Olivia, who had been standing slightly behind Augusta with her eyes fixed on the middle distance and her hands folded in the posture of a woman employed to be invisible, said without inflection, “Honesty is rather a virtue. In most circles.”
Lady Barbara looked at Olivia as though she had just noticed the gatepost had spoken.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a precision that made the words into something else entirely. “Are servants offering opinions now?”
“Evidently,” Olivia said, moving to stand in front of Cassie as though she could protect the girl from more attention.
Lady Barbara drew herself up with the particular dignity of a woman who had decided that departure was more devastating than engagement.
“Good day,” she said, and walked away at a pace that communicated with considerable eloquence that she had not been affected in the slightest.
Cassie watched her go. Then she looked up at Augusta with an expression that was equal parts satisfaction and the beginning of guilt.
“Was that very bad?”
“Moderately,” Augusta said.
“Hudson is going to hear about it.”
“Almost certainly.”
Cassie considered this. “It was still worth it,” she decided, and bent back down to Pippin, who had finished his investigation and was now prepared to continue walking.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hudson did not, as a rule, permit himself the luxury of contentment before noon. The habit was a relic of his father’s regime, and he had clung to it.
But the past fortnight had tested this principle rather severely.
Breakfast at Oakhart House had undergone a transformation that defied both his expectations and his better judgment. The mahogany table, once the stage for solitary meals taken with the mechanical efficiency of a man who regarded eating as a necessary interruption in the day’s business, now hosted a scene that belonged in one of those sentimental prints Cassie collected, all warmth and light.
“I maintain,” Cassie announced, brandishing a spoon with the authority of a scientist presenting incontrovertible evidence, “that marmalade is architecturally superior. The peel provides tensile strength. Blackcurrant is structurally unsound. It collapses under pressure.”
She demonstrated her thesis by applying her spoon to a dollop of preserve with sufficient force to send a spray of purple across the tablecloth, narrowly missing his sleeve.
“An eloquent defense,” Hudson said, retrieving his coffee before it could become collateral damage in the jam campaign. “Though I note you’ve demolished the evidence rather thoroughly.”
“Scientific rigor requires sacrifice,” Cassie declared, with the solemn certainty of an eleven-year-old who had recently discovered philosophy and was determined to deploy it at every opportunity.
Augusta looked up, and the smile that crossed her face did something to Hudson’s heart that he was still learning to tolerate without visible discomfort.
“The vicar would have been horrified,” she said. “Jam physics at breakfast.”
Hudson had barely opened his mouth to respond when the butler appeared in the doorway.
The man carried the morning post on a silver tray, a stack of correspondence that Hudson would normally have regarded with the enthusiasm of a dentist approaching an abscess.
Today, however, the sight of it elicited nothing more severe than mild resignation. The world beyond Oakhart House’s gates had receded to a distant murmur, its demands attenuated by thepresence of the women seated at his breakfast table, none of whom appeared to be in any hurry to return to it.
“Your Grace,” the butler said.
Something in his tone made Hudson set down his coffee with rather more care than the situation warranted.
The scandal sheet lay atop the stack.The London Whisperer, its masthead rendered in the shade of bilious yellow that its publisher apparently considered the height of journalistic distinction.
Hudson had never subscribed to the thing. It arrived regardless, like a recurrent rash or a particularly persistent door-to-door salesman, deposited on his tray by a butler who had long since given up attempting to intercept it.
He picked it up out of habit, intending to discard it, but the headline stopped his hand mid-motion.
