver took their trunks without comment. The horses stamped and snorted in the cool pre-dawn air, their breath visible in pale clouds that dissipated into the darkness.
Augusta climbed into the carriage after Olivia. And with that, they rolled away from Oakhart House.