Chapter Twenty-Nine
By the time the sun had begun to set, Hattie was certain she’d wish to sleep for the next several days.
Her throat was parched, her feet sore, and her stomach very full as she leaned against a pavilion stake, watching Ruby create sparking flashes of fire from a sheet of paper and swishing them into a staircase shape.
It had been the first chemical trick Ruby had ever learned, Hattie recalled with a tired smile. And yet it remained one of her most requested performances.
Elias was standing next to her, clearly dazzled as the golden sparks reflected in the blue of his eyes. “She doesn’t burn herself,” he observed, sounding for a moment like that little boy Hattie had once met in a kitchen, many years ago.
“She does sometimes,” she said with a little smile. “We all do.”
It made him grin and wind an arm around her, pulling her close.
“Did you collect the keepsake cards?” Hattie asked. “All seven of them? I was concerned someone might take one.”
“I have them here,” he said, withdrawing the little stack from his jacket pocket and thumbing through them. “One, two, three …”
“Three,” she echoed, tasting mint and sugar on the air. “Seven. There should be seven.”
“You are mistaken,” he replied with a chuckle. “There are eight.”
She turned to him, frowning, as the crowd gasped and applauded the next fizzing eruption of light from Ruby’s table. “No,” she said. “There were seven. I counted.”
He was still smiling at her and held the stack out. “You are the smarter one of the two of us,” he said wryly, “but I do think I can count below ten.”
She took the stack, an odd trepidation in her chest, and flipped through them.
Eight.
There were eight.
“Someone has added one,” she said, turning them over in her hands, squinting at the print and script on either side of each in the low light.
“Or you just counted wrong,” he said. “Stop that. You’ll go blind.”
She frowned again, handing them back to him. “I don’t think blindness is so swift.”
“But it might be,” he replied, still teasing, still watching her in the late glow of dusk. “We can look at them again when we get home.”
They were interrupted by Rhys, striding over with his tiger-striped trick box under his arm, his face twisted into a resigned glower. His kohl had smudged as the day had worn on and was in thicker, more theatrical lines around the spiky shadows of his eyelashes in the dimming light.
He paused in front of Hattie and then knelt on one knee, holding it out like a defeated general below a white flag.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, snatching it up. “And the rest?”
“Monica will have it,” Rhys muttered, scrambling back up to his feet.
To Elias, he simply regarded him for a moment and then said, “Your mother has wandering hands,” before stalking away.
“I should have told him about the extra keepsake card,” Hattie said absently, stroking the top of the box.
Elias was pulling a face. “What do you think my mother did to him?”
“Hm?” said Hattie, blinking away her reverie. “Oh, I don’t know. Women are always trying to grope the young men at the showcase, though. It’s far worse than the other way ’round. They’re used to it, especially Rhys.”
“Why ‘especially’?”
“Because,” she said with a shrug. “He is the pretty one.”
That only deepened Elias’s frown. “You think he’s pretty?”
The applause stopped her from answering. Though now that she had a moment to think, she supposed that Rhys got the worst of it because one of his tricks was inviting the crowd to find where he’d hidden things he’d just made disappear.
Yes, in retrospect, Errol and Malcolm had a similar number of admirers, just fewer opportunities to be handled by them.
“If he’s the pretty one,” Elias began again, as soon as the applause had died down, “what are Mal and Errol?”
She wrinkled her brow, turning to study him. “The charmer,” she said, “and the strapping one. You know this, don’t you? Ruby is the vixen. Monica the angel. Libba the Valkyrie.”
“And you?” he asked. “Me?”
She shrugged. “I have never asked.”
“You asked about the others?” he clarified, raising his brows in disbelief. “It sounded like you chose those titles.”
“Me? No. I’m useless at such things,” she said with a laugh. “I am the one who is yours, I suppose. And you are the one who is mine.”
“Hm,” he said, looking unconvinced. “I suppose.”
“The pretty one,” he said again with a huff. “I suppose that’s better than ‘the Welsh one.’”
“Oh, he would certainly think so,” she agreed.
“Why did he give you that box?” Elias asked, suddenly staring down at it with distaste. “I thought it would go in the rubbish after the showcase.”
“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you?” she replied, plucking at the remains of her erstwhile silk dressing gown. “No, I intend to repurpose what is left of my poor robe. That is what you get for thieving.”
“I didn’t steal it,” he argued. “I improved upon it. The red one is much better.”
“I must discourage such actions in the future, Elias,” she replied with a raise of her brassy brows. “Lest you take it upon yourself to commandeer my other gifts from male royals.”
“‘Other gifts’?” he repeated as she turned to walk back into the crowd. “Hattie! What other gifts?! Harriet!”
She only smiled as she heard him following her.
And did not answer.
*
Elias bid farewell to his parents as the last of the props were being taken down.
He had intended only to walk over and thank them for attending and assure them that their allowance would be restored on the morrow, but his mother stopped him with a hand to his arm and a nervous press of her lips.
“Do you mind terribly,” she said as her husband stifled a gigantic yawn behind her, “if we stay another night at the inn? It is just that it seems very late now to head back toward home.”
“Of course,” he said, blinking in surprise at the fact that it was a request and not a demand. “I can’t imagine doing anything but sleeping after this myself.”
She nodded, giving him a tight little smile. “Oh, good. Yes, that is good. And we will depart in the morning. I asked your Harriet if I might write to her and she said it was all right, though I think she is still a bit cross with me.”
“Hattie doesn’t get cross,” he told her. “Not really. If you write, she will write you back.”
“A wife who doesn’t get cross?” his stepfather echoed, yawning again. “Marvels continue.”
Elias rolled his eyes and waved them off, turning toward the carriage that awaited him with his wife inside.
When he crossed the drive and stepped into the thing, he found she had Peach in her lap and both had already begun to doze against the doorframe next to her.
It warmed him, and instead of slapping the roof as one often did, he leaned out and motioned to the driver so that he would not startle them back to the land of waking. And this way, for the whole of the ride, he could observe her in her slumber, cradling a tiny pig in her royal skirts.
By the time they’d arrived at the house, she had been jostled enough that she had started to wake on her own, her eyelids fluttering and her mouth pursing in clear disapproval at the interruption.
“Come on,” he said as the doors opened. “You don’t want to fall asleep in a corset.”
She insisted on carrying Peach herself back up to the room, pig under one arm and tiger-striped trick box under the other, blinking blearily as she stumbled forward the whole way.
Once inside their suite, however, she did relinquish both and submit to his assistance in getting out of the layered confines of her costume.
“You asked if I knew how to lace a corset,” he reminded her as he slid the suede layer off her arms, the full skirt of her dress crinkling around her legs. “What if I didn’t know how to unlace it afterward?”
“Then I should be very concerned for you,” she replied sleepily. “And your motivations.”
He laughed and then proceeded to demonstrate that his motivations were not a cause for concern at all, easing the grip around her ribs and freeing her from the press of fabric that had held her aloft all day.
“Polish,” he said as she stepped toward the waiting bath, her chemise floating around her legs. “It was very … dense. Wasn’t it? Chewy.”
“‘Chewy,’” she echoed with a dreamy sound of something like approval. “Yes, it is rather, isn’t it? Uwielbiam ci?.”
“Indeed?” he replied, watching her lift the chemise off and step into the warm water with a sigh of relief. “And what does that mean?”
She smiled at him drowsily, dropping her head to the side onto her shoulder, the braid sagging down over her ear where the pins had come loose against her scalp, tilting her crown.
“Ah,” he said, his heart aching. “The feeling is mutual. Shall I unbraid your hair?”
“Once I am clean,” she murmured, turning and sinking down into the water until her breath bubbled up from beneath it, submerged to her cheekbones.
He watched her with a fond warmth in his bones, removing his orange cravat and unbuttoning his marigold waistcoat, sighing at the freedom of his own ribs after a long day as he craned his neck from side to side.
He emptied his jacket pockets before sliding it off, carefully setting the fan of art cards on the bed and considering them as he shrugged himself down to his shirtsleeves and began to tug up the tail of it from his waistband.
Yes, there was no doubt. There were eight of them.
Not seven.
Eight.
He paused, reaching out to spread them into a larger spray across the coverlet, examining the destinations depicted on each card.
And he spotted the new one immediately.
Brighton, it read. England.
He frowned at it, pulling his shirt over his head. Blinking. Shaking his head. Giving his eyes a rub.
But it was still there.
Behind him, he could hear his wife emerging from the bath.
“Hattie,” he said, pulling the new card forward with two fingertips and then lifting it up, tentatively, in front of his face. “You were right. Someone put a new one in with the old.”
“Oh?” she said, and a few moments later, she appeared at his side, her skin damp and warm through the clinging fabric of her red dressing gown. “May I see?”
He passed it to her with a frown.
It was not like the others, each a small piece of art Willa had requested from the person in her correspondence, representing the place from which they were writing. Many of them were only identified on back, where the message was penned.
This one did not have art on it, just a rough sketch of a shingle beach and the name Brighton penned in bold calligraphy on the front, as though it were created in a hurry.
Hattie flipped it over, her eyes moving over the back.
“Not much of a message. It just says, ‘Felicitations’ in the same calligraphy.”
Elias could only make a confused mumbling noise and shrug. “A jest, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” she said, still frowning, her damp fingers toying with the corner. “‘Felicitations.’ It can mean ‘good work’ or it can be an expression of congratulations, I suppose. Perhaps it is a well-wisher from our wedding or a person who approved of the showcase.”
He nodded, his spine giving a tingle. “That’s likely all it is.”
“Yes,” she said, her tone entirely unconvincing. “Most likely.”
Still, she did not stow it with the others, which she gathered up carefully and carried back to the salon.
This one, Elias noted, she lifted carefully and folded into a sheet of tissue that she withdrew from her bedside table before tucking it into the compartment within.
“Felicitations,” she said again, softly to herself, likely unaware she’d spoken at all, then she looked at him and smiled. “Elias, you should wash while the water is still warm. And then come to bed, while I still am.”