The man froze, staring at her with his mouth hanging open.
“I am being teased,” he guessed, looking up at the baroness for confirmation. “Are you teasing me, Willa?”
“I am not,” the baroness said, sounding utterly pleased. “Hattie, my girl. I’m afraid I’m stuck attending this funeral for the next several hours, but would you be a dear and fetch a footman for me? He can take you back to the foundling home to gather your things and bring them here.”
“‘Bring them here’?” Hattie repeated, her hand still throbbing, her mind still muddled and dazed. “To live in the kitchens?”
“No, my dear girl,” the baroness said with a grin. “You will be living upstairs with me. You see, death sometimes does funny things to our lives. I suppose you already know that, as an orphan?”
“Willa!” the Russian man balked, wrinkling his nose in distaste and stalking away, muttering to himself.
Hattie gave an uncertain lift of her shoulder. “Well, yes,” she said. “If I had parents, I suppose things would be different.”
“Precisely,” the baroness said with pleasure. “When my husband the baron died, my life changed too. I’ve been wondering how I ought to change with it, and then I walked past you, screaming profanity that would sober a demon in mine own kitchens. Perhaps it is fate.”
“Fortuna,” said Hattie, teetering a little on her feet. “Isn’t that funny? There’s Fortuna and then there are the Fates. Do you think they get along?”
“No,” said the baroness with a laugh. “I do not.”
“I’ll just go get the footman,” Hattie said, turning and wavering as the room turned further, even after she had stopped.
The last thing she saw before she slumped to the floor was that other child. The boy, Elias.
He had a valise with him, she saw. He was holding a valise.
Americans called it a ‘grip.’
She opened her mouth to tell him that, because he clearly was expecting her to say something, the way he was staring.
But the words didn’t come out.
Because she fainted.
Part I
The Rule of Seven
Chapter One
London, Fifteen Years Later
The journey fromSaint Petersburg to London was meant to take five weeks.
Because of the weather, it had taken seven.
Harriet French supposed that was appropriate, given the circumstances. Seven, in her estimation, was a canary-yellow color that sounded of viola strings and smelled of sun and sea.
It had been seven years since her adoptive mother, warden, and proprietress, the Dowager Baroness Selwyn had gone missing. Seven weeks from her receipt of the letter in the tsar’s palace to the day they turned into the Thames port alley. Seven steps from the deck to the pier.
And she touched seven fingers with the curve of her thumbnail as she surveyed the awaiting crowd on the embankment, looking for a flash of silver hair and a well-tailored black suit. Later, she would guess it took her exactly seven minutes to find him.
“Miss French!” the baroness’s steadfast, lifelong friend and devoted barrister had called, booming and certain, his hand waving over the crowd. “Miss Harriet French! Over here, if you please!”
“Oh, Mr. Harcourt,” she breathed, turning with a sag of relief and waving back. “There you are. For a moment, I feared you’d forgotten me.”
“I’ve an ironclad memory, I assure you,” the silver-haired barrister said fondly, trotting up to meet her. “Are your trunks still aboard?”
She nodded, reaching up to brush the salt-touched strands of her brassy curls. “I thought some of the others would be with you,” she confessed. “At least Malcolm, as we are in London.”
