Hattie blinked at him, a little bleary. “Do I know you?”
“Can you still do it?” he asked again instead of answering. “How about… hm…your mum’s a yellow dog with the mumps?”
Hattie stared at him, blinking a few times and then sighed and nodded, pushing herself to her feet. She swiped up the remainder of her glass, which was only about a quarter full now, and held it as she stepped onto the booth to stand above the others, thrusting it out above them all as they turned their attention to her.
“Ta mère est une chienne jaune avec les oreillons,” she announced, stomping her foot once to a wave of light applause. “Deine Mutter ist eine gelbe Hündin mit Mumps! Din mor er en gul hund med fåresyge!”
Elias stared at her, stomping and announcing maternal insults in various languages, his heart climbing up to lodge in his throat.
Every new translation drew a louder cheer from the assembled crowd as she grinned, sipped her ale, and swished her skirts around. “Tha do mhàthair ’na cù buidhe le a’ phlàigh nan cnàmhan!” she cried, raising the glass with its little wisp of foam still swirling at the bottom, stomping again at the cheer. “And fifth… hm.” She pondered, teetering a little on herpedestal, then brightening and holding her glass up in a toast and crying, “Tvoya mat’. Zhyóltaya sobáka, bol’náya svínkoy!! Vashe zdaróv’ye!”
The room roared at the final translation and several of the onlookers joined her in knocking back the remainders of what was in their glasses as she collapsed into Libba’s and Monica’s waiting arms, giggling to herself in a slump of poofed-out yellow skirts and bronzed, bouncing curls falling over her brow.
Elias stared down at his own drink, spitting out the odd, lazy bubble opposite Hattie’s effervescent performance, and frowned.
“Cheers,” Errol Cagney said, tapping his glass against Elias’s with a knowing smirk. “Orvashe zdaróv’ye, I suppose.”
Chapter Six
Hattie had, eventually,worked up the courage to go speak to Elias Selwyn again.
Unfortunately, she had done so after enough pints of ale that her vision was wobbly, and she wasn’t entirely sure he was still inside the pub.
She gripped the table, hunched over a cache of empty glasses, searching the crowd for a well-combed top of dark hair or perhaps a flash of those lovely, blue eyes, but saw only Libba, dressed as Princess Xandine of the African Isles, winning a third gift from a group of admirers in a corner near the bar, and Malcolm being hassled to perform his numbers trick from his banker friends.
“Go on, Mal,” Jasper Townsend encouraged him, grinning over his own drink, gone almost as red as his hair. “You know you love to do it.”
“Oh, all right, all right,” Malcolm had allowed, shrugging off his jacket and wiggling his fingers as he prepared to dazzle the masses. It wasn’t until his touch fell onto the fabric at his wrist, with the intent of rolling up his sleeves, that his expression fell.
There was a ticking few seconds while his face registered disbelief that his golden cufflinks were gone and then outrage, and then his head snapped up. “Rhys!” he boomed. “Where is that little bastard?!”
“Gone,” Monica said wanly from her spot flat on her back in the booth seats, her wisps of blonde hair falling off the edge as she looked at Malcolm from an upside-down perspective. “Gone to slay Miss Persephone, remember?”
“I will kill… I will… maim!” Malcolm was sputtering, as his friends dissolved into guffawing laughter.
Hattie frowned.
It seemed Elias had left as well.
She couldn’t find him.
“‘Flatulence in a jar,’” she murmured to herself, dejected, as she sank back to sitting.
It wasn’t until Errol came and lifted her up that she realized she had gone directly to the pub floor, her legs crossed under her skirt, instead of landing in a chair.
“All right, then,” he decided, not outright laughing at her but clearly hiding the urge. “You too, Monica. Let’s go home.”
“Oh, spoilsport,” Monica said dreamily, more of her hair tumbling out of its chignon from her head’s dangling position over the corner of the booth cushion.
It took him another quarter hour to wrangle the rest of them, especially since he had to do so with Libba by sending her hand signals and meaningful glares from across the room, lest her ruse be discovered, but he did manage it.
They marched back to Starling’s Rest after him as the sky turned a yawning violet, the sun tickling under the horizon with all its threats of daylight and consequences.
Ruby yawned heavily from the front, collapsing against Errol as they walked, her skirt sagging and picking up grit from the ground as she wove around on the dirt path. “D’you think Mr. Harcourt is very cross? Is he our papa now?”
“He isnot,” Monica said, as sternly as she was able, which was to say, as gentle as a lamb.
“Oh, no?” Ruby tittered. “Don’t want a little discipline from the silver barrister, Miss Thresher?”
