Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Scottish border announced itself in the gradual coarsening of the landscape. Augusta pressed her forehead to the carriage window and watched the change silently.
Three days on the road. Three nights in coaching inns, where the beds were too narrow.
Olivia sat across from her, a sketchbook open on her lap, though Augusta strongly suspected her sister had not turned a page in at least an hour. The pencil moved in small, repetitive patterns, her mind clearly elsewhere.
Neither of them had mentioned Hudson. Neither of them had mentioned Oakhart House.
The carriage slowed.
Augusta registered the change in velocity before the driver’s voice reached them. A shouted exchange with someone on the road, the horses’ pace slowing from a trot to something more deliberate. She sat up instinctively, her hand finding the window strap.
“We’re being hailed, miss,” the driver called down, his voice carrying the particular blend of uncertainty and deference that hired men reserved for situations they had not been briefed to anticipate. “Gentleman on horseback. Says he’s the Duke of…”
The rest of the title was swallowed by the sound of hooves on gravel, and then the carriage door was wrenched open with a force that made the entire vehicle rock on its wheels.
Hudson stood in the doorway. His hair was wild from the wind, his cravat undone, and his expression was that of a man who had not slept in three days and had entirely ceased to care about the fact.
Augusta’s breath left her lungs in a silent exhale.
“You,” Hudson said. The word emerged rough, scraped, carrying the accumulated fury of a journey undertaken at a pace that would have killed a lesser horse and very nearly killed its rider. “You packed your things and walked out of my house as though the past months meant nothing, as though…”
Augusta stepped down from the carriage. Her legs, stiff from days of travel, nearly betrayed her.
Hudson’s hand shot out to steady her, his fingers closing around her elbow with a firmness that suggested he was not entirely confident she wouldn’t bolt for the nearest hillside the moment he released her.
Olivia remained in the carriage with her sketchbook and the air of someone who had developed a sudden interest in the grain of the woodwork.
They walked twenty yards, perhaps, to a flat stretch of grass beside the road where the hills rose on either side and the sky opened above them in a sweep of pale northern blue that felt obscenely beautiful, given the circumstances.
“How could you?” Hudson gritted out. He had stopped several feet away from her, as though proximity itself was dangerous, as though standing too close might reduce whatever he had come to say to something incoherent. “How could you make that decision without—without giving me the chance to…”
“To what?” Augusta prompted. “To talk me out of it? To present an alternative that would magically erase the fact that my name, my father’s name, is being printed in scandal sheets across London? To assure me again that everything would be well when we both know it wouldn’t?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I did it for Cassie. For your family. For your reputation. For all the things you’ve spent your entire life building, Hudson, which I would have destroyed simply by remaining in your house.
You know that. You’ve known it since the moment you read that article. ”
Hudson made a low, frustrated sound. He closed the distance between them in two strides, his hands curling around her shoulders. His grip was just shy of painful.
“My reputation,” he said, each word precise and weighted, “is ink on paper. It is gossip in drawing rooms. It is the accumulated opinions of people whose judgment I have never respected and whose approval I have never sought.” His fingers tightened.
“You are not ink, Augusta. You are not gossip. You are the woman who walked into my house and rearranged every assumption I had about what my life was supposed to be. I will be damned if I allow you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of something as meaningless as a scandal sheet.”
Augusta stared at him. The anger was still there, banked but present, a warm coal in her chest that she had been nursing since the moment she sealed those letters.
But beneath it, something else was stirring.
Something precarious and dangerous and so unwelcome that she nearly took a step back to escape it.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “You do not understand what it is like for a girl… for Cassie when she sees—”
“I will protect Cassie.” The certainty in his voice was absolute, unshakable.
“With every resource at my disposal, with every connection, with every secret I’ve accumulated over six years of running a gaming hell that half the ton frequents.
The scandal will pass. They always do. And Cassie will emerge from it because she is my sister, and because she has you, and because between the three of us, I rather think we can manage the collective opinion of a society that spends its afternoons debating the merits of different shades of cream. ”
Augusta wanted to believe him. Oh, how she wanted to. The desire rose in her throat with a force that nearly undid her composure. She pressed her lips together and looked at the hills, because looking at Hudson’s face was more than she could currently bear.
Her throat closed up. “Hudson…”
“I’m in love with you.” He said it simply, directly, with none of the hedging or qualification that characterized his usual speech.
Just the words, clean and honest and devastating in their simplicity.
“I think I have been ever since you looked at me with that defiance in my office at the Nightingale.”
He released her shoulders and stepped back. Then, with a formality that belonged in a ballroom rather than a roadside in the shadow of the Scottish border, he went down on one knee in the grass.
“Augusta Booth,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
The world stopped. The hills, the sky, the shifting horses—all of it receded to a distant hum, secondary to the man kneeling in the grass with his hair in his eyes and his heart in his hands and an expression of such naked, unguarded hope that Augusta felt her heart flutter like a bird’s wings.
“Yes.” The word escaped before her brain had fully processed the question, as though her heart had elected to bypass the usual bureaucratic channels and issue its response directly.
“Yes, I…” She stopped, swallowed, tried again.
“I love you. I have loved you with an inconvenient thoroughness that has made the past days considerably more miserable than they needed to be, and yes, I will marry you. But Hudson, Cassie—”
“My ownership of the Nightingale,” Hudson cut in, rising to his feet with the fluid grace of a man who had just received the answer he wanted and was not about to let practical concerns ruin the moment.
“has made me privy to a lot of information. Half the ton gambles there. I know which lords have mistresses, which ladies have debts, which families are one bad harvest from selling heirlooms. Anyone who attempts to harm you or Cassie or Olivia will find their private affairs rendered considerably less private with a speed that would make Fleet Street blush.” He flashed her a quick smile.
“I am exceptionally well-equipped for blackmail, Augusta. It’s one of my more overlooked talents. ”
She laughed. The sound surprised her, and it broke something loose in her chest, something that had been clenched tight since the moment she sealed those letters.
“Yes,” she said again, and this time the word carried its full weight, deliberate and certain. “Yes.”
Hudson kissed her. His hands cradled her face gently while his mouth found hers with the hunger of someone who had been starving and had just been offered a feast.
Augusta curled her fingers into his hair and allowed herself, for the first time in days, to believe that happiness might not be a luxury she had voluntarily surrendered but something she was permitted to keep.
He lifted her into his arms with a laugh, carrying her back to the carriage without paying any mind to her protests. Once there, he opened the door to look at Olivia with the bright grin of a man in love.
“We are returning to London,” he announced.
The journey back to Oakhart House was shorter, spurred on, Augusta thought, by the utter joy that radiated from all three of them.
As soon as they arrived back at the house, Pippin launched himself at Augusta’s skirts with an enthusiasm that nearly toppled her, his entire body quivering with joy.
And then, after what felt like forever, Cassie appeared. She came down the staircase with the deliberate slowness of a child who had been grievously wounded and was determined that everyone present should appreciate the full magnitude of the injury. Her arms were crossed, her lower lip pushed out.
“You left,” she said slowly. “You wrote a letter. Letters are for people who are dead, or sailors, or both. You are not dead, and you are not a sailor, and I am so cross with you, Miss Norton, and I…”
Her composure cracked. Her lower lip trembled, and she launched herself across the hall and into Augusta’s arms with a force that would have knocked over a less prepared adult.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she mumbled into Augusta’s shoulder, her voice thick with unshed tears. “I thought you decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“You,” Augusta said, her own voice unsteady, “are worth every trouble I have ever encountered and several I haven’t invented yet. And I am never leaving you again. That is a promise, Cassie Rivers, and I do not make promises I don’t intend to keep.”