Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lady Ashford’s ballroom had been designed with the intention of impressing people who were already impressed with themselves. The chandeliers alone could have funded a small parish for a decade.
Augusta kept her eyes moving rather than letting them settle. She was wearing the silver dress Hudson had bought her.
A woman in ivory silk said something behind her fan to the woman beside her. The second woman’s gaze traveled the full length of Augusta’s gown and returned to her face with an expression that took its time arriving at neutral.
Augusta smiled at her.
The woman looked away first.
Hudson’s hand shifted against the small of her back, and she felt Olivia’s presence at her right shoulder like a fixed point. The three of them moved deeper into the room, and the crowd parted, the whispers rising around them like water finding its level.
“You’re doing beautifully,” Hudson murmured. “They’re terrified of you. It’s rather satisfying to watch.”
“I’m not terrifying,” Augusta murmured back. “I am terrified.”
They had reached the center of the room.
Hudson stopped. The crowd arranged itself into a loose semicircle.
Conversations died. Heads turned. The orchestra, which had been producing a competent rendering of something pastoral, trailed into silence as the first violin caught Hudson’s eye and apparently received a signal that required no verbal elaboration.
Hudson did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The room had already gone quiet.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice carried to the farthest corners of the ballroom without apparent effort.
Augusta, standing beside him, felt the vibration of it through the fabric of her sleeve where it pressed against his arm.
“I’m sure you have read the latest edition of the London Whisperer with the particular attention that publication generally deserves, which is to say considerably more than it has earned and rather less than its authors might wish. ”
Whispers rippled through the crowd.
“I am here to set the record straight.” Hudson’s hand found Augusta’s, his fingers threading through hers with a certainty that made her breath catch.
“This is Miss Augusta Booth. She is my fiancée. The banns will be read beginning Sunday. By summer, she will be the Duchess of Oakhart, and any person in this room who regards that fact as anything other than the good fortune it represents will answer to me personally, with consequences that I strongly advise against experiencing firsthand.”
He turned slightly, his free hand extending toward Olivia, who had positioned herself with the tactical precision of a woman who understood exactly how public scenes worked and had no intention of being an afterthought.
“This is Miss Olivia Booth, my future sister-in-law and an artist of considerable talent. She is under my protection, so the same principles apply.”
The silence that followed had weight. Augusta could feel it pressing against her skin.
Then James stepped forward.
“As the Marquess of Ridgewell,” he announced, executing a bow that combined genuine elegance with just enough theatrical excess to communicate that he was enjoying himself enormously, “I feel obliged to inform this assembly that attempting to cross His Grace on matters pertaining to the women he loves is as wise as attempting to pet a bear that has recently developed strong opinions about personal space. I speak from personal experience. The bear wins. Every time.”
He turned to Augusta, his expression softening into something that contained considerably more sincerity than his usual repertoire.
“Miss Booth, it has been my very great pleasure to watch you reduce my oldest friend to a state of coherent desire, which is an accomplishment that several years of my best efforts failed to achieve. Welcome to the family. We’re delighted to have you, and anyone who suggests otherwise will answer to me, and I am significantly more creative with my threats than His Grace, who tends toward the blunt instrument approach. ”
Something shifted in the room. Augusta felt it happen.
A recalibration, subtle but unmistakable, as the collective consciousness of the ton processed the fact that the Marquess of Ridgewell, whose social currency was considerable and whose judgments were regarded with the particular attention that charm combined with genuine intelligence could command, had just thrown his entire weight behind a woman who had, until very recently, been the subject of precisely the opposite variety of endorsement.
Someone began to clap.
Augusta never identified the culprit. It did not matter. The applause spread. Hesitantly at first, then with gathering confidence, until the ballroom filled with a sound that she had never expected to hear directed at herself: approval.
Hudson turned to her. In the warm, fractured light of a thousand crystal pendants, with the sound of Society reconstructing its opinions washing around them like the tide, he looked at her with an expression that contained everything he had never been able to convey in words.
“May I have this dance, Miss Booth?”
The orchestra struck up a waltz. His hand settled on her waist. Augusta placed her palm against his shoulder and felt the solid warmth of him through the layers of formal dress.
Then they were moving, and the ballroom around them faded to a distant murmur of color and sound, secondary to the particular geography of his body against hers and the way his eyes held hers with a focus that suggested the rest of the world had been temporarily excused from consideration.
“You’re staring,” she noted.
“You are beautiful.” His hand tightened on her waist, guiding her through a turn effortlessly.
“The way the light catches your hair. The particular shade of your eyes when you’re attempting not to look affected by something that has, in fact, affected you considerably.
The fact that you are my fiancée and standing in the middle of Lady Ashford’s ballroom while what remains of London’s collective sanity realigns itself around the fact of our engagement.
” His mouth curved. “It’s a great deal to process.
I require the full three minutes of the waltz. ”
Augusta laughed. The sound surprised her.
“I love you,” she said. The words emerged quietly, pitched low for his ears only, with the full weight of everything she had carried since the roadside in Scotland and quite possibly longer.
“In case that wasn’t abundantly clear from the fact that I agreed to marry you while standing in a ditch with my hair coming undone and a carriage driver watching. ”
Hudson’s hand found hers where it rested against his shoulder, his fingers threading through hers.
“I love you,” he rasped. “In case that wasn’t abundantly clear from the fact that I rode a horse halfway to Scotland, threatened a newspaper, and nearly provoked my housekeeper to resign on principle. ”
They completed the circuit of the floor.
The waltz continued around them, other couples moving in their own orbits, the ballroom a wheel of light and music and the reconstructed architecture of a society that had, against considerable odds, decided that Augusta Booth belonged exactly where she was.
After her father’s arrest, she had felt that she’d never belong anywhere again.
But standing in Hudson’s arms, with his hand warm on her waist and his eyes holding hers, Augusta discovered that belonging was not something one was granted by birth or circumstance.
It was something one built. Brick by stubborn brick. Choice by inconvenient choice.
The music swelled toward its conclusion. Hudson drew her closer, his mouth brushing her ear in a gesture that belonged in a far less public setting and which neither of them could bring themselves to regret in that particular moment.
“Welcome home, Augusta,” he murmured.
For the first time in longer than she could remember, the word carried no qualifications, no caveats, no silent asterisk directing her attention to the provisional nature of the arrangement.
Just home.
Simple. Certain.
Hers.