The other parts had been too. She had seen the Continent. She had translated treaty negotiations and taught children fairy tales in a dozen languages. She had seen royal courts and remote villages and everything in between. She had walked sandstone paths in blazing sunlight and padded over snow deeper than two men standing foot to shoulder, with glittering palaces on one side and mud huts on the other. She had sailed and walked and ridden between idyllic meadows, towering mountains, dunes of sand, and even war-torn urban throngs.
And somehow, none of that had changed a single thing about Starling’s Rest.
She needed to speak to Elias.
“Are you all right, Hattie?” Errol asked, still standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “Do you need anything?”
She swallowed, dropping her hands at her sides, and shook her head. “No. No, I am well,” she told him. “Are you?”
He nodded, still looking unconvinced, but didn’t stop her as she walked past him out into the halls, turning left instead of right, toward the boys’ rooms.
She passed by Rhys’s bedroom, the door flung open as he was already making a mess of the linens.
“I know I left it here!” he cried to no one in particular. “Where the devil is it?”
She passed Malcolm’s room, which was shut.
Elias’s room was at the end of the hall.
She hadn’t stood in front of this door in a very, very long time. If someone had asked her, some weeks ago, if she’deverstood in front of it at all, she might have saidno.
That was how long it had been.
She could almost hear the arguing behind it, echoing through the past. She could almost feel the sting of salt dried on her eyelashes and the chill of wet shoes that had picked up grit and rocks on the walk back from the pier.
“I don’t want to study here! I want you to send me to Eton! Or Harrow! Or to bloody Cheapside, for all I care! Not here anymore!”
“Elias Selwyn, you are an ungrateful, spoiled, little fool,” Willa had chided back. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I can’t bear it anymore. I hate it.”
“You hate what?” she’d demanded. “All the best tutors? The most brilliant minds of your age learning alongside you? The challenge?”
“Whatever you need to believe!” he had shouted back. “Just go away. And let me go away too!”
Hattie blinked, the world hazy and blurred in front of her.
She shifted, half-expecting to still find sand in her shoes.
“Just come along with us after dinner,” Malcolm said, emerging from Elias’s door so suddenly that she startled, hopping back a step. “It’ll do you some good to get out of this house.”
“I’ll consider it,” Elias replied, sounding neither committed nor dismissive as Mal grinned and shook his head, turning back toward the hall.
“Oh,” he said, spotting Hattie and hesitating on closing the door behind him. “Come to see your fiancé?”
“I need to see Elias,” she replied, instead of answering.
Mal raised his dark eyebrows, stepping to the side and gesturing for her to go in.
So she did. And she heard him close the door behind her.
Elias was seated on the edge of the bed. He’d taken off his jacket and cravat and was slumped forward, staring at the carpet between his shoes, his dark hair flashing almost white where the sunlight hit it from the window.
He looked very different, Harriet thought. It wasn’t only that he was grown now, or slender, or handsome. It was something else.
She couldn’t quite name it.
She folded her hands in front of her and waited until he looked up at her, which he did with a sigh. “Yes?” he said, already impatient.
