The girl’s smile faltered, and she looked at her sister. The younger one, quicker on the uptake or simply more attuned to maternal signals, had already turned away, examining a nearby flower bed with the intense focus of someone who had developed a sudden passionate interest in horticulture. The elder girl followed.
Cassie stopped talking. She did not cry. She did not comment. She simply stood on the path with Pippin’s leash slack in her hand and watched the Finchley girls retreat with an expression that contained more understanding than any child of eleven should have been required to assemble.
Hudson saw it too. Augusta felt him go still beside her.
He crouched beside his sister. “Cass,” he said quietly. “Look at me.”
Cassie looked at him.
“People will forget,” he assured her. Each word was spoken with the careful weight of a man who knew he was making a promise he might not be able to keep. “Not immediately. Not all of them. But enough. This will pass. I give you my word.”
Cassie nodded. A single, jerky movement that contained more trust than any child should have been required to muster.
“Can we still have ices?” she asked, her voice small but steady.
“We can have all the ices in London,” Hudson said. “Starting with Gunther’s and working our way through every confectioner in Mayfair until you’re entirely sick of the things and swear never to touch one again.”
That earned him the ghost of a smile. Not much, but enough.
Cassie straightened her shoulders. “Gunther’s,” she said. “And then Hatchard’s, because I’ve been wanting to buy the book about mining engineers, and if we’re being scandalous, we might as well be thorough about it.”
Augusta watched them: Hudson rising to his full height, his hand still resting on his sister’s shoulder, Cassie already rebuilding her fortification of chatter brick by determined brick. She felt something settle in her chest with the weight and finality of a door closing.
She had to leave. Or else she would destroy the future of the one child who had trusted her completely.
She looked at Hudson, at the straight line of his back, the set of his shoulders, the way his hand still rested on Cassie’s shoulder with a protectiveness that made her chest ache, and knew, with a clarity that was almost physical, that she could not allow that to happen.
No matter what it cost her.
Augusta packed that very night while the house slept. Then she made her way to Olivia’s bedchamber.
Olivia was awake. She sat propped against her pillows with a book open on her knees. She looked up as Augusta entered, and whatever she saw on her sister’s face made her set the book aside without marking the page.
“You’ve decided,” she noted.
Augusta sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath her weight. “I have to go,” she said. “We both do. Back to Scotland, perhaps? You saw what happened today. Every mother in Hyde Park steered her daughter away from Cassie as though she carried the plague. It won’t get better. It will only get worse.”
Olivia was silent for a long moment. Her fingers found Augusta’s in the space between them, twisting together.
“I will support you, no matter what. But you must tell me that you’re certain about this,” she urged.
Augusta squeezed her hand. “I am. This is about what Cassie needs. And what she needs is for the connection to be severed, completely and publicly, before it destroys her chances entirely.”
“And what about what you need?” Olivia asked quietly.
The question landed between them with the weight of something that had been hovering unspoken since the moment Augusta had pulled her into that embrace in the morning room.
What did Augusta need?
The answer rose in her throat with a clarity that was almost physical.
Hudson.
His hand in hers under the dinner table. His mouth on her neck in the dark. The way he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t watching, as though she were something precious and slightly dangerous.
She did not say that. She could not afford to.
“I need Cassie to have the future she deserves,” she said instead. “I need to know that I haven’t… that my presence in her life hasn’t cost her everything before she’s even had a chance to begin. That’s enough, Livvy. It has to be.”
