Chapter Four
It seemed to Hattie that she had lost some time.
She was aware, of course, that Mr. Harcourt had continued speaking after the business about her being compelled to wed Elias Selwyn, but it seemed to her it had lasted only a moment.
She had watched Elias, across the room, trying to catch his eye, to communicate something of the shock they must both have been feeling and had utterly failed to capture his attention in any way. It made her wonder if she was truly standing in the room at all.
She did not come back to herself until the room had begun to empty of the others, making her utterly certain that she was standing in it, because she was about to be the only one left doing so.
“Ah, look what I found,” Malcolm exclaimed, withdrawing a little wooden sword from behind a cushion. He spun and pointed it at Ruby. “Saxon or Dane?!”
“Both, you nit,” she tutted, flicking the sword away with two upturned fingers. “Do you think our rooms are still in living condition?”
“They are,” said Errol quietly from the dark corner where Elias had been sitting, his eyes gentle and fixed on Ruby. “They’ve been ready for any of you to come home at any time.”
Ruby softened, turning to give him a tilting, half-smile, no flash of teeth or bat of her lashes. “That’s good, then,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
He nodded, putting his hands in his pockets and giving her the same little smile back.
“Ugh,” said Malcolm in disgust. “I’ll take my sword elsewhere.”
“That’s been half the trouble with you all your life,” Libba quipped, snatching it from him and ducking under his arm before he could take it back as she turned on her heel out of the room. “You can’t be trusted with it!” she called over her shoulder, giggling as she took off down the hall.
Hattie blinked again.
Now she was uncertain she’d ever left Starling’s Rest at all.
She looked down at her hands, stretching her fingers wide, and peeked down at the toes of her boots emerging from her yellow skirt.
She was an adult now.
Yes, this was all real.
The other parts had been too. She had seen the Continent.
She had translated treaty negotiations and taught children fairy tales in a dozen languages.
She had seen royal courts and remote villages and everything in between.
She had walked sandstone paths in blazing sunlight and padded over snow deeper than two men standing foot to shoulder, with glittering palaces on one side and mud huts on the other.
She had sailed and walked and ridden between idyllic meadows, towering mountains, dunes of sand, and even war-torn urban throngs.
And somehow, none of that had changed a single thing about Starling’s Rest.
She needed to speak to Elias.
“Are you all right, Hattie?” Errol asked, still standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “Do you need anything?”
She swallowed, dropping her hands at her sides, and shook her head. “No. No, I am well,” she told him. “Are you?”
He nodded, still looking unconvinced, but didn’t stop her as she walked past him out into the halls, turning left instead of right, toward the boys’ rooms.
She passed by Rhys’s bedroom, the door flung open as he was already making a mess of the linens.
“I know I left it here!” he cried to no one in particular. “Where the devil is it?”
She passed Malcolm’s room, which was shut.
Elias’s room was at the end of the hall.
She hadn’t stood in front of this door in a very, very long time. If someone had asked her, some weeks ago, if she’d ever stood in front of it at all, she might have said no.
That was how long it had been.
She could almost hear the arguing behind it, echoing through the past. She could almost feel the sting of salt dried on her eyelashes and the chill of wet shoes that had picked up grit and rocks on the walk back from the pier.
“I don’t want to study here! I want you to send me to Eton! Or Harrow! Or to bloody Cheapside, for all I care! Not here anymore!”
“Elias Selwyn, you are an ungrateful, spoiled, little fool,” Willa had chided back. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I can’t bear it anymore. I hate it.”
“You hate what?” she’d demanded. “All the best tutors? The most brilliant minds of your age learning alongside you? The challenge?”
“Whatever you need to believe!” he had shouted back. “Just go away. And let me go away too!”
Hattie blinked, the world hazy and blurred in front of her.
She shifted, half-expecting to still find sand in her shoes.
“Just come along with us after dinner,” Malcolm said, emerging from Elias’s door so suddenly that she startled, hopping back a step. “It’ll do you some good to get out of this house.”
“I’ll consider it,” Elias replied, sounding neither committed nor dismissive as Mal grinned and shook his head, turning back toward the hall.
“Oh,” he said, spotting Hattie and hesitating on closing the door behind him. “Come to see your fiancé?”
“I need to see Elias,” she replied, instead of answering.
Mal raised his dark eyebrows, stepping to the side and gesturing for her to go in.
So she did. And she heard him close the door behind her.
Elias was seated on the edge of the bed. He’d taken off his jacket and cravat and was slumped forward, staring at the carpet between his shoes, his dark hair flashing almost white where the sunlight hit it from the window.
He looked very different, Harriet thought. It wasn’t only that he was grown now, or slender, or handsome. It was something else.
She couldn’t quite name it.
She folded her hands in front of her and waited until he looked up at her, which he did with a sigh. “Yes?” he said, already impatient.
“I do not want to marry you,” she said, quickly and without feeling.
He stared at her for a moment, his bright-blue eyes blinking once, and then he gave a hoarse chuckle, a little bark of laughter, that shook his body.
“Well, thank you for that information, Harriet. I see you’ve still never learned how to properly communicate, despite all the languages you’ve mastered. ”
She frowned. “You do not want to marry me, either,” she added, hoping that was what she had missed the first time.
It made him stare at her, incredulous. “I don’t?” he said, sarcasm dripping from every consonant.
“Well, I know I am not … I am not of the usual pedigree for the likes of a baron,” she reasoned. “And even if I were, I do not think you would have chosen me.”
He gave a humorless chuckle, tossing something glinting and small between his palms. “Do you know anything about this?”
She took a step forward to accept something he was holding out toward her, clenched in his fist. Into her palm fell a heavy, gold ring, clearly sized for a man. She drew it close to her face, inspecting the antique pallor of its finish and tilting it to the side.
“‘Mea Culpa,’” she read aloud, from the engraving inside the ring.
“Yes,” he agreed, tightening his jaw and straining his neck from side to side. “Somehow, I suspect it is.”
“What is this?” she asked, looking at him over the top of the ring. “Something Willa put in your envelope?”
He nodded, sighing and running a hand over his hair. “It was probably my uncle’s. That would make the most sense, wouldn’t it?”
She shook her head. “No. The baron did wear a ring, but it was silver. I don’t know whose this was, but it wasn’t his. He never wore gold. He used to jest that he was allergic to it and that was why the baroness handled the coin.”
He grimaced, his face pulling taut in the motion. “Is that so?” he managed, sounding a bit clogged as he pushed himself to his feet. “Maybe there is an explanation, then, if I read the damned letter it came wrapped in. I haven’t yet. Did you read yours?”
“My letter?” she repeated, realizing she had left it somewhere. Back in the parlor? “No. Not yet.”
He nodded, reaching out to accept the ring back from her. “I suppose it will just be more of the same, anyway. ‘Marry or else.’ Did you know she intended this?”
“Of course not,” Hattie answered, finally returning enough to herself to feel a spark of offense. “I hadn’t an inkling. But that is what I came to talk about.”
He twisted his lips, looking almost amused. “To express your disinterest?”
“To come to an accord,” she said, taking a step toward him, as though proximity might make her better understood. “Neither of us wish for this match and we both know it, but that only provides us with the basis to enter into it with a set of clear understandings. Isn’t that right?”
“‘Understandings’?” he repeated, his brows ticking up a notch as she drew closer to him, close enough that he had to tilt his head down to continue to meet her eye. “Such as?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, wrinkling her brow. “But it seems there ought to be some, doesn’t it? I have never been married before. I have observed many marriages; all of them appear very different. Why, there is a tribe in Siberia—”
“Please do not,” he said, holding his hand up between them, his palm almost to the tip of her nose. “God, you have not changed a single whit.”
She huffed, twisting her hands together in her skirt. “I do not know if you have!” she shot back, her voice gone shrill. “I barely remember you at all!”
That gave him pause—or seemed to, anyway.
His hand moved slowly away, almost like a coquette’s fan, revealing the faces hiding on either side of it. He looked skeptical, once she could see him again, those blue eyes narrowed. “That isn’t true,” he said.
“It is,” she replied, desperation making her hoarse. “Years are like miles, Elias. And you are nothing of the boy I do remember, what little of him does remain. You are a stranger to me. And I …”
“You are not a stranger to me, Harriet French,” he hissed back, drawing even closer somehow, until their toes collided, until the heat of his words brushed her cheeks as they were spoken in gusts of breath. “You are exactly the same.”
She breathed out, exasperated as she tilted her face up to try to search for a reflection that made sense in those eyes of his. “I do not know what that means.”
“Barren fields,” he said, leaning down just an inch, just a breath closer as he lowered his voice. “Don’t you recall?”
“‘Barren fields,’” she repeated, baffled. But then there was something odd. A sting in her nose. A bleariness in her eyes. Salt in her throat. “No, I … I …”
“It’ll come to you,” he decided, taking a sudden step back and sending all that cool, static air in the room to swirl around her in place of where his body had been. “Think on it. You’re a smart woman.”
“Smarter than you,” she said, so softly, she might not have said it at all.
Oddly, that seemed to please him, something like triumph flashing in his eyes as he paced backward from where she stood in the center of his room. “There she is,” he said, just as softly, shaking his head, like he enjoyed the clash, despite himself. “Do come tell me, when you recall.”
“Elias,” she said, straightening her shoulders, blinking away the confusing onslaught of sensations and memories that were prodding and boxing her from every angle. “Are we getting married?”
He laughed then. He laughed sincerely, scratching at the back of his neck and breaking into a grin wide enough that she could see all of those even, white teeth.
“Oh, yes,” he said, once the first burst of amusement had passed, though he was still smiling, still chuckling, his shoulders still shaking. “Yes, we are. Congratulations to us, my bride-to-be.”
“Mea culpa,” she said, and turned on her heel to flee.