“That she would simply never have a child,” Hattie replied earnestly. “At which point Willa laughed and said such abstinence hadn’t saved her from the trial of it, so why should it save Ruby, either?”
“Insufferableness,” Elias repeated. “What a word.”
“It is unwieldy,” Hattie agreed. “But that’s why I remember it, maybe. Ugly words stick in the mind.”
He chuckled again, pressing his thumb against her palm. “I did ask Mr. Harcourt about Willa’s family,” he said. “After you reminded me. He didn’t say much that was useful, just that she was an orphan by the time she married and came into the marriage with a hefty fortune.”
“Perhaps her name was not even truly Starling, then,” said Hattie, watching their entwined hands with a fascination that was bubbling somewhere at the juncture of her ribs, threatening to hiccup out of her mouth if she did not focus elsewhere. “It might be like my surname and Ruby’s, given by a foundling home. A noun to describe or something from a list.”
“A noun?” Elias said, looking surprised. “Your parents were not called French?”
She shook her head. “I do not think so, though I suppose anything is possible. They gave me that name because my first word was a French one. I’d learned from all the French maids and minders who flooded into Brighton when we were young, fleeing the unrest. And Ruby was always so tiny, so much smaller than the other girls her age, so she is called ‘Little.’ Some children were just given the color of their hair or the month they were delivered to the home.”
He stared at her, those dark-blue eyes searching her face. “That seems rather callous,” he said softly.
“Does it?” she responded. “I can’t say it is any less sentimental than families called ‘Cooper’ or ‘Fletcher’ because some ancestor made barrels or arrows. Can you?”
He blinked, a flicker of something like awe passing over his face. “I suppose not,” he admitted. “I do not even know what ‘Selwyn’ means.”
“It means ‘good friend,’” she said immediately. “From Old or Middle English. ‘Sele’ could also mean… hm, ‘prosperous’ or ‘fortunate,’ rather than ‘good.’ So it could also be ‘lucky friend’ or ‘auspicious friend.’”
He made a little sound in his throat, half choke, half laugh. “Well,” he said. “I’d say my father has lost the plot, but I know enough Coopers and Fletchers who don’t make a damn thing out of wood, so perhaps that’s unfair.”
“You also need feathers,” she said with a sparkle in her eye. “To fletch. Like, say, from a…”
“Starling?” he guessed, smiling now. “It is a bird.”
“A common bird,” she replied. “But shiny. Perhaps Errol will know more about them?”
“It seems unlikely it is not her real name,” he mused. “An heiress would have legacy if she had money, surely?”
“I do not know,” said Hattie. “I am only newly an heiress myself. And I have no legacy to speak of.”
“Well, now,” he said. “You said that convincingly, and it is a bald-faced lie. Perhaps you’re more skilled at deception than you thought.”
She laughed, her cheeks tingling with something between pleasure and bashfulness as he continued to tangle their fingers together. “I met someone else with my surname once,” she told him, “but he spelled it with twoFs. Ffrench. I was still a child, so I asked him if he was from France, a question to which he took serious offense.”
“TwoFs,” Elias said with amusement. “Welsh? They like their double letters.”
She shook her head. “That was my second guess, at which point he got even more flustered. I will never forget the way he shouted,‘Galway, my dear!’, as though his ancestors had overheard my error. And, to wit, I have never made that mistake again.”
“Ah, well,” he said, lifting her hand and pressing a soft kiss to the back of it. “How else do we ever learn?”
Chapter Fifteen
It took allof twenty minutes into the first showcase rehearsal for Elias to regret ever opening his fool mouth and requesting such a thing.
“Shouldersback, Elias,” Libba snapped at him, slapping the intersection of his spine and ribs with her knuckles. “You’re a baron, not a barmaid. This isn’t the jacket he’s wearing on the day, is it?”
“God, no,” Monica said from her stool near a quartet of dress forms. “I can fix it, though, if he lets me.”
“What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, only to be ignored by both women as he looked helplessly down at the double-breasted linen jacket, which had looked, to him, perfectly serviceable this morning.
“Color’s all wrong,” Ruby told him from her chemist’s stand a few feet away, dripping with sympathy. “Why would you wear brown?”
“Everyone wears brown,” he insisted, ignoring that none of the wards were, just now, wearing it.
“Doesn’t taper at the waist,” Monica added. “Too baggy about the shoulders.”
