Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
When Hudson came down for breakfast at the usual hour the following morning, the room felt wrong.
He registered this fact before he had fully crossed the threshold. All was as it should be. Except that Augusta was not seated across from him, and Olivia was not there either.
He paused with his hand on the back of his chair and conducted a swift assessment.
The hour was correct. The day was Tuesday.
Augusta was never late for meals. Olivia, while less rigorously committed to the clock, could generally be relied upon to appear within a quarter-hour of the appointed time, usually bearing a new sketch that she would attempt to pass off as a casual observation rather than the product of hours of focused work.
Neither woman had materialized.
He sat down slowly. The footman poured his coffee.
Hudson accepted it with a nod that conveyed nothing of the unease churning in his gut.
He reached for the post, more out of habit than interest, and was halfway through a letter from his steward regarding drainage in the north field when Mrs. Beale appeared in the doorway.
Her expression gave him pause.
“Your Grace,” she said. “These were found in the entrance hall.”
She extended a hand that held two folded papers. Hudson recognized Augusta’s handwriting on the uppermost one immediately.
He took the letters.
Mrs. Beale did not immediately withdraw, which was unusual. “There’s something else,” she added. “Miss Norton’s chambers and Miss Olivia’s, they’ve been… cleared, Your Grace. Their personal effects. Their trunks. The wardrobes are empty.”
The hollow sensation in Hudson’s chest crystallized into something colder and considerably more precise. He looked down at the letters in his hand.
“Thank you, Mrs. Beale,” he said, his voice cracking. “That will be all.”
She withdrew.
He opened the letter addressed to him. He told himself this was the rational approach: ascertain the situation, then determine how to manage Cassie’s reaction.
He read the letter. Then he read it again, more slowly, each word registering painfully.
At last, after rereading it multiple times, he set it down with a steadiness that cost him more than he cared to admit.
His coffee had gone cold. His fist came down on the table with enough force to rattle the china. Coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup, spreading across the linen in a dark, accusing stain.
August had left.
While he slept.
She had written her letters and packed her trunks and walked out of his house as though the past months had been nothing more than a temporary arrangement, a pleasant interlude that could be concluded with the same efficiency with which it had begun.
The rational part of his brain informed him that Augusta’s reasoning was sound. Cassie’s reputation. The scandal. She was right. She was absolutely, devastatingly right, and the knowledge made his fury grow, because he could not even hate her for it.
He could hate himself, though. That, at least, was familiar territory.
The sound of small, rapid footsteps in the corridor pulled him back from the edge of whatever precipice he had been approaching.
He straightened, adjusted his cuffs with a mechanical gesture that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with the desperate reassembly of composure, and reached for the other letter just as his sister appeared in the doorway.
She was dressed for her lessons. She bounced into the room with the unrestrained energy that characterized all her movements before nine in the morning, Pippin trotting at her heels.
“Good morning,” she chirped, sliding into her chair with the practiced ease of someone who regarded furniture as a series of obstacles to be navigated rather than items to be treated with respect.
“Is Miss Norton coming down? I’ve been thinking about the mining engineers, and I’ve formulated three new questions, and I require her immediate input before my brain explodes from the pressure of containing them, which would be messy and also a waste of perfectly good questions. ”
Hudson looked at his sister and felt something in his chest crack open.
“Cassie.” His voice emerged rougher than he had intended. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Miss Norton isn’t here this morning.”
Cassie’s hand froze halfway toward the toast rack.
“Isn’t here? Do you mean she’s unwell? Because if she’s unwell, I should go to her immediately.
I’m very good at sitting quietly with invalids.
Mrs. Beale says so. She says I have the patience of a saint when properly motivated, and Miss Norton being unwell is extremely motivating, so—”
“She’s gone, Cass.”
The words hung in the air between them, simple and devastating.
“Gone where?” she asked, her voice small.
Hudson placed the letter on the table before her. The thumbprint seal gleamed in the morning light, a signature rendered in wax. “She left this for you.”
Cassie stared at the letter as though it were a specimen of some unfamiliar species. Then her hand darted out, snatched the paper, and tore it open.
He watched her face as she read, watched the brightness fade from it, replaced by something that started as confusion and accelerated, with the terrible momentum of a child’s grief, into full-blown devastation. Then she made a sound.
Hudson had heard his sister cry before, had soothed scraped knees and nightmares and the bewildering sorrows of childhood that adults had forgotten how to name. But he had never heard such a sound.
He couldn’t let Augusta go, he knew that as he put a comforting hand on his sister’s hair.
He would have to go after her, no matter what she asked.