“‘Soothe’ me,” he repeated, almost dreamily, chuckling to himself like he’d gone mad. “You know,” he said, glancing up, “I have oft wondered if any of you are actually sad that she is dead. I know she requested this bizarre celebration of a requiem, but… none of you are acting as though it were strange at all.”
Hattie blinked, a little thump of pain landing between her breasts, and frowned at him. “Areyousad?”
He watched her for a moment, also frowning, and sighed, leaning back against the chaise, dropping his head into the shaft of sunlight from the window, and turned his eyes up to theceiling. “Yes,” he said. “I think I am. That’s a little stupid, isn’t it? I don’t think she even liked me.”
Hattie hesitated for a moment, uncertain what the right thing to say was, what the right language for this could be.
She found herself crossing the room without deciding she ought to and sinking into the chaise at his side. It was a surprise, she noted, how naturally her body moved in this way, and with intention, reached out to place her hand over his, dipping her fingers into the recesses between his knuckles.
“I cannot accept that she is actually dead,” she whispered. “So it is hard to know what to feel. In her letter to me, she speaks of her body in the earth and a gravestone atop it, of my visiting her on a bench next to her resting place and speaking to her there. But there is no body. She is not here. We do not know where she is or what happened.”
“You think she is alive?” he asked, turning his head from where it was cradled against the top of the chaise and looking at her through the glare of sunlight. “She just stopped communicating with everyone seven years ago?”
Hattie shrugged, giving a little sigh. “Perhaps. She loved to travel and she was never particularly forthcoming about her motivations or aims. I would rather believe she has started anew somewhere sunny and foreign than consider that she wandered into tragedy alone, and far from home.”
He gave a little smile, a short, reluctant chuckle escaping his chest. “Perhaps she married a villager on some remote island,” he said, “and has a gaggle of loinclothed children to look after now.”
“It would make keeping up with her letters very difficult,” Hattie agreed, mirroring his little smile. “I stopped writing to her as often, you know. And so she stopped writing to me as well. If I hadn’t done that, I might have noticed how long it had been since anyone had heard from her.”
“Noticing wouldn’t likely have changed anything,” he told her. “And you were doing what she wished you to do. You were living your life, fulfilling your potential, and so on.”
“Was I?” she said, considering it. “If that is what she wanted for us all, then why anchor us here again as her final wish? Perhaps we oughtn’t have left in the first place.”
He frowned, looking down at her slender fingers stroking the spaces between his knuckles. “Do you not wish to stay here?” he asked. “For the year to come? After that?”
“I don’t wish to leave in any active way,” she replied, turning the thought over in her head. “Do you?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. I thought I would. I thought I’d come here and listen to the will and get back to Hounslow as fast as my carriage would get me there. The year imposition sounded outrageous initially, but now… I don’t know. I can’t imagine going back.”
“Neither can I,” she agreed. “Even though it is my fault you left this place for so long, Elias, I am glad you have found your way home again.”
He was silent for a moment, his brows drawing together as his gaze snapped up to meet hers. “It was not your fault I left.”
“It was,” she protested. “It is all right. I am not too delicate to know my faults. I said that awful thing to you that day and—”
“Hattie!” he said, sounding a little desperate somehow.
It did silence her.
He gave an odd, dry laugh, shaking his head. “I didn’t leave because of what you said. I didn’t even leave because of what I did, though that was absolutely humiliating enough that I wished to run as far and fast as I could from here and never look back. I was convinced that I couldn’t belong here. It was no one’s direct doing but my own.”
“But you are the baron,” she protested, shaking her head. “You are theonlyone who belongs here.”
He shrugged, coloring a little. “It didn’t seem that way to me then. Willa was forced to raise me. She didn’t choose me. And she wouldn’t have. I knew that and she did too.”
Hattie tensed, frustration fluttering against the bones in her throat, flapping like wings. It was like the indignation she felt at how wrong he was had slowed the formation of her ability to correct him into coherent words, catching them halfway between the mud of thought and the flint of speech behind her tongue.
“She didn’t dislike you, Elias,” she finally managed to blurt out. “Not in the way you mean.”
He laughed outright then, flipping his hand over under hers and dragging his fingertips against the palm of her hand. “No? In what way did she dislike me?”
“The way we often dislike a mirror,” Hattie said seriously. “The day you finally convinced her to let you go away, I was outside the door, still wet from the pier. I was eavesdropping. And after, she stalked out and said to me, ‘That boy is too much like me to ever listen to a word from my mouth.’”
“She didn’t say that,” he protested, a little hopeful, by Hattie’s estimation.
She raised her eyebrows. “I am a terrible liar,” she reminded him. “She also got angry at Ruby once and told her that one day, she would be grown and fate had a way of forcing you to contend with copies of your own youthful insufferableness. She got close to Ruby’s face and said she could not wait to watch her raise a daughter.”
“What did Ruby say?” he asked, his smile looking steadier now, more real.
