Augusta said nothing. Over the past weeks, she had learned that the girl’s silences were rarely empty. They were simply a different sort of conversation, one that required patience to hear.
She steered her away from the broad thoroughfares, where carriages and carts would force them to walk in single file, and guided her instead toward a quieter neighborhood where the houses stood farther back from the street.
They reached a small garden square at last, barely more than a patch of ground enclosed by iron railings and filled with elms. An iron gate stood partly open, as though the square had been waiting specifically for them. Augusta nudged Pippin’s lead toward it.
“Shall we?” she asked.
Cassie nodded once.
They found a stone bench beneath one of the larger trees and sat down. Pippin immediately sat on his hind legs with a sigh and dropped his enormous head on her knees.
Cassie’s gloved hand settled on his fur. For several moments, she held herself perfectly still, her spine straight, her chin lifted, the very picture of composure. Then, without warning, her shoulders sagged, and tears began to roll down her cheeks, fast enough that she had to wipe them away almost angrily with the back of her glove.
“I am so tired of being treated like a child,” she said, the words coming out in a rush.
Augusta kept her own hands in her lap. “It’s not easy.”
“Miss Norton, do you know how many people have told me I’ll catch up eventually?” Cassie’s voice had grown thick with tears and frustration. “Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. My last governess said it. My dancing master said it. Even Hudson says it sometimes, though he tries to hide it.”
She rubbed at her cheeks again.
“I’m nearly twelve years old. I’m not foolish. I know real things. I know why boats float and why the sky is blue and which trees produce the most interesting leaves in autumn, but nobody ever seems to notice.” The words poured out in a torrent now, each one landing like a pebble on the frozen ground between them. “And now Lady Harriet and Miss Cecily and Miss Arabella think that I’m—that I’m?—”
Augusta waited.
Cassie’s breath came in quick, tight gasps, her hand gripping Pippin’s ruff with enough force to make the dog look up in mild concern. A single tear dripped from the end of her nose and landed on his fur.
“They’re measuring you against a very narrow idea of what young ladies ought to be,” Augusta said at last, her voice quiet. “That narrowness says more about them than it does about you.”
Cassie stared down at Pippin’s fur, rubbing one thumb repeatedly against the leather of her glove. “I know,” she said, the fight draining from her voice. “But it will happen again. Lady Harriet’s mother invites Hudson for dinner every month, and Miss Cecily’s father is a member of Hudson’s club, and Miss Arabella’s aunt was friends with our mother.” She looked up at last, her eyes red-rimmed and steady. “They know things I don’t. Things I should know.”
The summer sun slanted through the bare branches above them, casting thin, wavering shadows across the gravel.
“I want you to teach me,” she said. “Household management. Accounts and menus and linens and all of it.” Her jaw set in a stubborn line that reminded Augusta of Hudson so much that she nearly smiled despite herself. “I don’t want anybody to ever look at me that way again.”
Augusta studied Cassie’s profile: the reddened eyes, the stubborn mouth, the hand gripping Pippin’s thick fur.
She thought of pirate fleets painted in careful watercolors, of climbing trees with skirts hitched up to her knees, of lying on her back in the grass counting clouds and asking questions that had no simple answers. All the wild, wonderful curiosity that made Cassie so distinctly herself.
If she agreed, those things would be replaced by ledgers and inventories, by careful lessons in how to become the kind of young lady those girls would accept.
“I’m not asking to stop our other lessons,” Cassie added, as though reading the hesitation in Augusta’s silence. “Just to add these. Please.”
“We’ll find a way to incorporate the lessons,” Augusta said after a long moment. “Not instead of your other studies, but alongside them.” She paused, choosing her words with care. “There’s value in knowing how to manage a household, just as there’s value in knowing how narwhals live and why the sky changes color at sunset. You must always remember that, Cassie.”
Cassie’s eyes searched Augusta’s face.
“I mean it,” Augusta insisted. “As for household matters, we’ll begin small. Perhaps a household account tomorrow, and the history of pirate fleets the day after.”
Cassie exhaled, a long, shaky breath that fogged the air between them. Then, quite without warning, she leaned her shoulder against Augusta’s arm.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice small but steady.
Beneath the bench, Pippin’s tail began a slow, steady thump against the gravel. Above them, the thin sunlight filtered through the bare branches, casting the three of them in a light that made even the cold stone bench seem, for one suspended moment, exactly where they were meant to be.
Chapter Eighteen
“Now then, My Lady,” Mrs. Beale said to Cassie, who stood eagerly in the corridor, “the first principle of household accounts is that one must know precisely what one has.”
