“It will.” Augusta nodded. “Though they may not speak of it. Many women don’t. They treat it as a secret, something to be hidden and never discussed. I’ve never understood why. It’s as natural as breathing.”
Cassie considered this, her brow furrowed in that now-familiar expression of serious contemplation. Then, she nodded. “Will you help me change the sheets? Before anyone notices?”
“I will,” Augusta promised. “And then we’ll have that practical conversation about rags. And perhaps a cup of Mrs. Beale’s special tea with ginger for your tummy. How does that sound?”
Cassie nodded, her grip still tight on Augusta’s hand, and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She stood for a moment, swaying slightly, and then straightened her shoulders with a determination that would have done a soldier proud.
“Practical,” she said. She glanced up at Augusta, a new thought visibly forming. “Will you tell me about the first time it happened to you? Not all the details,” she added hastily. “Just… was it as awful for you as it was for me?”
Augusta thought of the first time she had bled. She had been alone, at the vicar’s house, with no one to explain and nothing but a tattered copy of a medical text to guide her through days of confused terror.
Her stomach twisted.
“It was worse,” she said honestly. “I had no one to tell me I wasn’t dying. No one to promise me it would be all right.” She squeezed Cassie’s hand. “You have me, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hudson paced the length of the gallery for what felt like the hundredth time in two days, his boots making no sound against the carpet but his thoughts producing enough noise to fill the silence three times over.
The house felt different, hollow in a way that defied his usual vocabulary for describing space.
Cassie had been avoiding him. He was certain of it. And Augusta…
Augusta had perfected the art of being present while remaining utterly, infuriatingly out of reach.
Two days. Two days of finding the schoolroom vacant when he’d timed his morning walk to coincide with Cassie’s lessons. Two days of Augusta’s voice carrying from behind closed doors that fell silent the moment his footsteps approached. Two daysof catching the scent of her hair in corridors she had vacated moments before he arrived.
It was deliberate. He was not a man given to paranoia, but even he could recognize a coordinated retreat when he witnessed one. The question was why.
His mind kept returning to the garden. To her mouth against his, her hands in his hair, the sounds she’d made when she had climaxed. He had replayed those moments so many times they had taken on the quality of a dream—too perfect, too intense to have actually occurred in the sober light of a spring morning.
Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps she regretted it. Perhaps the reality of what they had done had dawned on her with the clarity that daylight inevitably brought, and she had decided that discretion was infinitely preferable to whatever madness had possessed them both.
He had reached the west wing, Cassie’s territory, the part of the house where his sister’s presence was most clearly felt in the scattered evidence of an eleven-year-old’s enthusiasms: a half-finished sketch of Pippin propped on a side table, a silk ribbon dangling from a doorknob, a small stack of books balanced precariously on the newel post of the staircase.
He paused, listening. From behind Cassie’s closed door came the murmur of voices.
He knocked firmly three times.
“Come in,” Cassie called, her voice bright with an energy that had been conspicuously absent from the house for the past forty-eight hours.
He opened the door and found them seated by the window, a basket of embroidery silks between them, their heads bent over what appeared to be an ambitious rendering of a rose garden on a pillowcase. Cassie looked up first, her smile fading slightly when she saw him.
Augusta did not look up at all. Her fingers moved with practiced precision through the linen, her needle flashing in the afternoon light, her entire being focused on the rose taking shape beneath her hands with an intensity that was excessive for embroidery.
“Hudson,” Cassie said, setting her own work aside. “We’re making cushion covers. Miss Norton says my stitches are improving, though I maintain that French knots are the invention of a particularly sadistic individual with a grudge against children.”
“A view I share,” Hudson said.
His eyes were on Augusta, who had still not acknowledged his presence. The line of her neck, exposed where her hair was swept up in its usual style, held a tension he could read from across the room.
“I’ve missed you at dinner,” he added, addressing this to the top of her head. “Both of you.”
“We’ve been taking meals in the schoolroom,” Cassie said. “Miss Norton says it’s more efficient. Less walking, more time for lessons.”
“Efficient,” Hudson repeated. The word tasted wrong in his mouth. “I see.”
Augusta looked up at last, meeting his gaze with a directness that made his breath catch.
