The barrister turned and lifted two fingers to a porter he had evidently secured prior to their business, pointing to the ship with the implicit instructions to retrieve Hattie’s things. “I’ve secured rooms for you tonight at an inn in Bloomsbury,” he informed her as he offered his elbow and nodded toward the path to the street. “My thinking was that you should rest before you set off again straight away for Brighton, but after my arrival here, I realized I am going to need your help, anyhow.”
“My help doing what, sir?” she asked, following him toward a gleaming black hackney coach that awaited them beyond the throng. “I confess, your letter relayed your urgency effectively, but not so much anything else. I’m not entirely sure why I am here.”
He heaved a heavy sigh, shaking his head a little mournfully. “I did specify,” he reminded her, “that the passage of seven years since anyone has seen the dowager baroness means that the law now considers her deceased.”
“Yes, of course,” said Hattie, pausing to be assisted into the carriage. She waited until the doors closed to speak again, watching Mr. Harcourt settle in across from her. “That doesn’t mean that she is.”
“For my purposes, my dear, I’m afraid that it does,” he told her seriously. “Which means that her estate has entered a state of bequeathment escrow until such a time as her last will and testament can be read, a stipulation that requires the physical presence of all her heirs. I did not realize until I started tracking you all down how elusive the group of you has become.”
“The seven of us,” she said, with a wry, little twist of her lips. “Isn’t that funny? Seven heirs. Seven years. Did you know King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn wore canary yellow on the day Catherine of Aragon died? Yellow is believed to have been a color of mourning in Spain, from whence she hailed.”
He blinked at her, clearly a little taken aback. “Did they, indeed?”
“Many people thought they were celebrating her demise,” Hattie said, settling back as the carriage began to move and gazing out the window. “They were not through their clothing, though I suppose they might have been otherwise.”
There was a beat of silence, a lingering shift from the port sounds to the streets as the wheels of the carriage turned onto the street proper.
Mr. Harcourt cleared his throat. “Eight,” he said, politely.
Hattie turned back to him, frowning. “Pardon?”
“There are eight of you,” he said to her. “Not seven.”
She shook her head, her brow wrinkling as she ran through the list of wards who had been raised alongside her at Starling’s Rest, her thumbnail tapping on those seven fingers again. “Myself,” she said, remembering them in the order in which they’d come into the home. “Malcolm and Libba. Ruby, Errol, Monica, and Rhys. Seven.”
“Ah, Libba,” said Mr. Harcourt, grimacing. “I should mention we are headed to Giltspur Street Compter before we move onto the inn, to retrieve Miss Elizabeth. Or Miss Liberty, I believe, as she is now called.”
“Giltspur Street!” Hattie balked. “She is in jail?!”
He nodded. “I would have gotten her out yesterday, when I found her, but I’m afraid I was under explicit instructions to contact you and only the executor of the baroness’s will first and foremost, which, of course, is you. My hands were tied, so to speak.”
“It sounds like Libba’s are too!” Hattie exclaimed. “What has she done?”
“She was caught with some smuggled goods,” he told her with a grimace. “French textiles and spirits, I believe. Nothing half the households in Mayfair don’t also have in their pantries. I will represent her and clear it with the magistrate before we start back to Brighton. We can also retrieve her brother while we are here. For the others, I will be relying on you to locate and contact them.”
“The six others,” she said again, tapping that thumbnail. “Seven.”
“Eight,” the barrister corrected with a sigh. “You are forgetting Elias Selwyn, the new baron and rightful heir of all the land under Starling’s Rest.”
Hattie stared for a moment, her mind whirring.
Eight was very different.
Eight was dark blue. Somber. Stormy. Eight smelled of fire.
“Elias,” she repeated slowly, flashes of a taciturn, pudgy boy with rosy cheeks and a frowning demeanor in the corners of Starling’s Rest flickering into her mind. “Yes. I remember him. He was already baron. He’s been baron this whole time.”
“More or less,” the barrister agreed with a shrug. “But his inheritance was complicated and contingent while the dowager baroness still lived. All will be explained in Brighton, I assure you. Ah, here we are. Shall we retrieve Miss Lennox?”
“Smuggled goods,” Hattie tutted, waiting for the door to be wrenched open. “What is she about these days? I thought she was an actress.”
“You will have to ask her,” Mr. Harcourt said as they entered the cavernous foyer of the holding chamber. “I will have to ask her too, I suppose. Ah, there’s the clerk now. I’ll only be a moment.”
Hattie nodded, turning and looking for a place to wait.
The only option was a long, mean-looking wooden bench. It had no legs. Instead, it had been nailed directly into the brick wall, as though anyone who might come here and sit on it would also be just as likely to make off with it down the street.
She cleared her throat and frowned, giving the bench a little wipe with her kerchief before she settled onto it.
