Chapter Twelve
By luncheon the next day, Hattie had written no fewer than three full orations dedicated to one Elias Selwyn, Baron Selwyn, denier of pleasures and purveyor of cruelty.
She had skipped breakfast, pacing about her room as she muttered to herself, pulling tresses free from her braid as she thought of all the things she wished to say to him after he’d left her there last night, ablaze and flustered, without so much as a peck on the cheek for her trouble.
What on earth was his aim, doing such a thing?
She’d have preferred another dip in the ocean!
When a rap sounded at her door, thinking it must have been he who’d delivered such torment, she had stomped to it immediately and wrenched it open, with all three of her opening salvos colliding on the curl of her tongue, ready to be unleashed like the cracks on a whip as soon as she got the damned hinges to cooperate.
But it was not Elias on her threshold.
It was Ruby Little.
Who was also red-faced.
“Will you please,” Ruby immediately exploded, pushing into the room in a flurry of skirts and ichor, “tell your new cook that this is my home as much as it is yours? And that when I demand she hand over the jar of vanilla beans so that I may … I say, you aren’t dressed.”
Hattie stared at Ruby, who now stood in the center of her room, and released the doorknob. “I’m not,” she agreed as the door swung shut with a pitiful click behind her.
Ruby frowned, looking about the room until her eyes fell on the vanity. “Aha!” she said, marching over and snapping up the bottle of eau de toilette from its perch. “I knew you were almost out! How in the blazes am I to make more without the damned vanilla beans, Hattie? Make her give them to me!”
“There’s vanilla in that?” Hattie asked, baffled.
“And cardamom and ginger and cinnamon and cloves,” Ruby said, shaking the bottle at her like a magic wand. “And black tea! Make her give me the vanilla!”
“Ruby, I am not …” Hattie trailed off, dazed. “Dressed?”
Ruby was glaring, her eyes darting around the room as if looking for hidden vanilla stores. “Yes, why aren’t you?” she said. “The cook said you are the lady of the house and I am a guest. A guest! In my own home!”
“I’ll speak to her,” Hattie promised, stepping quickly over to the bed to kick the port glasses beneath it. “She is new.”
“Yes, well,” Ruby said, deflating a bit, the glass vial sagging at her side, “I have not yet set up my laboratory and I need to get my scents in order before the showcase. I do not enjoy being treated like one of Monica’s seamstresses.”
“Oh, the seamstresses,” said Hattie, blinking. “One of them is Polish, I believe?”
“How should I know?” Ruby snapped, stepping forward and pushing the vial into Hattie’s palm. “Here. Use it sparingly until I can make more. God knows what else Cerberus will try to hide from me.”
“Are you calling her a dog?” Hattie asked her retreating foster sister. “Or a demon?”
“Yes!” Ruby shouted, slamming the door behind her.
Hattie blinked.
Was this what it would be like, as baroness?
Perhaps Elias hadn’t been wrong to express concern about all of the wards staying here for the full year.
She had been the first of Willa’s wards. Or the second, if one were to count Elias, which Hattie never really had. He was her real, actual, legally bound family, after all, not a lucky talent in need of a patroness.
Seven.
She tapped her fingertips again with her thumbnail.
Eight.
He was the eighth. She still smelled smoke when the number rounded itself in the air upon thinking it, but the doom had gone. The feeling of trepidation had eased.
How could she have forgotten him? Why had she locked him so tightly away that his very existence had distressed her so?
Was it just about that nonsense on the pier? Or was it because he had left the house after it and she’d always known, deep down, that it had been her doing? That she had been the thing that had driven him away?
What if she drove the others away now too, as baroness?
She frowned, shaking her head.
She had been the first, but Libba was right: she had never been the authority amongst them. She had never wished to be. If anything, she had observed and been grateful for inclusion when it had come along.
And after Elias had gone … well …
She supposed she might have kept herself at a bit of a distance after he’d left, lest she drive another away again. She’d been the first to venture out into the world. Even as a child, she’d often watch the others play rather than participate.
She’d gotten close to Elias once, and he’d shoved her into the sea for the trouble, after all.
She sighed, shaking her head.
She was likely thinking in circles because she hadn’t slept and because Elias had thrown her mind into disarray, because he’d chosen to teach via torment rather than titillation!
Perhaps she ought to give him a stern talking-to about the merits of teaching with encouragement and reward rather than …
well, whatever the devil he was doing to her.
Yes, it was Elias’s fault she was all turned about this morning.
That was all it was.
In any event, she supposed her days of lounging about in her shift until noon were likely over, at least at Starling’s Rest and for the duration of this very unusual year.
Perhaps forever.
She hoped not forever.
By the time she had dressed, dabbed a modest amount of perfume onto her throat and wrists, and commandeered the vanilla jar from the kitchens, however, Ruby had vanished, evidently gone down to the boardwalk with Monica and Errol to examine the new storefront and workshop.
“They invited me, you know,” Rhys said sullenly from the dining room table, “but I don’t like to walk past that chicanery shop en route.”
“What?” said Hattie, whilst Malcolm attempted to shush her.
Thus commenced a twenty-minute rant about the many evils of Persephone Boswell and her curiosity cabinet.
And still there had been no sign of Elias.
If she hadn’t been half-convinced that she’d arrive just as they were leaving, Hattie had a mind to go find her bonnet and make her way to the boardwalk herself, just to indulge in a bit of distraction. As it was, she didn’t fancy feeling like a fool twice in one day.
She had never felt like this in Russia.
Or in Greece.
Or in Switzerland.
She kicked an empty rubbish bin purely by accident, but it did make her feel a little better. At least, it would have, if that hadn’t been the exact moment that Elias Selwyn deigned to return.
“Problem?” he asked, already grinning at her victorious stance over the toppled basket.
She spun around, eyes already narrowed, to find him holding a stack of boxes, lingering in the entryway with a rosy flush to his cheeks and a windswept tousle to his dark hair. “Many!”
“Oh, ‘many,’” he repeated, clicking his tongue with mock sympathy. “Do you wish to talk about it?”
“No!”
He smiled wider. “I don’t believe you.”
She drew herself up, her body rippling with fury, and took a stalking step toward him, pointing one finger in his direction. “You!” she hissed. “You appear so very smug after what you did … what you didn’t …”
“‘What I didn’t …’?” he prompted, still flashing those even, white teeth.
She paused, her face radiating warmth as Libba and Malcolm passed in the hallway beyond the parlor, glancing curiously inside. It made her clamp her teeth together, her lips sealed against revealing too much, but her eyes had gone down to mere slits.
“You know very well,” she said as softly as she could manage.
“I suppose I might,” he replied jovially, looking fit to spring around the room like a satyr. He strode into the parlor, depositing the parcels from his arms onto the chaise, and took a step back, admiring the effect. “Here, I’ve brought you some things.”
She froze, confusion puncturing the heat of her rage as her eyes fell on the boxes. “What things?”
“Wedding things,” he said with a shrug. “Fabrics that Miss Thresher asked me to fetch, some silk flowers, and a dressing gown I saw in a shop window.”
“‘A … dressing gown’?” she repeated as she raised her eyes to meet his, blue and twinkling with abject self-satisfaction. “I have a dressing gown.”
“Do you, indeed?” he said, as though he weren’t perfectly well aware. “You might find that it has gone missing, in fact. Terrible shame. That happens in full houses.”
“What?!” she exclaimed, turning to look over her shoulder, as though she might see the thief absconding at her rear. “I was just wearing it this morning. I shall go check.”
She took a single step. Just one, toward the door, before she felt his hand on her wrist, anchoring her in place.
“Hattie,” he said, low and warm in her ear. How had he gotten across the room so fast?
She stumbled, her shoulder and back falling against the solid wall of his chest as she turned in surprise to see the full presence of him there.
Had he just called her ‘Hattie’? He always called her ‘Harriet,’ didn’t he?
She turned, trying to keep him only in her periphery, the warmth of his breath on her neck and tickling her ear. “Elias?” she managed, though she sounded a bit strangled.
He smiled again, though this time, it did not look amused, his teeth glinting in the afternoon light. “You can’t really expect me to let you keep an intimate gift from a Russian prince? Surely, my silent language has told you that much?”
Her jaw dropped, her breath catching in her chest. “It has told me no such thing!” she breathed, still unable to turn and face him directly. “‘Intimate gift,’ indeed! That prince was nearly eighty years old!”
“Oh, indeed?” He sounded surprised. Relieved, even? Pleased!
She ground her teeth. “And much more of a gentleman than you will ever be!”
“Well, I can’t account for your tastes,” he said with a shrug. “The point remains.”
“Elias!” she gasped, turning then only because there was no other choice, and finding him somehow both intense and utterly at ease with what was passing between them. “Release me!”
“Fine,” he said, shrugging and dropping his hand away, leaving a band of ice-cold air around her wrist in its place.
She frowned, somehow even angrier than she’d been a second ago as he backed away, raising his hands in a symbol of surrender and collapsing next to his damned parcels with his elbow propped atop them.
She snatched her wrist up against her chest, rubbing her own hand around it in an effort to restore the warmth he’d taken from her flesh. It was ineffective. She supposed he might just run hotter than she, as a matter of standard.
He watched her, his eyes lingering on her fingers as they rubbed the delicate bones and pale skin there, until she felt so conspicuous that she had no choice but to drop her hands uselessly at her sides.
It was at that moment that she realized she had not used any of the fine speeches she’d penned in her mind this morning, even in outline.
She had not spoken a word of that finely wrought prose, and that was why he was sitting there so comfortably, without a single lash mark on his person to sting in reminder of the one tool she had against him.
She opened her mouth and then clamped it shut again at the way he started to smirk.
It was obviously too late now.
And that might have deflated her, on another day. It might have made it all worse.
Instead, she brightened.
“I’ve read you,” she whispered, her eyes widening, her hands coming up to touch her lips. “Elias! I’ve read your silent language! Just now!”
He raised his dark brows, his smirk melting away. “Oh?”
She nodded, bouncing on the balls of her feet, and gave a little squeak of pleasure. “Yes! I … I was going to speak, and then I saw your posture and your face and I knew I oughtn’t because I could feel your mindset! But you said no words! I did it, Elias!”
He was silent for a moment, his countenance shifting from sunlight to something a little darker, something that smelled of nearing rain.
He dropped his arm off the parcels and draped both onto his knees, leaning toward her, eyes glittering.
“That was not the first time,” he told her firmly.
“You knew very well what I was conveying last night.”
She blinked, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “Oh, I suppose that might be true,” she realized with awe. “Though I must have been wrong at that time, considering your actions directly following said interpretation. Yes, I think I was wrong then. But I am not wrong now.”
He watched her again as another tick of the clock passed them, mirrored by a tick in his jaw, a little jumping muscle that conducted the music of silence that was swelling in the air.
“You called me ‘Hattie’ just now,” she told him, allowing the smile to fully form on her face. “You never do that. You never have.”
“What?” he snapped, fully frowning now. “I didn’t.”
She nodded. “You did. I assure you.”
There was another beat of silence. Outside, the clock tower at the nearby church sounded the toll of the hour.
Hattie gave a happy, little sigh. “I did it,” she said quietly, once more, to herself.
“I have things to do,” Elias said abruptly, shoving himself to his feet.
“No, you don’t,” Hattie observed as he stalked past her and exited the room entirely, leaving her smiling countenance in his wake.