She stared back at him, her narrow throat flexing as though she were trying to get the question down into her belly, to digest it before she could justify answering it. Apparently, it was not an agreeable meal, because she turned abruptly and pointed at the two heavy mahogany panels in front of them.
“This is the door,” she announced, staring ahead blankly.
He turned and looked at them, frowning. “I know that, Harriet,” he said, sharper than he ought to have. “Obviously.”
He stepped past her, ignoring the scent she wore, something spiced and unusual, just like she was, and pushed the key into the lock, rotating it first to the left, which found no purchase, and then to the right.
The door swung open like it had been recently oiled and accustomed to use, shafts of sunlight dancing, swirling in the cavernous apartment of rooms that it revealed to them as both panels glided inward on their hinges.
Elias left the key in the door, taking a slow, deliberate step over the threshold with the same tentative and tense posture he’d use on the battlefield or hunting a boar. It wasn’t that he half-expected Willa to jump out from behind a tapestry necessarily, only that it was impossible not to feel her presence here, in this place.
He paused only once, when he felt the warm grasp of both of Harriet French’s hands encircle his bicep, her body clinging to his side as she followed him into the room. Oddly, it eased his own tension about the place.
He caught her scent again, the spiced notes lingering on the air and settling over the fabric of his jacket.
Most of the furniture had been covered and the room had a musty quality to it, despite having been occasionally cleaned over the years, due to the windows remaining shut for so long.
He looked around until his eyes fell on an old lantern sitting on the mantel of the fireplace, right next to a tinderbox, and gave a little sigh of relief.
“Do you think that still has any oil in it?” he asked Hattie, nodding toward the lantern.
She didn’t answer immediately, her eyes drawn instead to the painting hung above the mantel. It was a family he did not recognize, a pale, bearded man and a smiling woman, both with a hand on either shoulder of their young daughter.
“That’s Willa,” Hattie said, sounding amazed. “As a little girl.”
“No,” said Elias, squinting in the dimming light. “She was never a child, surely.”
The child did have an air about her, her chin lifted and dark eyes painted with a glint to them. Her hair was the correct shade of rich auburn and there were the tightly coiled curls.
But this was no noble house portrait. If Elias had to guess, the people in it were merchant class at most.
“Starling,” he murmured to himself, glancing down at Hattie. “I’ve never met anyone else from her maiden line. Have you?”
Hattie shook her head. “No. But she told me once that she was born wealthy, not titled, so I always assumed she married into the peerage.”
“Well, that’s something to chew on,” Elias said, frowning. “I could write to my parents and ask, though I couldn’t guarantee they’d ever open the letter, much less answer it, unless I included some bank notes with the inquiry.”
Hattie squeezed his arm, making him look down into her frowning face. “Is that true?”
He gave a short, humorless chuckle. “It doesn’t matter. I was only jesting. Let me see if I can get that lantern lit.”
He pressed his lips together at the cold band that seemed to glow around his arm when her hands slid away from his bicep, even though it had been his own doing, his own brisk removal of himself from her attempt at closeness.
He took up the tinderbox, listening to the way she turned and moved about the room as he attempted to find a spark. It gave his hands something to do. It gave his eyes something to watch. His mind something in which to lose itself.
Was he being serpentine, just now?
Was he living up to his name?
“Ah, there we go,” he said, just a little too heartily as the flame sparked to life. “There’s a bit of oil in the old girl after all.”
He took up the lantern by the handle and turned to find Hattie peeking under sheets, flipping them halfway up as she went, as though to mark her progress in case she forgot her way back.
“There is a pianoforte,” she told him, those amber eyes of hers fixed on the flame in his hand. “We need not keep it up here. I’ve no ear for music.”
“No?” he said, raising his brows. “Isn’t that just another language to you?”
She paused, her fist clenching around the sheet above an armchair, and grimaced. “Yes and no,” she said. “I can read the sheet music easily enough. I can hear it, when it’s spelled out, in thesolfège, you know? Do-re-mi and so on. I amhopelessat recreating it. Not with an instrument, not with my voice. It vexes me so.”
