The world stopped. The hills, the sky, the shifting horses—all of it receded to a distant hum, secondary to the man kneeling in the grass with his hair in his eyes and his heart in his hands and an expression of such naked, unguarded hope that Augusta felt her heart flutter like a bird’s wings.
“Yes.” The word escaped before her brain had fully processed the question, as though her heart had elected to bypass the usual bureaucratic channels and issue its response directly. “Yes, I…” She stopped, swallowed, tried again. “I love you. I have loved you with an inconvenient thoroughness that has made the past days considerably more miserable than they needed to be, and yes, I will marry you. But Hudson, Cassie?—”
“My ownership of the Nightingale,” Hudson cut in, rising to his feet with the fluid grace of a man who had just received the answer he wanted and was not about to let practical concerns ruin the moment. “has made me privy to a lot of information. Half the ton gambles there. I know which lords have mistresses, which ladies have debts, which families are one bad harvest from selling heirlooms. Anyone who attempts to harm you or Cassie or Olivia will find their private affairs rendered considerably less private with a speed that would make Fleet Street blush.” He flashed her a quick smile. “I am exceptionally well-equipped for blackmail, Augusta. It’s one of my more overlooked talents.”
She laughed. The sound surprised her, and it broke something loose in her chest, something that had been clenched tight since the moment she sealed those letters.
“Yes,” she said again, and this time the word carried its full weight, deliberate and certain. “Yes.”
Hudson kissed her. His hands cradled her face gently while his mouth found hers with the hunger of someone who had been starving and had just been offered a feast.
Augusta curled her fingers into his hair and allowed herself, for the first time in days, to believe that happiness might not be a luxury she had voluntarily surrendered but something she was permitted to keep.
He lifted her into his arms with a laugh, carrying her back to the carriage without paying any mind to her protests. Once there, he opened the door to look at Olivia with the bright grin of a man in love.
“We are returning to London,” he announced.
The journey back to Oakhart House was shorter, spurred on, Augusta thought, by the utter joy that radiated from all three of them.
As soon as they arrived back at the house, Pippin launched himself at Augusta’s skirts with an enthusiasm that nearly toppled her, his entire body quivering with joy.
And then, after what felt like forever, Cassie appeared. She came down the staircase with the deliberate slowness of a child who had been grievously wounded and was determined that everyone present should appreciate the full magnitude of the injury. Her arms were crossed, her lower lip pushed out.
“You left,” she said slowly. “You wrote a letter. Letters are for people who are dead, or sailors, or both. You are not dead, and you are not a sailor, and I am so cross with you, Miss Norton, and I…”
Her composure cracked. Her lower lip trembled, and she launched herself across the hall and into Augusta’s arms with a force that would have knocked over a less prepared adult.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she mumbled into Augusta’s shoulder, her voice thick with unshed tears. “I thought you decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“You,” Augusta said, her own voice unsteady, “are worth every trouble I have ever encountered and several I haven’t invented yet. And I am never leaving you again. That is a promise, Cassie Rivers, and I do not make promises I don’t intend to keep.”
She met Hudson’s eyes over Cassie’s head. He was leaning against the doorframe, with his arms crossed and his expression doing that complicated thing where it attempted to maintain ducal composure while simultaneously communicating an emotion so warm and so entirely unguarded that it made her chest ache.
“Now, you will immediately come here and…”
It was Mrs. Beale’s voice that interrupted the tender moment as she appeared in the doorway, one hand clamped around the upper arm of a young man whom Augusta recognized as the footman who usually served breakfast.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Beale said, her tone suggesting that the footman’s employment was a personal affront she had tolerated for rather longer than Christian charity dictated. “I believe we have located the source of your… difficulty.”
Hudson looked from one to the other.
“Explain,” he ordered the footman.
The young man looked as though he would prefer to be anywhere else, including several locations that had not yet been discovered by European cartographers.
“It was a lady, Your Grace.” The words emerged in a rush, tumbling over each other. “She approached me in the market. Said she was a friend of the family. Wanted to know about the new arrivals, Miss Norton and Miss Olivia. Said it was curiosity, nothing more. She offered…” He swallowed. “Money. Quite a lot of it. More than I make in a month.”
Hudson’s expression did not change.
“And you told her what, exactly?” he asked coldly.
“Everything.” The footman’s voice had shrunk to something barely above a whisper. “Their names. That they were sisters. That Miss Norton was the governess and that Miss Olivia came from Scotland. That they were… that they were the daughters of…” He could not bring himself to say it. His throat worked visibly, as though the words themselves were physically obstructing his airway.
“The man whose crimes were detailed in theLondon Whisperer,” Hudson supplied helpfully. The helpfulness was the most terrifying thing about the entire exchange.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And the lady’s name?”
