“It is not the sort of story one shares with their baby sister.”
“He also,” Lord Ridgewell added, “set fire to the groundskeeper’s shed, attempting to build a signal lamp.”
“That was an accident.”
“The man still brings it up at Christmas.‘The year His Grace murdered my parsnips,’he says, though they were turnips.”
Cassie’s laughter drew glances from strangers.
Augusta found herself laughing too. The conversations made everything easy, made it possible to forget for a few minutes that she was a woman with a false name sitting beside a man who could never be hers.
Hudson’s gaze found her across the distance. He wasn’t laughing, but his mouth had softened, and his eyes had gone warm and unguarded.
She looked away and took a bite of ice she couldn’t taste.
“Is being grown up very different from being a child?” Cassie asked. “Besides eating vegetables and not climbing things?”
“Enormously,” Lord Ridgewell replied. “You’re expected to pretend you know what you’re doing at all times. The trick is confidence and hoping no one checks.”
“Is that what you do?”
“It’s what everyone does. Your brother is simply better at it than most.”
Cassie turned to Augusta. “Do you get frightened, now that you’re grown up?”
Augusta set her spoon down. “Yes. Though the things that frighten me now are different from the things that did when I was small.”
“What frightens you?”
Her fingers found her mother’s necklace beneath her collar, the habitual touchstone she reached for when the ground felt uncertain. “Losing people I care about. Not being able to protect them.”
Behind her, Hudson had gone very still.
“That’s what frightens Hudson too,” Cassie said, with the devastating certainty of a child who’d been watching far more carefully than anyone suspected. “I can tell because his face does this—” She clenched her teeth and tightened the corners of her mouth, producing a miniature version of her brother’s most guarded expression. “He does it when Mrs. Beale mentions me going away to school.”
Silence fell heavily over them.
Augusta kept her gaze on her empty dish, where the glass caught the afternoon light and threw tiny rainbows across the bench.
“Cassie,” Hudson said, his voice very calm. “That’s enough ice for today.”
“I’ve only had two.” But Cassie slid down from the bench, brushed her coat, and announced that she intended to investigate the second balloon before the exhibition closed.
Lord Ridgewell rose with her. “I shall serve as a chaperone and, if necessary, a restraint.”
They set off, Cassie’s hands moving as she explained something inaudible to him.
Augusta stood, and Hudson pushed off the oak. They were alone in the lee of the tree, surrounded by empty dishes and the faint sweet smell of lemon.
“We should follow them,” Augusta said.
“Yes,” Hudson agreed.
Neither moved.
The afternoon light fell across his face, and Augusta watched the muscle in his jaw work, the same expression Cassie had just mimicked. His hand flexed at his side. Her own fingers curled in response, her palm suddenly empty.
“We should go,” she whispered.
