“You must forgive us for our prying,” Malcolm said, as diplomatic as a royal envoy. “You left the house so long ago, and we are all just trying to remember who you are.”
“Or find out for the first time, as it were?” Elias suggested, tilting his head. “The disorientation is mutual, at the very least.”
“It is easy to forget being a child,” Hattie said softly, gazing at him across the candles and food. “You left just as we were growing into something new, so in a way, it really is like meeting for the first time again, isn’t it?”
He glanced back at her, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “I certainly hope so,” he said. “Miss French.”
Libba cleared her throat. “Have you chosen a poem to read for the opening of the showcase yet, Elias?” she asked, louder than strictly necessary. “Willa always chose one about prodigiousness, but perhaps you’ve different tastes.”
“I… What?” he said, blinking twice before he turned his eyes from Hattie to Libba. “No one has said anything about a poem.”
“That’s not true,” she said, smirking. “I just did.”
“Perhaps an elegy,” Monica said thoughtfully, pressing the handle of her fork into her bottom lip. “Or something wistful.”
“Are you wistful, Lord Selwyn?” Malcolm asked, in a tone that suggested he knew that Elias was not.
“If the occasion calls for it,” Elias replied, archly enough that Malcolm looked impressed. “I shall have to ponder the matter.”
“We should have told you,” Monica said apologetically. “It is easy to forget you have not always been here with us, now that you are again.”
He looked baffled and perhaps a little sheepish at what she’d said, giving her a slight nod and then finally, at long last and with the mercy of the angels, reaching out and taking up the damned wineglass.
Hattie exhaled, her shoulders drooping.
She watched with the oddest feeling of relief as he began his ritual with the glass, rotating it in his fingers, tracing the patterns, touching the stem. It felt like someone had finally fixed a clock that was just a little bit off.
“Do you like poetry, Miss French?” Elias asked her, over the rim of the wineglass. “As our resident linguaphile, you must have an opinion on it.”
She paused, licking her lips, and reached for her own glass to moisten her throat, considering the question.
“Sometimes,” she said. “When the poem is written in obvious reverence for the beats and sounds of a language. When it has rhythm or motion or clever double meaning. But often, I find it just meanders and sometimes is a little nonsensical.”
“Abstract, you mean,” Libba said, tilting her curly head to the side.
Hattie frowned. “No, I mean nonsensical. Simile pushed past the point of credulity. It isn’t beautiful anymore when it’s bizarre.”
“And here I thought that’s when it was at pinnacle,” Rhys said, giving an exaggerated frown. “I don’t mind the surreal. It’s often a metaphor for something else, after all.”
Hattie sighed. “So it is another instance of people saying something other than what they mean. Yes, I suppose that is why I don’t like it.”
At this juncture, the table erupted into several threads of conversation, dissecting this school of thought and the merits of abstraction in poetry and indeed, art in general.
Hattie crossed her arms and simply listened, for she had already said all there was to say on the matter.
Elias, however, said nothing at all.
He simply continued to make love to his wineglass and watch her as he did so. He did not say what he was thinking. Or what he meant. Or anything whatsoever.
And Hattie suspected that was deliberate.
For he was choosing to speak in the one language she had not yet mastered, instead.
Chapter Eleven
Elias had beenintending to address something when he’d come home that night, but there was just something about entering a room filled to the brim with Willa’s full menagerie that scrambled his tidy thoughts to scraps of rubbish.
Even if tonight’s dinner had been verging on enjoyable, it had still addled him.
