Chapter Five
Elias hadn’t expected another knock on the door. Not tonight, anyway. Perhaps not ever again.
He had flopped onto his back, staring up at the dusty canopy of his childhood bed, trying to blink away the memory of Harriet French standing so close to him, flexing away the feel of the tip of her little nose against the palm of his hand, forcing himself to stay still.
He had come to live in this house on the same day she had. His bags had been from Rottingdean and hers from the foundling home down by the wharf, but their destination had been the same. And for the briefest, oddest moment, he had thought they had been the same.
She had been annoying from the start, of course, the way intelligent children often are.
She had followed him, attempting to mimic his posture, the way he held silverware, the gait of his walk.
She would repeat the oddest things back to him as soon as he’d said them, trying to capture his accent in her own throat.
And she hadn’t been discouraged by his rudeness.
“I am Harriet,” she had said to him that first night, after she’d awoken from her fainting spell. “But my people call me ‘Hattie.’”
“Then I shall call you ‘Harriet,’” he had responded without thinking, and it had only made her giggle.
He had been so embarrassed by that that he’d never been able to bring himself to call her ‘Hattie’ at all, afterward. Even when absolutely everyone else did.
Her strangeness had been oddly endearing for a time. He could admit that to himself. It had been grating but still somehow musical, because for the first time in his life, he hadn’t been the only child in a room.
But then Willa had decided to expand her collection of children. In had come Malcolm with his numbers and Libba with her far-superior skills of mimickery, so startlingly accurate that it had stopped Harriet from attempting such things at all.
Then had come the boy from the stables who could teach a goat the difference between an apple and a pear.
And the girl from the laundress’s hut who could turn an old kitchen rag into a ballgown in miniature, who had been so, so shy but still bright and quick to smile, which had made her shyness better than Elias’s.
And had made him aware of that.
They’d found Ruby peddling perfumes at the behest of the orphanage outside the grand pavilion and collecting extra coins if she could guess the ingredients of any scent a wearer already had on. Of course, she too had been immediately adopted.
By then, Elias already had wanted to vanish. To disappear. To find somewhere else to be, because it was unbearable being so damned ordinary around all these bright, young stars.
He wanted to say Rhys had been the final straw, but he hadn’t been.
Barren fields had been the final straw. That day on the pier, as he’d paced and stewed and tried to reason that he was worthwhile too.
That he was better than all of them, in the end, and Hattie trailing behind him, refusing to shut up.
Chattering, chattering, chattering, and then hitting the sorest nerve.
Splash.
He groaned and covered his face.
Perhaps he could just stay here for the next year, have a vicar come and wed Harriet to him without even mussing the covers, and never face the outside world again.
Naturally, such a thought was immediately interrupted by a rap at the door.
He ignored it.
And it sounded again.
He grunted, pushing himself to his feet and padding over to the door, expecting perhaps Mr. Harcourt, come to talk logistics, or Malcolm here to pitch coming out to the pub after dinner again, neither of which interested him in this moment.
But it was Errol Cagney. It was the boy from the stables, all grown up, hands in his pockets, looking somehow both sheepish and friendly.
“Errol?” Elias managed, blinking twice to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
The other man gave half a smile, as though he knew his own appearance was absurd. “Mal said to come get you,” he explained in that soft brogue of his. “We have to sneak out now before Mr. Harcourt starts the preparations for that dinner of his. None of us wanted to go.”
“‘Sneak out’?” Elias repeated dumbly. “And go where?”
Errol stared at him for a moment, then gave an incredulous little laugh, running a hand over his wispy, blond hair.
“Ah, right,” he said. “You were gone when we started doing this, weren’t you?
Off to Eton. We’re going to steal out through the root cellar and go for drinks and vittles at the Coin and Cauldron. You’re coming.”
“I am?” asked Elias.
He was.
If it had been Mal or Rhys who’d come to get him, he might have been able to say no and stick to it, but how did one sternly reject the likes of Errol Cagney? By Elias’s estimation, it couldn’t be done.
And so he found himself shod and jacketed again, following the other man into the root cellar and up its ladder through the open hatches and into the early evening air.
“We’re last,” Errol said, kicking the hatch doors shut behind him.
“And late. I stayed behind to help Da with the fodder and lost track of time. They’ve all had almost two hours now in their cups, so I imagine they’ll all be intolerable.
Anyhow, I always go last to make sure our tracks are covered.
We used to let Rhys go last because he was the thief, but … ”
“But a pickpocket is not a tactician?” Elias guessed, smirking at Errol’s chuckle and nod as he followed him down a narrow dirt path that led down the hill toward the beach.
“Spot on,” Errol said. “Turns out, Rhys’s key aim after a crime is to get away, not to cover his tracks. I suppose that makes sense.”
“Lucky for him, too,” Elias noted. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be amongst us. I don’t believe I’ve heard of the Coin and Cauldron. A public house?”
“And inn,” Errol confirmed, nodding. “It was new back then, and because the owners didn’t know who we were yet, we were able to get away with appearing as a group for a while.
By the time the barkeep and so on had settled into Brighton proper, they were too fond of us to kick us out.
I think the baroness knew, but she never bothered to drag us home or otherwise destroy the illusion that we had a safe haven. ”
“What about your father?” Elias asked curiously, picturing the tall, seemingly stern groom who had saddled his horses as a lad. “He doesn’t seem the indulgent type.”
“Doesn’t he?” Errol replied with another little laugh. “You might be surprised. Few would have described the baroness as ‘indulgent,’ either, you know.”
Elias tilted his head to the side, considering this. Willa rose in his mind, her sharp grin and oiled curls and quick laugh, and he blinked. “My mother did,” he said without thinking. “She thought adopting half a dozen orphans was the very definition of indulgent.”
Errol let out a gust of laughter. “If your vices are tolerating and caring for precocious children, I suppose. Not exactly a leisure activity.”
“I suppose not,” he agreed after a moment. “Indulgent is not the word I’d use, certainly. She wasn’t lax so much as she was … hm.”
“Strategic?” Errol suggested, pointing to a crossroads where they needed to make a left turn. “Unknowable?”
“Unknowable,” Elias repeated. “Yes. I like that.”
Errol glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “Do you?”
Elias smirked again, despite himself. “No.”
“At least Hattie is easy to know,” Errol observed as they walked up toward the door of the pub. “If nothing else, she is direct and open, hm?”
Elias did not have the chance to respond to that, but his amusement quickly melted away as the words left Errol’s mouth, even in that charming musicality of his Irish accent.
He feared he was halfway to glowering the instant they walked over the threshold, even as a large cheer of welcome arose from the table in the corner, where the other wards were awaiting them, clustered like hours on a clock around a pitcher of ale.
There were a few others with them, Elias noted, hesitating to fall in step behind Errol rather than next to him.
They seemed to be men from the East India offices on the wharf, clustered around Malcolm Lennox like so many barnacles. He only recognized one of them, Malcolm’s lifelong best mate Jasper Townsend, whose bright-red mane was unmistakable, even in adulthood.
Elias sighed, softly to himself.
Why had he come here?
“Oh, Elias, you decided to join us!” Ruby Little exclaimed, coming up from her chair with a splash of ale from her glass, her dark hair gleaming in the candlelight. “Come pour yourself a tipple! You can sit next to me!”
He wondered if it would be bad form to turn around and run away.
“That pitcher’s almost empty,” Malcolm observed from his clutch of lads. “Shall I go buy us a new one?”
“Let me!” Rhys Caradoc exclaimed, popping up from his seat and rushing forward to grip both of Mal’s hands at the wrists as though to stop him from spending more coin. “I’ll get more glasses too. You relax and enjoy your reunions.”
“Oh,” said Mal, blinking a few times. “All right.”
Rhys slipped around Elias, a grin spreading on the former’s face as he flicked two golden cufflinks over his fingers, tossing Elias a wink in passing as he headed toward the bar, pocketing his take.
Part of Elias wanted to be amused by it, his eyes flicking back to Malcolm, who appeared blissfully unaware that he’d just been robbed as he chortled it up with his banker friends. The other part wanted to tattle on Rhys and ruin everyone’s fun.
He frowned.
He had grown up, hadn’t he?
He’d thought he had.
He never would have had that impulse back home in Hounslow. He enjoyed a night at the pub in Hounslow. He could relax there, could engage in revelry.