She buried her face in her pillow to muffle the sound that escaped her, something between a laugh and a groan.
Mercy.
She had let a duke pleasure her in the gardens. A duke. Hudson had reduced her to a trembling, moaning mess with nothing but his mouth, and his hands, and the skill with which he used them. And she had loved every second of it. Had begged for more, in words she would blush to recall in the clear light of morning.
She dressed with hands that still trembled slightly. Every brush of fabric against sensitive skin, every casual movement that recalled the stretch and ache of muscles used in ways they were not accustomed to, sent little pulses of memory through her that made her breath catch.
The house was quiet. The ballroom, when she walked past its open doors, bore little resemblance to the glittering fantasy of the night before.
Cassie should be in the schoolroom by now. They had agreed to start their morning lessons at nine o’clock, and the girl was rarely late. Punctuality, she had informed Augusta with the solemn certainty of an eleven-year-old who had recently discovered the concept, was the mark of a well-organized mind.
The schoolroom door stood ajar. Augusta pushed it open, expecting to find Cassie already seated at her desk, but the room was empty. The arithmetic text lay open on the desk, a slate beside it bearing half a sum that had been abandoned mid-calculation, the chalk still lying across the numbers as though its owner had been called away mid-thought.
Odd.
Cassie did not typically abandon sums. She approached mathematics with the grim determination of a soldier facing a superior enemy and did not retreat.
Augusta checked the adjoining room, but it too was empty, the fire laid but unlit, the windows letting in squares of springsunlight that illuminated nothing but dust motes and the lingering scent of yesterday’s beeswax candles.
A sound stopped her. It was faint, barely audible over the distant sounds of the house coming awake, but unmistakable. A sob. Small, stifled, the kind of sound a child made when they were trying very hard not to be heard.
Augusta stood perfectly still, listening.
There, again. From the direction of the library.
She moved quickly, her earlier warmth giving way to a cold, sharp concern that settled in her chest like a stone. The library door was closed, which was unusual, for Cassie treated the library as her personal domain, and its doors were rarely shut during the day.
For a moment, Augusta hesitated, her hand on the handle, wondering if she ought to knock. The sobbing had stopped, or perhaps she had imagined it. The last thing she wanted was to barge in on a child who had sought privacy for whatever reason. But the silence that followed felt wrong.
She opened the door.
She did not know quite what she had expected to find. Certainly not the small, hunched figure curled on the floor between two bookshelves, knees drawn to her chest, face buried in her arms,the occasional shudder passing through her narrow shoulders like a physical wave.
Cassie.
Augusta’s heart sank. She crossed the room in three strides, her soft slippers silent on the carpet, and knelt beside the girl without touching her.
Cassie did not look up. Her blonde curls had come loose from their pins and fell around her face in a disordered halo, and the sleeve of her morning dress was damp where she had pressed it against her eyes.
“Cassie,” Augusta said softly. “Sweetheart. What’s happened?”
The girl’s shoulders stiffened. For a long moment, she remained exactly as she was, and then, with a sound that was half-sob, half-surrender, she lifted her head.
Augusta’s breath caught. Cassie’s face was blotchy, her eyes swollen, her lower lip trembling in a way that made her look younger than her eleven years. Tears tracked clean paths through the dust on her cheeks. Her hands, when they emerged from their protective curl, were clenched into small, white-knuckled fists.
“I’m sorry,” Cassie whispered, the words barely audible. “I didn’t mean to… I tried to…” She stopped, her throat working visibly, and a fresh tear rolled down her cheek to land with a soft plop onthe sleeve of her dress. “I’m going to die, Miss Norton. I know I am.”
“Oh, Cassie,” Augusta said softly. She reached for the girl, her hands finding Cassie’s shoulders, and drew her gently into the circle of her arms. “Sweetheart, you’re not going to die. I promise you that. Whatever’s happened, whatever you’re afraid of, we’ll face it together. But first, you need to tell me what’s wrong.”
Cassie stiffened for one suspended moment and then collapsed against Augusta’s chest with a sound that was pure, undiluted misery. Her small fists uncurled to clutch at Augusta’s sleeves, and her face pressed into the wool of Augusta’s dress with the desperate urgency of someone seeking anchor in a storm.
“It’s blood,” she whispered, the words muffled against Augusta’s bodice. “There’s blood everywhere. On my sheets. And… and down there.” Her voice dropped to something barely above a breath. “I think something’s broken inside me, Miss Norton. I think I’m very ill, and I don’t want to die, and I don’t want Hudson to know because he’ll worry, and he worries enough already, and—” She broke off, another sob tearing through her.
Augusta held her tighter, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head. Unless she missed her guess entirely, Cassie had just begun a certain rite of passage that no one in this household had thought to prepare her for.
She held Cassie against her chest and felt the girl’s small body trembling with the aftershocks of crying, her breath comingin hiccupping little gasps that caught on Augusta’s bodice like burrs.
“Cassie,” she said, her voice firm enough to cut through the girl’s distress. “Look at me.”
