Chapter Thirteen
If it would not have announced his petulance to the world at large, Elias Selwyn would have taken dinner in his room.
As it was, he would not give her the satisfaction. Or himself, he supposed.
It wasn’t exactly that he was displeased that she’d read him and read him well. It was just that she’d caught on so damned quickly. He thought he’d have at least one full day of enjoying the upper hand in their endless sparring.
Instead, he’d had about twelve hours.
And damned if he wasn’t proud of her amidst the frustration.
Yes, pouting in his room over a solitary meal had held some appeal, but he was coming to enjoy these communal meals in a queer sort of way.
The more time he spent with the wards, grown as they had into mostly adults, the less outside their sheen he felt.
They squabbled and faltered and blustered like any other person.
And that was oddly comforting.
Besides, he had been taught once and over again in the cavalry that there are only two options in moments of combat: engagement and retreat. And one should only retreat if defeat is a certainty or as a strategic gambit.
Retreat, Elias knew, should never be a thing of indulgence.
Still, it burned him a little that he could not indulge.
And he liked lamb, he supposed. Tonight they were having lamb.
“Mint jelly is a vile thing,” Ruby Little observed, jiggling a sample of it on the edge of a spoon. “Tell me, why do we explore the globe, corner markets in divine samples of all things sensory, and then put mint on lamb?”
“Why eat lamb at all?” Errol Cagney pondered, helping himself to more summer cauliflower, roasted to a caramelized golden brown. “Sweet leanbhaí.”
Ruby frowned at him. “Do not make me feel guilty. I only wished to lament the lack of cumin.”
“Mint jelly,” Elias echoed, glancing at Hattie, who was also looking at hers with a discontent wrinkle of her brow. “Three?”
She blinked, looking up at him with a flash of alarm. “What?”
“Three,” he repeated, slower, a little glow of pettiness alight in his chest. “Isn’t it?”
She blinked. Thrice. “Yes.”
“Oh, excellent,” said Rhys Caradoc. “Now there are two of them.”
Elias grinned for the first time since that afternoon, but he did not take his eyes off Hattie, lingering and relishing in the deepening of her frown.
He supposed the others were observing them, but it was hard to care.
He wondered if she had torn her room apart yet, looking for that hideous tiger-striped dressing gown.
She wouldn’t find it.
And the new one would suit her much better, anyhow.
He had taken his time choosing it. He had considered which colors might glow against her skin and hair. Which hues best suited brass and molten bronze.
He had settled on a glinting, garnet red in cool, liquid satin, with bell-shaped sleeves and a broad sash resembling an Eastern kimono. The boxes had vanished from the chaise in the parlor, but he did not know if she had opened them yet.
She was going to have to, he thought, if she wanted to wear anything other than a shift after changing out of her dress tonight.
Libba Lennox cleared her throat very loudly and made a show of clicking her knife against her plate as she cut into her lamb. She whispered a word under her breath that might have been, “Lewd.”
He smiled to himself, dropping his eyes to his plate, and curated his own bite of food.
He’d have to buy Hattie a second dressing gown, he realized. For when the weather turned colder.
He wouldn’t mind that task at all.
“Miss French!” came a panicked voice, the new head maid bursting into the dining room and startling them all into staring up at her. “My … My lord? I don’t know who to tell, but we’ve had an incident.”
“Oh, thank God for that,” Rhys muttered.
“What’s happened?” Hattie asked, half out of her chair already. “What’s the matter?”
“There’s someone upstairs!” the girl exclaimed, her face sheet white. “We were cleaning out the master suite, as we were told, of course, and … Well, someone’s up there. Someone who’s not us!”
“That’s impossible,” Malcolm Lennox said, frowning. “Unless … Has anyone brought someone else into the house tonight?”
One by one, they shook their heads.
“My girls have gone home,” Monica insisted.
“My people won’t arrive for another day or two,” Libba snapped. “Stop looking at me.”
“Why do you think there’s someone upstairs?” Errol asked, his voice soothing as he stood and ushered the young woman into his chair, moving to pour her a glass of wine. “What frightened you?”
“We heard … well, whispers, my lord,” she said, blinking her big eyes up at him with a softening in her face as she accepted the glass. “And rustling. Like people were hiding and afraid of being discovered. Spooked us all!”
“Hattie!” Elias snapped, only just realizing that she was on her way out of the room. “Where are you going?”
She startled, turning on her heel to stare at him. “There!” she said, shrill as you please. “You’ve done it again!”
He grimaced at her, pushing his chair back. “Going to fight them off with your bare hands?” he demanded. “You should let the men go up and check.”
“What men?” Rhys demanded, frowning.
“It is my room,” she reminded him, bunching her skirts into her hands and turning. “I am going.”
“God in heaven,” he muttered, flinging the chair away and scrambling after her as it clattered to the floor. “You are impossible!”
“Someone pass me the jelly?” Rhys’s voice said behind them. “What? They’re handling it.”
Elias stomped after her, annoyed with how quickly she was moving, those burnished-peach skirts of hers swishing over the floors as she clipped away from him. He wasn’t going to run. He wasn’t going to chase after her like some lovesick swain.
“Hattie!” he boomed again, his jaw aching from how badly his teeth wished to smash into one another.
“I am Hattie to you now,” she sang over her shoulder. “Harriet no more!”
“Harriet!” he corrected, grasping the banister and bounding up the stairs after her. “Slow down!”
She ignored him, marching past the piles of sheets the staff had removed from the suite, and the pianoforte that now sat in the hall.
The doors hung open, with two young women in maid uniforms retreating to the end of the hall observing them warily from the shadows. The rooms had been lit, even as the summer sun was still setting, likely in preparation for an evening of devoted cleaning.
The flamelight danced down the hall in a cacophony of combating shadows, likely doing nothing to alleviate the anxiety of the spooked cleaners.
“You may go rest,” Hattie said to them without pausing, flicking her wrist like an empress well accustomed to giving orders. “I shall see to this!”
He wondered exactly what sort of trouble he would get in for running ahead and locking her out of her own rooms.
He stopped, holding a hand up to the two servants before they could flee. “Where exactly,” he said through his teeth, “did you hear the sounds?”
“Near the bed, sir,” one maid said. “Lord. My lord. Near the bed. On the side with the wardrobe.”
“In the wardrobe,” the other maid said. “Or under the bed?”
“Fine,” he said. “You may go.”
He gave a little sigh of relief as he turned and found Hattie in entirely the wrong portion of the suite, peeking under armchairs. He noted that she had taken up a fire poker, though he was unclear on if she intended to use it as a weapon or a probe.
Perhaps he could just lock the entire house up and put everyone in a nearby inn. Surely, no one would argue with that.
“Willa?” she called, making him freeze with his foot halfway through a step. “Is it you?”
“Harriet,” he said, exasperated. “It is not Willa.”
She frowned, turning to shoot him a look. “You don’t know that.”
Despite himself, it did put a chill up his back. “It isn’t,” he repeated as firmly as he could muster. “And you’re in the wrong place. Give me that poker before you harm yourself.”
“No,” she said, hugging it to her body as she came up to standing and gave a sniff. “All the windows are open. What if someone came in through one?”
“Scaled up the painted brickwork with their fingernails, did they?” he said flatly. “Hattie.”
“Harriet?” she repeated, mocking him.
He paused, taking a long, slow inhale through his nostrils and closing his eyes against the spark of impulse that rang through his hands at that.
He gave his head a little shake and sighed, blinking his vision back into place and nodding toward the bedchamber.
“Come on,” he said. “The maids said it was over here.”
She nodded, scooting across the floor with shuffling steps until she was standing in his shadow, following him to the place where the wraiths had sounded.
The bed had been stripped down to its tufted, eiderdown mattress, he saw, and a polish rag was hanging over the footboard, dust half removed along the heavy cedar bevels.
He held his arm back to stop Hattie from coming any further and bent at the knees, attempting to peer under the bed to see if anything was lurking down there in the dark.
The light from the windows was casting a harsh shadow, unfortunately, and he couldn’t make much out. Though he did note that it smelled much better in here with the surf in the air than it did with the must of seven years of sealed air.
“Well?” she whispered, huffing when he only shook his head.
He turned and looked at her, reaching out to take the poker from her hands, slowly, so as not to make her grip it harder. Mercifully, she relented, letting it slip free with nothing more than a frown and whimper in protest.
He reached the poker in his hand out toward the wardrobe towering over the corner, aiming the tip of the thing at the door, and then gave two quick taps to the wood.
The sound responded immediately.
Rustling, like naughty children hiding in a corner, whispering and panicking at being caught.
“Oh, Christ!” Hattie squeaked, slapping her hands over her mouth.
He frowned.
“Is someone there?” he asked, attempting to sound stern.
More rustling. More whispers.
He glanced back at Hattie and handed her the poker, which she snatched with more enthusiasm than Elias felt strictly necessary. “Go stand by the door,” he instructed.
He waited for her to retreat, Hattie standing between the foot of the bed and the door with the poker held like a bludgeon, before he put his hands on the wardrobe handles. He counted to three. Mint jelly three. And then he swung them open.
Bats.
She screamed.
He might have too, ducking his head down as no fewer than half a dozen of them exploded out of the tattered remains of Willa’s clothing, screeching and flapping about the room in just as much of a panic as Elias and Hattie.
“Get down!” he boomed at Hattie as she attempted to swing the poker wildly in the air. “On the floor!”
She ignored him, screaming incoherently at the winged interlopers as she attempted and failed to smash them with iron.
He grabbed one of the only things available—a pillow sitting on the bare bed—and smacked one of the bats toward the windows, followed by another. They kept coming back, as though they were enjoying the game, though he was certain he had begun to beg them verbally to go. Go and be free!
He did not know how long it took. Certainly an hour. Or a second. Or both? But one bat, one genius, blessed bat, finally found the open window.
And it must have called to the others.
Because in just a few moments, they had gone.
They had gone.
And Hattie and Elias were left panting and wild-eyed in the midst of their wreckage.
She stared at him, poker still gripped in her hands, and he stared back, his heart thundering in his chest, blood rushing in a roar in his ears.
She dropped the poker, letting it clatter to the floor, her chest rising and falling as she sucked in ragged gulps of air.
He tossed the pillow aside.
He crossed the room.
And he grabbed her, dragging her to him as he sank a hand into her hair. He claimed that intelligent, little mouth of hers before it could get itself around a single taunting observational word and he did so with relish.
She hesitated for only a second, only half a breath, before her hands came up and wrapped around the lapels of his jacket, her back arching and pressing her body firmer against his as she returned the claim, a soft, little sigh of satisfaction escaping her throat as her lips moved.
He lost himself a little, his tongue flicking out to taste her, to test if he had been right about the sweet, spiced strangeness of her flavor and the complexity of that talented tongue. He curled his fingers in her hair, groaning into her mouth, his body gone feverish and taut with the answers.
Engage or retreat, something whispered in his mind. Choose.
He batted the thought away, sliding his other hand down the curve of her back, dragging her closer, pressing his hips against hers.
Engage or retreat, the voice said again.
And he sighed in frustration, pulling back just a touch, just a breath, and resting his forehead against hers.
“Elias,” she whispered, her lips slick and warm against his, her fingers tripping over the lines of his chest through his clothes.
“The door is open,” he reminded her, reluctant and damned. “There might be more bats.”
“Oh,” she said, licking the taste of him from her mouth. “All right.”
He sighed, taking his time unwrapping himself from her, stroking the back of her neck as he untangled his hand from her hair. Stepping back as slowly as he could muster.
She did not look angry at the interruption, however.
She was wearing that little curving smile she got when she was thoughtful, those amber eyes tilted up at him as she observed every move he made.
“Elias,” she said, almost a whisper. “What is my name?”
“Harriet,” he answered, a little puzzled by the question.
She shook her head, the smile still in place.
“Hattie?” he corrected. A guess.
She showed her teeth then, the little curve of her mouth breaking into something more satisfied, and leaned forward on her toes to claim one more kiss from him, small and quick.
“My name is Harriet,” she reminded him, sounding very much like the girl she’d once been, “but my people call me ‘Hattie.’”
And then she spun on her heel and fled back out into the house proper.