“Barren,” Hattie continued, pausing, and frowning. “Barren Fields.”
Monica stopped, turning around with a wrinkle of her brow. “Harriet? You’re delirious.”
“I… No,” she said, shaking her head and holding a hand up. “I’m… almost recalling something. I… think?”
“Hattie,” Monica said, her voice gone soothing like it would to reason with a feral cat. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”
Hattie let herself be shuffled into her bedroom, but her mind was clawing itself back awake, the words tumbling over one another, climbing over their own syllables, swinging through their vowels, and clambering atop the consonants of each other.
“That man called you ‘my lord.’ Sometimes I forget that you are the baron now. Baron Elias. That is very fine. You must be proud. Or excited. Or both. I know I would be.
“But baron is a funny sort of title, isn’t it? It sounds like ‘barren,’ which is a bad thing. You know, like barren women or barren fields. And Fields is quite a common surname. Can you imagine if your inherited barony was from an estate called Fields? You’d be Baron Fields!”
She collapsed forward onto the bed, her hands catching in the blankets just the way they had caught in the surf that day, when Elias had punted her right off the edge of the pier and into the water, mid-ramble.
She drew in a deep breath, certain she could taste the briny Channel water in her mouth, her skin erupting in gooseflesh.
Christ, but that had been insensitive, hadn’t it?
He had lost his uncle.
He had been born to an unusual family, one where the patriarch spent most of his life waiting to die. His mother had married the baron’s younger brother, perhaps anticipating the eventual shift of power, but he too had died while she had been still pregnant with Elias. She’d then married the closest male cousin, Elias’s stepfather, Wallace Selwyn, for good measure.
Elias had been born as a placeholder regardless. An expectation of death. Heir to a doomed man.
And she’d called him…
Barren fields.
She moaned, her head throbbing, and climbed into the bed, pushing her face into a pillow.
She’d been all of twelve years old that day, hadn’t she? Certainly no more than thirteen. She had wanted nothing in the world so much as Elias Selwyn’s friendship back then. His approval. His…
Was he really still upset about that?
Really?
Hadn’t he gotten her back in turn by shoving her into the blasted ocean?
Hattie pulled the pillow up around her face and over her ears, as though she could stifle the sound of thoughts that were coming from inside her head, which of course was ridiculous. She squeezed her eyes shut and instructed herself in a dozen different tongues tosleep.
Because that always worked.
She sighed, rolling onto her back and opening her eyes a sliver, just enough to glare through her lashes at the cheery sunlight starting to peek in through her curtains.
She was going to have a bottle ache.
She knew it.
Whyhad she forgotten about that day on the pier? Shame? Anger?
She remembered coming up out of the water, furious and confused and spitting salt water, clawing her way up the shingles and onto the shore in her ruined muslin dress. Elias had just been standing there, staring at her vacantly, like he couldn’t quite believe he’d done what he had.
He hadn’t apologized or gloated oranything. He’d just turned and walked away.
And then Willa had let him go to Eton.
Hattie sat up, groaning and moving to pull the pins out of her hair. At least she’d give herself some small chance of comfort, she thought. She could loosen her hair and undress. She could do that.
