Augusta took a step closer, eyeing every feature on her dear friend’s face to seek out any hint of falsehood. “Did you know about Sebastian and the dowry?”
Ginny’s eyes bounced between Augusta’s, clearly seeking her own answers to the situation at hand. “Augusta, you are speaking nonsense, I believe. Are you alright? What has Sebastian done?”
What, indeed?
Tears brimmed in Augusta’s eyes, though they had probablybeen threatening to appear for some time now.
“Ginny…” With that, she fell into a heap on the chaise, and the tears spilled freely.
“Oh, heavens,” Ginny breathed, rushing over to her in an instant. “What on earth is the matter?”
“I-” Augusta sobbed. “I’ve been such a God damned fool.”
Ginny sat on the chaise next to her and laid an arm across the back of her shoulders. “My dearest Auggie, what has happened to you?”
The story came tumbling out of Augusta in waves, broken up by bursts of sobbing that made her feel embarrassed and achey.
“Oh, God,” Ginny breathed at the end. “That is just awful. Are you certain of it?”
“As certain as I’ve ever been. God, Ginny, how did I miss all of it? How did I let myself believe that I was actually being loved by someone?”
Ginny’s compassionate expression hardened some. “Now, you listen to me, Auggie. I won’t have you talking about my very best friend that way. Of all the nasty lies in this situation, you being worthy of love isn’t one of them. You have always deserved a love that swept you off your feet. I am just so very sorry that the man who did it is not who you thought he was.”
Her words only served to bolster Augusta’s spirits by the slightest bit. Nothing anyone said now could cut through the crushing haze of her husband having taken her for a fool with his friends.
“I just don’t understand,” she said with a sniffle. “I did everything right Ginny. I tried to be soft and quiet and tiptoe around. I married the man my brother told me to. What was it all for? What was the point of it? I feel so much like I’ve walked intoa trap and can’t get out.”
Ginny looked at her with so much pitiful sympathy that Augusta almost felt more sorry for her friend than for herself.
“I think…” her friend started, but the sentence died quickly. Finally, she started once more. “I think, perhaps, that there is no ‘right,’ sometimes. You did not ‘do things’ right, you only made the choices you believed to be right. Everything else is…luck, I suppose.”
It was not the answer that Augusta wanted, but it rang true enough. Luck. That was what so much of this boiled down to. It had been the only thing that separated her from the common ladies of the Society. The only thing that separated Reginald, with all of his easy freedoms, from herself.
“I think perhaps I have been a bit myopic,” she said finally. “I have badly misjudged the women of the Society. I now feel so greatly like throwing a brick through a window that I wonder how I ever saw them as lesser.”
Ginny’s eyes widened. “You are not saying that youaregoing to throw a brick through a window, are you?”
“No,” Augusta said, surprised to find that a part of her did not believe it.
*****
When she arose the next morning, Augusta found a bouquet of flowers on her bedside table. Bright yellow tulips stuffed into a crystal vase. At the base of the vase was a card.
I am sorry.
That was it. Three words for all of her misery.
Disgusted, she steeled herself for breakfast with Sebastian. There was little she could do to get out of it. So, with a book in hand to keep her attention, she wandered downstairs andstepped into the dining room.
Sebastian stood as she walked to the table, taking her own seat a few down from him. A servant set a plate before her. In her peripheral, Sebastian sat again in silence.
Her usual eggs and toast sat on the plate. What would have been so appetizing a week ago now looked gray and bland to her. Instead of eating, she sipped her tea and opened her book, happy to have something to look at that was not Sebastian.
“How did you sleep?”
“Quite well,” she said without looking up.
Another long silence stretched between them. Even as she attempted to read, the obnoxious sounds of Sebastian’s fork scraping against his plate grated on her ears. She wondered at the strangeness of Sebastian’s fall from grace, as his very existence in her space now put her on edge.
