Chapter One
London, Fifteen Years Later
The journey from Saint Petersburg to London was meant to take five weeks.
Because of the weather, it had taken seven.
Harriet French supposed that was appropriate, given the circumstances. Seven, in her estimation, was a canary-yellow color that sounded of viola strings and smelled of sun and sea.
It had been seven years since her adoptive mother, warden, and proprietress, the Dowager Baroness Selwyn had gone missing. Seven weeks from her receipt of the letter in the tsar’s palace to the day they turned into the Thames port alley. Seven steps from the deck to the pier.
And she touched seven fingers with the curve of her thumbnail as she surveyed the awaiting crowd on the embankment, looking for a flash of silver hair and a well-tailored black suit. Later, she would guess it took her exactly seven minutes to find him.
“Miss French!” the baroness’s steadfast, lifelong friend and devoted barrister had called, booming and certain, his hand waving over the crowd. “Miss Harriet French! Over here, if you please!”
“Oh, Mr. Harcourt,” she breathed, turning with a sag of relief and waving back. “There you are. For a moment, I feared you’d forgotten me.”
“I’ve an ironclad memory, I assure you,” the silver-haired barrister said fondly, trotting up to meet her. “Are your trunks still aboard?”
She nodded, reaching up to brush the salt-touched strands of her brassy curls. “I thought some of the others would be with you,” she confessed. “At least Malcolm, as we are in London.”
The barrister turned and lifted two fingers to a porter he had evidently secured prior to their business, pointing to the ship with the implicit instructions to retrieve Hattie’s things.
“I’ve secured rooms for you tonight at an inn in Bloomsbury,” he informed her as he offered his elbow and nodded toward the path to the street.
“My thinking was that you should rest before you set off again straight away for Brighton, but after my arrival here, I realized I am going to need your help, anyhow.”
“My help doing what, sir?” she asked, following him toward a gleaming black hackney coach that awaited them beyond the throng. “I confess, your letter relayed your urgency effectively, but not so much anything else. I’m not entirely sure why I am here.”
He heaved a heavy sigh, shaking his head a little mournfully. “I did specify,” he reminded her, “that the passage of seven years since anyone has seen the dowager baroness means that the law now considers her deceased.”
“Yes, of course,” said Hattie, pausing to be assisted into the carriage. She waited until the doors closed to speak again, watching Mr. Harcourt settle in across from her. “That doesn’t mean that she is.”
“For my purposes, my dear, I’m afraid that it does,” he told her seriously.
“Which means that her estate has entered a state of bequeathment escrow until such a time as her last will and testament can be read, a stipulation that requires the physical presence of all her heirs. I did not realize until I started tracking you all down how elusive the group of you has become.”
“The seven of us,” she said, with a wry, little twist of her lips. “Isn’t that funny? Seven heirs. Seven years. Did you know King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn wore canary yellow on the day Catherine of Aragon died? Yellow is believed to have been a color of mourning in Spain, from whence she hailed.”
He blinked at her, clearly a little taken aback. “Did they, indeed?”
“Many people thought they were celebrating her demise,” Hattie said, settling back as the carriage began to move and gazing out the window. “They were not through their clothing, though I suppose they might have been otherwise.”
There was a beat of silence, a lingering shift from the port sounds to the streets as the wheels of the carriage turned onto the street proper.
Mr. Harcourt cleared his throat. “Eight,” he said, politely.
Hattie turned back to him, frowning. “Pardon?”
“There are eight of you,” he said to her. “Not seven.”
She shook her head, her brow wrinkling as she ran through the list of wards who had been raised alongside her at Starling’s Rest, her thumbnail tapping on those seven fingers again.
“Myself,” she said, remembering them in the order in which they’d come into the home.
“Malcolm and Libba. Ruby, Errol, Monica, and Rhys. Seven.”
“Ah, Libba,” said Mr. Harcourt, grimacing. “I should mention we are headed to Giltspur Street Compter before we move onto the inn, to retrieve Miss Elizabeth. Or Miss Liberty, I believe, as she is now called.”
“Giltspur Street!” Hattie balked. “She is in jail?!”
He nodded. “I would have gotten her out yesterday, when I found her, but I’m afraid I was under explicit instructions to contact you and only the executor of the baroness’s will first and foremost, which, of course, is you. My hands were tied, so to speak.”
“It sounds like Libba’s are too!” Hattie exclaimed. “What has she done?”
“She was caught with some smuggled goods,” he told her with a grimace.
“French textiles and spirits, I believe. Nothing half the households in Mayfair don’t also have in their pantries.
I will represent her and clear it with the magistrate before we start back to Brighton.
We can also retrieve her brother while we are here.
For the others, I will be relying on you to locate and contact them. ”
“The six others,” she said again, tapping that thumbnail. “Seven.”
“Eight,” the barrister corrected with a sigh. “You are forgetting Elias Selwyn, the new baron and rightful heir of all the land under Starling’s Rest.”
Hattie stared for a moment, her mind whirring.
Eight was very different.
Eight was dark blue. Somber. Stormy. Eight smelled of fire.
“Elias,” she repeated slowly, flashes of a taciturn, pudgy boy with rosy cheeks and a frowning demeanor in the corners of Starling’s Rest flickering into her mind. “Yes. I remember him. He was already baron. He’s been baron this whole time.”
“More or less,” the barrister agreed with a shrug. “But his inheritance was complicated and contingent while the dowager baroness still lived. All will be explained in Brighton, I assure you. Ah, here we are. Shall we retrieve Miss Lennox?”
“Smuggled goods,” Hattie tutted, waiting for the door to be wrenched open. “What is she about these days? I thought she was an actress.”
“You will have to ask her,” Mr. Harcourt said as they entered the cavernous foyer of the holding chamber. “I will have to ask her too, I suppose. Ah, there’s the clerk now. I’ll only be a moment.”
Hattie nodded, turning and looking for a place to wait.
The only option was a long, mean-looking wooden bench. It had no legs. Instead, it had been nailed directly into the brick wall, as though anyone who might come here and sit on it would also be just as likely to make off with it down the street.
She cleared her throat and frowned, giving the bench a little wipe with her kerchief before she settled onto it.
Oddly, she was certain she could still feel the ocean waves moving under her feet, even here, on perfectly solid land and in the embrace of a place meant for holding people still besides.
She closed her eyes and pressed her feet firmly to the uneven stone floor beneath her boots, reminding herself that she was ashore again, that she was home again.
England, she told herself. English. The King’s English? Or the Regent’s? Had it changed because of the Regency?
She would have to ask someone who might know.
When Mary and then Elizabeth Tudor had reigned, after all, it had been the Queen’s English.
Clerk was a funny sort of word, wasn’t it?
Why was it pronounced as though the vowel were an a rather than an e?
When English had shifted, and the ligaments had been replaced with single letters, most had retained their phonetic vowel.
This particular word, it seemed, was a matter of contention.
Hattie preferred a lack of contention in matters of phonics, and often thought English was perhaps the most unfortunate language to have been born into, with its many roots and borrowings and eras. Clerk, she thought again.
“I’m not leaving without Lem,” came Libba’s voice from the hall, shrill and animated and entirely familiar. “You’ll bail him out too or I’ll sleep here for another week.”
Hattie smiled, her eyes still closed.
She couldn’t make out exactly what Mr. Harcourt said in response, but she supposed that Libba won the argument, because a few moments later, in the darkness behind her eyelids, she felt the bench creak and smelled Libba’s favorite jasmine hair oil as it sprinkled into the air.
She didn’t speak. Instead, Liberty Lennox just reached out and took Hattie’s hand, linking her fingers through the other woman’s.
Hattie sighed and opened her eyes then, turning to look upon a face she had missed very much. “You changed your name,” she said by way of greeting. “The new one is a little ironic, given the venue of our reunion.”
Libba grinned, the constellation of beauty marks on her face dancing along her lip and cheek. “I knew you’d say something like that,” she said. “By way of greeting.”
Hattie gave half a smile and a shrug, admiring this version of Libba, who appeared to still be partially in costume from some performance she’d given before arrest. There was white talc in her dark, tight-coiled hair and her gown was more of a toga than respectable dress.
Her skin, dark as oiled beechwood, sparkled with a layer of glittering cosmetics that caught in the light.
“Who is Lem?” Hattie asked, tilting her head curiously. “Did you marry?”
“Marry Lem? Absolutely not,” Libba said with a laugh. “He’s my muscle.”
Hattie blinked, reaching forward instinctively and poking at Libba’s bicep, which made the other woman snort and slap at her hand.
“Stop being so queer.”
“I can’t,” said Hattie with a lazy smile. “Smuggling?”
Libba scoffed. “All the best things are French. You know that as well as anyone. Wine, silk, cheese, shoes, men. Where were you this time, by the by?”
“Russia,” said Hattie. “They have very nice shoes as well.”
“Russia,” Libba repeated with a wistful little sigh. “Living with a king again?”
“A tsar,” Hattie said. “And tsarina. Or empress, depending on who you ask. Her, you would have liked.”
“And him?” Libba pressed.
“Pious,” said Hattie with a shrug. “Or blessed, depending on whom you ask. I thought I was there to teach or to translate, but I think I was primarily something like a centerpiece for dinners.”
“Put you right on the tablecloth, did they?” Libba asked with a grin as Hattie immediately shook her head. “I know. I do that to Lem sometimes, though. We oil him up and surround him with fruit as the patrons file in. It does draw a particular crowd.”
“Because of his muscle?” Hattie asked, blinking.
“Because of his muscle,” Libba agreed. “Ah, here he is.”
Both women stood as Mr. Harcourt emerged with an extremely tall, extremely muscled bald man, dressed in a costume like some manner of sultan or pasha.
He was even darker than Libba, gleaming closer to ebonwood and wearing the same layer of sparkle as he trudged out.
“Lem, meet Hattie,” Libba said. “Hattie, Lem.”
“It is a pleasure,” Hattie said, drawing nearer, offering her hand to shake. “Is ‘Lem’ short for ‘Lemuel’?”
“Short for ‘Lem,’” he said, each word clipped at the end.
Mr. Harcourt sighed. “Why don’t we go to the inn presently?” he suggested. “I can get an extra room for Mister … Lem here. I’m sorry, sir, do you have a surname?”
The big man blinked down at the barrister. “Lem.”
“Right,” said Mr. Harcourt, giving his head a little shake. “We’ll go to the inn and gather our thoughts, unless we ought to go grab your brother on the way, Miss Lennox?”
Libba made a face. “No. Let me wash and change before I face Malcolm. And if either of you tells him about this jail business, I’ll make hell for you. Understand?”
Hattie nodded immediately, while Mr. Harcourt just looked weary, the circles under his eyes seeming darker and heavier than they had been back on the docks.
Lem did not react at all.
“Good,” said Libba, brightening. “Off we go. Good God, Harriet. What on earth are you doing back in England, anyway?”
“Well,” said Hattie. “It’s been seven years, you see. And there are seven of us.”
“Naturally,” said Libba in an amused, fond way that always meant she didn’t understand at all.
“Eight,” corrected Mr. Harcourt as they walked toward the carriage. “There are eight of you.”
Harriet French frowned.
Dark blue, she thought, counting her fingers. Stormy, dark blue and the smell of smoke.
Eight.
She had forgotten Elias Selwyn.