Chapter Nine
“Are you leaving?” Elias asked, surprised as Mr. Harcourt appeared to be making his way to the front door with a valise. “Permanently?”
“I live on the other side of town, just past the Lanes,” the barrister said, turning with a wry smile to the other man.
“I would have gone home last night if the lot of you hadn’t sneaked out.
I’ll be back frequently as we continue to untangle your aunt’s knot, of course, and anytime you need me, but with the household evidently observing the Spanish tradition of siesta today, I thought perhaps I ought to go check in on my own home. ”
Elias had the grace to blush, scratching at his hair as he nodded. “Sorry about that, by the by.”
“Don’t be,” Mr. Harcourt said. “I daresay it was a necessary release of tension for the lot of you. Grief is an odd thing, Lord Selwyn. We all navigate it how we must.”
“Grief,” Elias repeated. “Right.”
“Oh, Mr. Harcourt!” came Monica Thresher’s voice, dove soft and trilling. “You aren’t leaving us? I wished to measure you for a new suit.”
The barrister looked up, blinking rapidly at her earnest face, her pale hands clutched under her chin. “Me?” he said, baffled. “Haven’t you got costumes to make for all your fellow wards?”
“Most of them,” she said with a nod. “Rhys and Libba already have plenty of my creations. I’ll need to measure you too, Lord Selwyn.”
Elias stepped back, wrinkling his brow. “I don’t have an act,” he reminded her.
Shaking her head, she gave a soft giggle and released her clasped hands, revealing the measuring tape that was caught between her palms. “You are the showmaster now, are you not? The baron. You will require a fitting.”
“Well,” said Mr. Harcourt, sounding relieved. “It sounds as though you will be very busy.”
“Nonsense,” she replied, turning those soft, brown eyes from one man to the other. “Why are you both so resistant to the idea of a gift? Please allow me to do this. I can measure you both now if you wish.”
Their protestations sounded in unison, tumbling over one another in such bumbling, awkward accord that it made her giggle again.
“Very well,” she said. “I am just finishing up with Malcolm. Elias, why don’t you at least join us to watch the process? It is not so very terrible.”
“I was going to nap,” he lied.
She studied him, her pale lashes blinking thrice. “Were you?”
He winced. “No.”
“Well, I’ll be off, then,” Mr. Harcourt announced, grabbing his valise by the handle and turning on his heel. “I’ll see you all very soon!”
Monica frowned as she watched him go, making Elias feel guilty enough that he had no choice but to slump after her back toward her hostage party with Malcolm Lennox.
He peeked into the parlor as they walked past it but saw that Hattie’s languid position on the chaise had been taken up by Jasper Townsend, who was apparently participating in the afternoon siesta with the rest of the household, his hat over his face and his fingers laced over his steadily rising and falling chest.
Elias never had been able to nap midday.
Another shortfalling.
“You aren’t tired from last night?” he asked curiously, watching Monica bustle down the halls. “I was told you were trying to fall asleep in the booth at the public house.”
“I was simply enjoying the view of the ceiling,” she said wryly. “And I do intend to rest, but it is hard to pin Malcolm at the best of times, and he was willing just now. I had to fetch my measuring tape.”
“Malcolm’s resistant?” Elias said with some surprise. “He seems to me a fellow who enjoys expanding his wardrobe.”
“Oh, he is,” she said with a titter, “as the debonair gambler and banking man. Not as the Marvelous Human Abacus.”
“Ah,” said Elias, feeling a little slapped by how that resonated. “That does make sense.”
“Bah,” said Monica. “One ought to be grateful for discovery. If Willa hadn’t found me, I’d still be scrubbing stained particulars next to my mother’s lean-to. Now she has her own laundry and I’ve seen the Continent. What’s to complain about?”
He pressed his lips together, his cheeks warming at his own many, many complaints, and resolved not to complain himself through the next hour of pinning and prodding and pinching as he and Malcolm Lennox shared sympathetic glances between themselves, propped like mannequins in front of a set of dusty, old mirrors that Monica had not yet had time to wipe down.
Afterward, he did rather wish he could take a nap.
Instead, he found himself standing at the foot of the foyer stairs as the sun began to sink lower in the late-afternoon sky, his hand brushing the dusty banisters as he gazed up toward the master suite, pondering whether or not he should go have a peek into his future without Harriet in tow.
He knew that he should not. He had already decided not to do it.
But that didn’t change how it likely looked to her when she found him there.
“Have you gone up?” she asked softly, startling him so much, he might have broken off part of the stair railing, the way he spun around.
She had changed, he saw, after her siesta. Her wealth of brassy, red-blonde hair was piled up on her head now, pinned into order, and she was wearing a diaphanous orange gown that glowed like an ember opposite the lowering sun.
It hit him right between the ribs, the way she glowed there, as though nothing at all were amiss.
His eyes followed her fingers as she twisted a strand of her brassy hair over her knuckles, pulling her lip between her teeth as she gazed up the stairs.
She looked just as worried as she had back in the parlor.
Oddly, knowing she was capable of anything other than total confidence and bizarre trains of thought was somehow reassuring to him.
He shook his head, following her gaze up the banister. “No,” he bit off. “I only considered it. Hadn’t quite worked up the nerve.”
She nodded, running her thumbnail against the pads of her fingertips as her eyes tilted up to the darkened hall above. “If we are going to go up today,” she said, “we ought to do it right now, before it gets any darker. What do you think, Elias?”
He swallowed, considering it. “Do you think it will get any less ominous tomorrow?”
She gave him a thin smile. “I do not.”
“Well, then…” He shrugged and jerked his head toward the stairs to indicate that they should climb them.
“So,” he said between footfalls on the creaking wood, “do you picture a serpent every time you say my name?”
Her lips gave a delicate twist, her eyes down watching her slippered feet take one step at a time. “Not a literal snake, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It is more the shape of the word as it escapes into the air. I do not find you snake-like, Elias.”
“No?” He reached the landing and fished the heavy, silver key out of his pocket, taking a deep breath as they turned to walk toward the master suite doors. “What do you find me like? Not three, either. Not candy and chimes.”
“Definitely not candy and chimes,” she agreed, still wearing that little look of amusement.
“Nothing so fleeting or fluffy. I hear thunder sometimes. I taste salt. I smell the bonfire from the summer’s end festival, from that day that you pushed me into the water, right before the rain started.
I didn’t know that was what it was. I didn’t realize it was a memory until last night.
Barren fields. I do remember now. And I am sorry. ”
“You are sorry?” he repeated, stopping dead in his tracks. “Why are you sorry?”
She grimaced, drawing that lip back between the clamp of her teeth. “It was … I was … silly. I was a silly child, and I said something unkind, even if I didn’t mean to. It doesn’t make it less unkind just because it was unintentional. I understand that now.”
He paused, frowning. “I never thought you were being cruel,” he said, guilt pricking up in his veins. “Just … relentless.”
“‘Relentless,’” she repeated, as though she didn’t know the meaning of the word. Though, of course, she did. “I’ve never been described as such, to my knowledge. Tenacious, perhaps.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” he said with a sigh, rubbing his hand over his face. “You were just quite a lot as a girl and I got overwhelmed on that day. I am sorry too.”
“Oh,” she said, blinking at him in clear surprise. “Well, if we are both sorry, then I suppose the only sensible thing to do is agree on mutual forgiveness.”
He blinked. And then he laughed. “Sensible,” he said, watching her through the half-shadows of the hallway. “Is that what you are now? Instead of relentless?”
She stared back at him, her narrow throat flexing as though she were trying to get the question down into her belly, to digest it before she could justify answering it.
Apparently, it was not an agreeable meal, because she turned abruptly and pointed at the two heavy mahogany panels in front of them.
“This is the door,” she announced, staring ahead blankly.
He turned and looked at them, frowning. “I know that, Harriet,” he said, sharper than he ought to have. “Obviously.”
He stepped past her, ignoring the scent she wore, something spiced and unusual, just like she was, and pushed the key into the lock, rotating it first to the left, which found no purchase, and then to the right.
The door swung open like it had been recently oiled and accustomed to use, shafts of sunlight dancing, swirling in the cavernous apartment of rooms that it revealed to them as both panels glided inward on their hinges.
Elias left the key in the door, taking a slow, deliberate step over the threshold with the same tentative and tense posture he’d use on the battlefield or hunting a boar.
It wasn’t that he half-expected Willa to jump out from behind a tapestry necessarily, only that it was impossible not to feel her presence here, in this place.
He paused only once, when he felt the warm grasp of both of Harriet French’s hands encircle his bicep, her body clinging to his side as she followed him into the room. Oddly, it eased his own tension about the place.