Chapter Three
Elias Selwyn briefly considered turning the coach around and going directly back to Hounslow. He had a nice life there, he reasoned. He was respected. Well-liked. Happy.
He certainly never felt the doom and weight that was currently sitting on every single one of his ribs like dangling iron weights back in Hounslow.
Starling’s Rest rose up on its pert, little hill beyond the coastal townhouses of Brighton like a crow’s eye, glinting and smug and still so very, very tall.
Yes, he thought as they turned into the drive.
He should just go back to Hounslow. He’d made a home there, hadn’t he? He just wanted to go home.
The only reason he couldn’t was because as far as the law was concerned, this was home now. If Willa Selwyn was truly dead and gone, then there was nothing left between Elias and the full burden of his barony.
This was home now.
Or something like it.
He sighed, resisting the urge to rub the anxieties that prickled over his face, and straightened his shoulders as the driver’s boots hit the pebbled drive.
He was not a child anymore. And neither were any of the people inside.
It would be different now.
They were all going to be different now.
Still, the instant his body had moved from the cushioned embrace of the carriage to the windy landing of the house, Elias was certain he was no longer the man who had ridden here from Hounslow.
He had been that man, in the carriage. And as soon as he had stepped out, he’d been half as tall, still swaddled in baby fat, trembling in a coat that was a little bit too tight about the arms because his mother had refused to spend what had been left of their pin money every time he’d grown, either taller or wider.
He shivered, despite the glorious, shimmering sunlight, his very person flickering between the man and the boy. The tall and the short.
He ran both hands over his dark-brown hair and gave himself a shake.
“They’re waiting,” he said out loud, though the driver was gone to unbridle the horses and he was alone here, boots digging into the tiny, pebbled drive. “Aren’t they?”
If Willa’s ghost was there to hear him, she did not answer.
That was very like her.
The doors opened and a figure emerged, casting a long, slanting shadow opposite the sun. It was, mercifully, not one of Willa’s little prodigies, but the staid and familiar Julian Harcourt, Esquire. The barrister. The friendly man who had always had a warm hand for Elias’s shoulder.
He exhaled, lifting his chin and giving his best smile of greeting. “Mr. Harcourt!”
“Lord Selwyn,” the older man called back, breaking into a smile. “I have not seen you in some time! You are looking very well. Very well, indeed. And I must congratulate you on your recent promotion. A baron and a captain both. You do your house proud.”
“Not that house,” Elias joked, nodding toward Starling’s Rest. “But maybe another one, somewhere.”
Mr. Harcourt gave him a wry, little twist of the lips and turned, gesturing at the door. “You are the last to arrive. Won’t you come in?”
“Oh,” said Elias, trying not to frown as he followed the other man to the doors. “All of them are here? Already?”
“Indeed. I’ve only just arrived myself, along with the Lennoxes and Miss French. The others were here waiting.”
Elias blanched, flashes of children bouncing in his mind. Of Malcolm, dark-skinned and charming, leading games of make believe on the lawn while his sister had become heroes and villains, damsels and brigands, breath after breath.
And Hattie.
He winced, hearing a splash of water and a crack of thunder in a far-tucked corner of his memory.
He flexed his hands. The hands that had pushed her into the ocean, so bloody annoyed by her endless prattling and following and chattering and questions. The attempts to mimic his accent, the way she’d repeat everything he’d said.
It was no wonder he’d shoved her.
They had still been children back then.
Did she still hold a grudge over it? Did she remember it at all?
Somehow, he imagined she did.
But if it haunted her … If that day on the pier—and off it, for that matter—revisited Hattie French, Elias knew for certain that it looked very different to the memory as it played for him.
Very different, indeed.
He sucked in a breath and turned the corner into the parlor, a room so silent, he would not have expected to find anyone in it at all.
When he walked in and found all their eyes on him, all seven pairs, he understood.
He had caused the silence.
Again.
He’d spent almost three years in this house. Amongst them. And then, finally, he’d been allowed to leave. He’d left and had only come back twice: once for Christmas that first year, and once more to collect his papers before he’d made the change from Eton to Oxford.
He’d made that second journey when he’d known the household had been on holiday elsewhere. He’d avoided them then. He’d avoided them since he had been still growing into his body and learning who he was, away from all of this.
“Good God,” said Ruby Little, still dark haired and bright eyed, fluttering up from her lounge on the chaise with a hand to her chest. “Elias Selwyn, look at you! My goodness, who knew what was hiding under all that youthful pudge. Come sit by me.”
“Ruby,” Errol chided, softly and frowning.
She stood, her red gown crinkling around her, still the type of beautiful that gloated over the fact in every move she made. “I can’t believe it,” she said again, her shining, rouged lips parting in a grin. “You really are gorgeous. Welcome home.”
“Well, what about the rest of us?” the little Welsh shit who used to steal Elias’s desserts and his socks said from the window, grinning widely.
Rhys Caradoc, Elias reminded himself. Greasy Rhys.
He’d been the last addition to the wards, perhaps even the final straw on Elias’s tolerance for staying here. “Aren’t we all gorgeous too?”
Ruby turned and looked at him, flicking her eyes from his scuffed shoes to his open collar. “No,” she said, slumping back into the chaise in a flutter of skirts.
Elias frowned.
Willa hadn’t taken in any other wards after he’d left this place. Had that been related to his leaving? Surely not.
Mr. Harcourt cleared his throat, still standing formal and stiff near the entry. “I suppose I ought to ask,” he said politely, “if you all wish to settle and rest before we begin the reading or if you wish to have it done with immediately.”
“Done with,” several voices chanted right away, with only one deviating.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind a nap,” said Harriet French, bronze curls glowing in the afternoon sun from where she stood near Rhys Caradoc at the window. She blinked, her eyes glinting like amber in the light. “I suppose I’m the outlier.”
“Usually,” said Ruby, making Rhys snicker and soft, little Monica Thresher frown.
“Oh, Ruby.” Monica tutted under her breath.
Hattie nodded, her eyes moving slowly to settle over Elias as her narrow shoulders straightened. “Then I suppose I will stay,” she said, as though speaking directly to him. “I shouldn’t like to be the cause of everyone’s irritation.”
He inclined his head toward her, using the opportunity to admire the ways she’d changed in the years since he’d seen her last.
And the ways she hadn’t.
Judging from that last little comment, she remembered him as well as he remembered her.
It seemed, for that brief moment, that neither of them had changed much at all.
She was still brassy inside and out, a perfect little pedant with impeccable posture and strange affectations, and he still felt like an idiot in her presence.
He wasn’t two inches shorter than her anymore, of course. Nor was he quite as soft as he had once been. The miracles of transitional adulthood alone couldn’t be the only things that had changed, though, could they?
She had, perhaps, gained some control over the incessant questions and chatter, though Elias supposed that remained to be seen.
She had finally mastered that posh, perfect accent she’d wanted so badly. Every syllable was refined.
She was taller now. Shapelier.
Though of course that shape of hers had already started to blossom that day at the pier.
He could see her now, sputtering and aghast and confused, lurching out of the water with her muslin dress translucent and clinging to her.
He could feel the shock of it. The heat and confusion and instant regret.
He cleared his throat, shifting and looking for somewhere to sit.
Heat or confusion or instant regret would not suit him right now, at a damned funerary rite. He turned his back to Hattie and hastened toward the chair in the rear corner of the room, shadowed and cool, apart from the wards.
Elias had never been one of them, anyhow.
Mr. Harcourt was already thumbing through his folio, pulling a pair of well-worn silver spectacles from his pocket and perching them midway down his nose.
“I’ve a letter for each of you,” he began, “though I would ask that you wait until I’ve read the preliminary statements to open and read them.”
“You can keep mine,” Rhys said immediately, grimacing at the envelopes and crossing himself. “I can’t read.”
“Shut up, Rhys,” Malcolm suggested.
The Irish boy, Errol, settled into the chair next to Elias, shaking his head with what seemed a fond exasperation at the exchange between the other two. He glanced over at Elias and gave him a little nod of greeting, friendly and brief.
Elias nodded back, grateful that of all of them, this was the one who had taken that chair.
Errol had always been easy. Quiet. Even as a lad, when all the other children had been playing knights and bandits on the lawn, Errol would be off to the side with his vegetables or his birds or his flowers or the horses.
The only person he ever seemed to like as well as his natural things had been Ruby, who could sometimes coax him into play or otherwise join him in his naturalist idyll apart from the others.
This had always puzzled Elias, who found Ruby overwhelming and exhausting, even when she didn’t speak.