Chapter Six
Hattie had, eventually, worked up the courage to go speak to Elias Selwyn again.
Unfortunately, she had done so after enough pints of ale that her vision was wobbly, and she wasn’t entirely sure he was still inside the pub.
She gripped the table, hunched over a cache of empty glasses, searching the crowd for a well-combed top of dark hair or perhaps a flash of those lovely, blue eyes, but saw only Libba, dressed as Princess Xandine of the African Isles, winning a third gift from a group of admirers in a corner near the bar, and Malcolm being hassled to perform his numbers trick from his banker friends.
“Go on, Mal,” Jasper Townsend encouraged him, grinning over his own drink, gone almost as red as his hair. “You know you love to do it.”
“Oh, all right, all right,” Malcolm had allowed, shrugging off his jacket and wiggling his fingers as he prepared to dazzle the masses. It wasn’t until his touch fell onto the fabric at his wrist, with the intent of rolling up his sleeves, that his expression fell.
There was a ticking few seconds while his face registered disbelief that his golden cufflinks were gone and then outrage, and then his head snapped up. “Rhys!” he boomed. “Where is that little bastard?!”
“Gone,” Monica said wanly from her spot flat on her back in the booth seats, her wisps of blonde hair falling off the edge as she looked at Malcolm from an upside-down perspective. “Gone to slay Miss Persephone, remember?”
“I will kill … I will … maim!” Malcolm was sputtering, as his friends dissolved into guffawing laughter.
Hattie frowned.
It seemed Elias had left as well.
She couldn’t find him.
“‘Flatulence in a jar,’” she murmured to herself, dejected, as she sank back to sitting.
It wasn’t until Errol came and lifted her up that she realized she had gone directly to the pub floor, her legs crossed under her skirt, instead of landing in a chair.
“All right, then,” he decided, not outright laughing at her but clearly hiding the urge. “You too, Monica. Let’s go home.”
“Oh, spoilsport,” Monica said dreamily, more of her hair tumbling out of its chignon from her head’s dangling position over the corner of the booth cushion.
It took him another quarter hour to wrangle the rest of them, especially since he had to do so with Libba by sending her hand signals and meaningful glares from across the room, lest her ruse be discovered, but he did manage it.
They marched back to Starling’s Rest after him as the sky turned a yawning violet, the sun tickling under the horizon with all its threats of daylight and consequences.
Ruby yawned heavily from the front, collapsing against Errol as they walked, her skirt sagging and picking up grit from the ground as she wove around on the dirt path. “D’you think Mr. Harcourt is very cross? Is he our papa now?”
“He is not,” Monica said, as sternly as she was able, which was to say, as gentle as a lamb.
“Oh, no?” Ruby tittered. “Don’t want a little discipline from the silver barrister, Miss Thresher?”
Which got Malcolm tittering too until Monica turned the corner with her face hidden in her hands.
“I’d let him paddle me,” Libba put in, if only to immediately silence her brother.
Whether or not he had assumed the status of their new, disapproving parental figure, Julian Harcourt was, in fact, awaiting them at the entrance to Starling’s Rest, arms crossed and face unamused as they swayed and stumbled their way back up the drive.
“There’s food in the dining room,” he said, stepping aside to usher them in. “Soak some of that up before you go to sleep.”
“Oh, Mr. Harcourt,” Monica said, pink as a peony. “Are you cross?”
He only sighed in response, patting her on the shoulder as he waved her inside.
Rhys was at the table, stabbing a boiled egg with a fork he was wielding like a skewer, and glanced up at them with a glower as they filed in, falling one at a time on the basket of bread and the platters of meat and eggs.
Only Errol hesitated, sighing at the spread.
“Still don’t eat meat?” Malcolm asked curiously, stuffing a sausage in his mouth. “Shame.”
“There’s bread and cheese, Errol,” Ruby said, already making a second plate next to her own. “And an egg, if you like?”
“No egg,” he said, grimacing at the one Rhys was brutalizing.
“Where is Elias?” Hattie asked, finding a chair and falling into it sidesaddle as she pulled a bun across the table and tore it in half.
No one seemed to know, a series of shrugs going around the table.
“Did you find Miss Persephone’s?” Libba asked Rhys, leaning closer to observe the carnage he was delivering on that egg and then sprinkling some salt onto it. “Or better, Miss Persephone herself?”
“It was closed,” he ground out, tossing his fork away in evident disgust now that someone had been thoughtful to his egg. “And she’s likely still hanging upside down in the cave underneath it, plotting.”
“If she were a bat,” Monica said thoughtfully, “wouldn’t she be awake and open at night instead of the other way ’round?”
“Yes,” said Errol.
“Be silent,” said Rhys.
“Persephone …” Ruby was mulling, absently cutting her cheese into little chunks. “That’s so familiar.”
“She was the little Traveller girl who also did illusions with Rhys at the summer exhibitions, wasn’t she?” Malcolm said, raising his eyebrows. “They had a falling out, remember? But we didn’t call her ‘Persephone.’ I believe she went by—”
“Seph!” Monica and Libba exclaimed in unison, both looking delighted as Rhys melted further into his chair.
“I’m going to bed,” he announced, flinging himself from the table and stalking away.
“My, my,” Ruby observed, watching him go. “Someone’s harried.”
Hattie realized she was falling asleep mid-mastication, bread still held aloft between her molars, and blinked sleepily at her fellow wards.
“Did I eat enough?” she asked, swallowing with some effort and reaching across the table for one of the pre-poured glasses of fruit juice. “I’m so very tired.”
“One sausage link,” Malcolm decided, “and two cubes of cheese. And you can go.”
“Oh, all right,” Hattie said, frowning as she accepted her sentence on a small, white plate. “All right.”
She forced it down and stood, pleased that Monica decided to walk with her to the girls’ wing, and wondered if she could even be bothered to get out of her dress before falling into bed. She said as much to Monica, who shook her own head, tugging at her collar with a sigh.
“So many layers,” she bemoaned. “If only I could snap my fingers and be bare, in nothing but a nightrail.”
“Bare in,” Hattie repeated with a sleepy smile. “Baron.”
“Hm?” said Monica.
“Barren,” Hattie continued, pausing, and frowning. “Barren Fields.”
Monica stopped, turning around with a wrinkle of her brow. “Harriet? You’re delirious.”
“I … No,” she said, shaking her head and holding a hand up. “I’m … almost recalling something. I … think?”
“Hattie,” Monica said, her voice gone soothing like it would to reason with a feral cat. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
Hattie let herself be shuffled into her bedroom, but her mind was clawing itself back awake, the words tumbling over one another, climbing over their own syllables, swinging through their vowels, and clambering atop the consonants of each other.
“That man called you ‘my lord.’ Sometimes I forget that you are the baron now. Baron Elias. That is very fine. You must be proud. Or excited. Or both. I know I would be.
“But baron is a funny sort of title, isn’t it? It sounds like ‘barren,’ which is a bad thing. You know, like barren women or barren fields. And Fields is quite a common surname. Can you imagine if your inherited barony was from an estate called Fields? You’d be Baron Fields!”
She collapsed forward onto the bed, her hands catching in the blankets just the way they had caught in the surf that day, when Elias had punted her right off the edge of the pier and into the water, mid-ramble.
She drew in a deep breath, certain she could taste the briny Channel water in her mouth, her skin erupting in gooseflesh.
Christ, but that had been insensitive, hadn’t it?
He had lost his uncle.
He had been born to an unusual family, one where the patriarch spent most of his life waiting to die.
His mother had married the baron’s younger brother, perhaps anticipating the eventual shift of power, but he too had died while she had been still pregnant with Elias.
She’d then married the closest male cousin, Elias’s stepfather, Wallace Selwyn, for good measure.
Elias had been born as a placeholder regardless. An expectation of death. Heir to a doomed man.
And she’d called him …
Barren fields.
She moaned, her head throbbing, and climbed into the bed, pushing her face into a pillow.
She’d been all of twelve years old that day, hadn’t she? Certainly no more than thirteen. She had wanted nothing in the world so much as Elias Selwyn’s friendship back then. His approval. His …
Was he really still upset about that?
Really?
Hadn’t he gotten her back in turn by shoving her into the blasted ocean?
Hattie pulled the pillow up around her face and over her ears, as though she could stifle the sound of thoughts that were coming from inside her head, which of course was ridiculous. She squeezed her eyes shut and instructed herself in a dozen different tongues to sleep.
Because that always worked.
She sighed, rolling onto her back and opening her eyes a sliver, just enough to glare through her lashes at the cheery sunlight starting to peek in through her curtains.
She was going to have a bottle ache.
She knew it.
Why had she forgotten about that day on the pier? Shame? Anger?
She remembered coming up out of the water, furious and confused and spitting salt water, clawing her way up the shingles and onto the shore in her ruined muslin dress. Elias had just been standing there, staring at her vacantly, like he couldn’t quite believe he’d done what he had.
He hadn’t apologized or gloated or anything. He’d just turned and walked away.
And then Willa had let him go to Eton.
Hattie sat up, groaning and moving to pull the pins out of her hair. At least she’d give herself some small chance of comfort, she thought. She could loosen her hair and undress. She could do that.
She could take the dress off. It felt oddly like salt-starched, soggy muslin against her skin now, anyhow.
When she stood and paced across the room to drop the pins in the little bowl on her vanity table, she spotted the envelope tucked under it.
For Hattie.
Her heart gave an aching, little lurch at Willa’s handwriting, her hands trembling as she released the pins with a tinkling series of clinks into the little holding bowl.
She ought to read it, she knew.
She wondered if any of the others had read theirs yet.
The only contents anyone had spoken of, at least in her hearing, came down to that curious gold ring.
Mea culpa.
She frowned, snatching up the letter and marching back over to her bed as she loosened the ties on her bodice.
She flicked the wax seal apart and tossed it on the rumpled covers as she pulled the dress over her head and worked at the strings of her half stays, looking at the way the letter peeped tantalizingly over the flap of the envelope, spiky writing showing through the thin paper.
She kicked the dress and stays into a pile, shaking her hair free, and climbed in with the letter, her shift breezing pleasantly over her body underneath. Bare in, she thought, twisting her lips as she pulled the sheet of paper from its envelope and unfolded it carefully. Baron. Barren.
The handwriting hit her like a gong in the center of her chest.
She’d have known Willa’s pen anywhere. In any language. On any parchment.
For a moment, the writing itself seemed to swim, meaningless and narrow, just slashes of ink on the page as memories battled up against the tide of the shapes they made.
Had it really been seven years since she’d gotten a letter from this woman? Had it really been that long?
They had all written to one another feverishly in the beginning, when adulthood had pulled them in half a dozen sparkling and thrilling far-flung directions.
Weekly, Hattie would rush to the post from her tour of the Continent with that erstwhile chaperone, onto the year she’d spent trading herself as a research subject in exchange for access to study at a Swiss university.
They would all write, back and forth, bubbling over with enthusiasm for all the new things life was offering.
It was only as the years had started to pass that the letters had slowed. They’d slowed and slowed and eventually stopped.
And she had not noticed at all.
Hattie gave a shaky little sigh, blinking away the veil of warm, salty regret that had welled over her vision, and shook her head.
Here was one last letter, anyhow, she reasoned.
Whether she deserved it or not.
To My Darling Harriet,
This is the first letter I am writing with the thought that I might someday be dead. It is an odd thing to ponder, isn’t it? But I will be, so must we all at some point.
When I met with Mr. Harcourt this afternoon to discuss my wishes for the things I carried in this life and their fates upon my demise, I had only one wish at the outset: that you, my girl, would be my primary heiress.
I told him Hattie should be baroness. I want nothing less.
And he had, of course, laughed in that way of his and told me I was being a ninny. Perhaps he would have kept laughing, if we hadn’t gotten to a particular clause concerning the house itself, which holds a deed apart from the demesne.
Ah, but you aren’t the only clever one, are you, Hattie? I have my talents too. And you shall be baroness, which was my wish, after all.
I know you might be cursing my name in the wake of the reading of my final wishes and wondering what matter of madness had overtaken me to bind you to my nephew forever. I shall tell you—it is the madness of a life lived long enough to have gathered some degree of wisdom about matrimony.
You and Elias always had a strange dynamic between you.
You followed, curious and eager, while he bristled and hid and glowered.
I really did not wish to send him away, for I knew it would turn into something else entirely if the two of you were allowed to blossom into young adulthood in one another’s company.
But alas, sometimes the demands of necessity force us out of our plans and wishes.
I only take comfort that I can meddle now, from the Fields of Elysium, and that one day, you shall go to my grave, sit upon the bench next to it, and tell me I was right. Below the dirt, on that day, I will smile, as I am smiling now.
Stay strong, my darling girl.
You are going to be a fine baroness.
All my love,
Willa Starling Selwyn—your mother in my heart.