Chapter Fourteen #2
He watched her for a moment, also frowning, and sighed, leaning back against the chaise, dropping his head into the shaft of sunlight from the window, and turned his eyes up to the ceiling. “Yes,” he said. “I think I am. That’s a little stupid, isn’t it? I don’t think she even liked me.”
Hattie hesitated for a moment, uncertain what the right thing to say was, what the right language for this could be.
She found herself crossing the room without deciding she ought to and sinking into the chaise at his side. It was a surprise, she noted, how naturally her body moved in this way, and with intention, reached out to place her hand over his, dipping her fingers into the recesses between his knuckles.
“I cannot accept that she is actually dead,” she whispered.
“So it is hard to know what to feel. In her letter to me, she speaks of her body in the earth and a gravestone atop it, of my visiting her on a bench next to her resting place and speaking to her there. But there is no body. She is not here. We do not know where she is or what happened.”
“You think she is alive?” he asked, turning his head from where it was cradled against the top of the chaise and looking at her through the glare of sunlight. “She just stopped communicating with everyone seven years ago?”
Hattie shrugged, giving a little sigh. “Perhaps. She loved to travel and she was never particularly forthcoming about her motivations or aims. I would rather believe she has started anew somewhere sunny and foreign than consider that she wandered into tragedy alone, and far from home.”
He gave a little smile, a short, reluctant chuckle escaping his chest. “Perhaps she married a villager on some remote island,” he said, “and has a gaggle of loinclothed children to look after now.”
“It would make keeping up with her letters very difficult,” Hattie agreed, mirroring his little smile. “I stopped writing to her as often, you know. And so she stopped writing to me as well. If I hadn’t done that, I might have noticed how long it had been since anyone had heard from her.”
“Noticing wouldn’t likely have changed anything,” he told her. “And you were doing what she wished you to do. You were living your life, fulfilling your potential, and so on.”
“Was I?” she said, considering it. “If that is what she wanted for us all, then why anchor us here again as her final wish? Perhaps we oughtn’t have left in the first place.”
He frowned, looking down at her slender fingers stroking the spaces between his knuckles. “Do you not wish to stay here?” he asked. “For the year to come? After that?”
“I don’t wish to leave in any active way,” she replied, turning the thought over in her head. “Do you?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. I thought I would. I thought I’d come here and listen to the will and get back to Hounslow as fast as my carriage would get me there. The year imposition sounded outrageous initially, but now … I don’t know. I can’t imagine going back.”
“Neither can I,” she agreed. “Even though it is my fault you left this place for so long, Elias, I am glad you have found your way home again.”
He was silent for a moment, his brows drawing together as his gaze snapped up to meet hers. “It was not your fault I left.”
“It was,” she protested. “It is all right. I am not too delicate to know my faults. I said that awful thing to you that day and—”
“Hattie!” he said, sounding a little desperate somehow.
It did silence her.
He gave an odd, dry laugh, shaking his head.
“I didn’t leave because of what you said.
I didn’t even leave because of what I did, though that was absolutely humiliating enough that I wished to run as far and fast as I could from here and never look back.
I was convinced that I couldn’t belong here.
It was no one’s direct doing but my own. ”
“But you are the baron,” she protested, shaking her head. “You are the only one who belongs here.”
He shrugged, coloring a little. “It didn’t seem that way to me then. Willa was forced to raise me. She didn’t choose me. And she wouldn’t have. I knew that and she did too.”
Hattie tensed, frustration fluttering against the bones in her throat, flapping like wings.
It was like the indignation she felt at how wrong he was had slowed the formation of her ability to correct him into coherent words, catching them halfway between the mud of thought and the flint of speech behind her tongue.
“She didn’t dislike you, Elias,” she finally managed to blurt out. “Not in the way you mean.”
He laughed outright then, flipping his hand over under hers and dragging his fingertips against the palm of her hand. “No? In what way did she dislike me?”
“The way we often dislike a mirror,” Hattie said seriously. “The day you finally convinced her to let you go away, I was outside the door, still wet from the pier. I was eavesdropping. And after, she stalked out and said to me, ‘That boy is too much like me to ever listen to a word from my mouth.’”
“She didn’t say that,” he protested, a little hopeful, by Hattie’s estimation.
She raised her eyebrows. “I am a terrible liar,” she reminded him.
“She also got angry at Ruby once and told her that one day, she would be grown and fate had a way of forcing you to contend with copies of your own youthful insufferableness. She got close to Ruby’s face and said she could not wait to watch her raise a daughter. ”
“What did Ruby say?” he asked, his smile looking steadier now, more real.
“That she would simply never have a child,” Hattie replied earnestly. “At which point Willa laughed and said such abstinence hadn’t saved her from the trial of it, so why should it save Ruby, either?”
“Insufferableness,” Elias repeated. “What a word.”
“It is unwieldy,” Hattie agreed. “But that’s why I remember it, maybe. Ugly words stick in the mind.”
He chuckled again, pressing his thumb against her palm. “I did ask Mr. Harcourt about Willa’s family,” he said. “After you reminded me. He didn’t say much that was useful, just that she was an orphan by the time she married and came into the marriage with a hefty fortune.”
“Perhaps her name was not even truly Starling, then,” said Hattie, watching their entwined hands with a fascination that was bubbling somewhere at the juncture of her ribs, threatening to hiccup out of her mouth if she did not focus elsewhere.
“It might be like my surname and Ruby’s, given by a foundling home.
A noun to describe or something from a list.”
“A noun?” Elias said, looking surprised. “Your parents were not called French?”
She shook her head. “I do not think so, though I suppose anything is possible. They gave me that name because my first word was a French one. I’d learned from all the French maids and minders who flooded into Brighton when we were young, fleeing the unrest. And Ruby was always so tiny, so much smaller than the other girls her age, so she is called ‘Little.’ Some children were just given the color of their hair or the month they were delivered to the home. ”
He stared at her, those dark-blue eyes searching her face. “That seems rather callous,” he said softly.
“Does it?” she responded. “I can’t say it is any less sentimental than families called ‘Cooper’ or ‘Fletcher’ because some ancestor made barrels or arrows. Can you?”
He blinked, a flicker of something like awe passing over his face. “I suppose not,” he admitted. “I do not even know what ‘Selwyn’ means.”
“It means ‘good friend,’” she said immediately. “From Old or Middle English. ‘Sele’ could also mean … hm, ‘prosperous’ or ‘fortunate,’ rather than ‘good.’ So it could also be ‘lucky friend’ or ‘auspicious friend.’”
He made a little sound in his throat, half choke, half laugh. “Well,” he said. “I’d say my father has lost the plot, but I know enough Coopers and Fletchers who don’t make a damn thing out of wood, so perhaps that’s unfair.”
“You also need feathers,” she said with a sparkle in her eye. “To fletch. Like, say, from a …”
“Starling?” he guessed, smiling now. “It is a bird.”
“A common bird,” she replied. “But shiny. Perhaps Errol will know more about them?”
“It seems unlikely it is not her real name,” he mused. “An heiress would have legacy if she had money, surely?”
“I do not know,” said Hattie. “I am only newly an heiress myself. And I have no legacy to speak of.”
“Well, now,” he said. “You said that convincingly, and it is a bald-faced lie. Perhaps you’re more skilled at deception than you thought.”
She laughed, her cheeks tingling with something between pleasure and bashfulness as he continued to tangle their fingers together.
“I met someone else with my surname once,” she told him, “but he spelled it with two Fs. Ffrench. I was still a child, so I asked him if he was from France, a question to which he took serious offense.”
“Two Fs,” Elias said with amusement. “Welsh? They like their double letters.”
She shook her head. “That was my second guess, at which point he got even more flustered. I will never forget the way he shouted, ‘Galway, my dear!’, as though his ancestors had overheard my error. And, to wit, I have never made that mistake again.”
“Ah, well,” he said, lifting her hand and pressing a soft kiss to the back of it. “How else do we ever learn?”