“Maybe he went back to Wales,” Malcolm speculated, seemingly on nothing but pure whimsy, popping a roasted fingerling potato in his mouth. “Or maybe he’s dead.”
“Mal,” Libba said, frowning. “He’s not dead. There would’ve been trumpets.”
Malcolm chortled at that. “And fireworks.”
“All right,” said Hattie, waving her hand. “We do need to find him. Nothing can happen until we do.”
Libba groaned, dropping her head into her hands and shaking it. “Fine. I will go inquire with the Illusionists’ Guild out of Covent Garden. They’re likely to have heard something. I hate them, though, and they hate me, so you owe me a dessert.”
“Why?” Malcolm asked, on his third potato. “It’s all a little similar, isn’t it? Acting, dancing, and magic?”
At which point, his plate magically ended up in his lap.
By the time Mr. Harcourt had provided confirmation that Rhys had indeed been located and contacted, Hattie was simply ready to begin her journey south and get the next stage moving. There was a will to be read, a house to be opened, a new chapter of their lives to begin.
And there was also…
“Did you write to the baron?” Mr. Harcourt asked, frowning at her. “Why do I get the feeling you did not?”
“Oh, him,” she said, frowning at the scent of smoke in her nose. “Would you do that, Mr. Harcourt? Would you mind it horribly? I’ve no idea where to find him and it seems like you do.”
He had nodded, frowning at her like a disappointed papa, and clipped away from her, his silver hair glinting in the sunlight.
Hattie had watched him go.
They both knew very well that he’d told her that Elias Selwyn was stationed in Hunslow. She simply did not wish to address it.
Somehow, it was both a relief and more damning than a rebuke that he’d chosen silence in response to her avoidance.
Julian Harcourt had sported white hair all of her life, she thought. He must have gone gray as a student. Thinking about it, he must have only been early in his forties by now, still quite young for that shock of snowy hair.
What an odd thing. Perhaps he had been born with it.
She counted her fingers again, her thumbnail grazing against the pads of them, and turned her focus toward Brighton.
Why, after traveling to Russia and back, it was nothing at all from London to the coast. Nothing but the bat of an eye.
Libba, Malcolm, and Mr. Harcourt all traveled alongside her, all reacting with quite a bit more enthusiasm and relief when their destination drew near than Hattie thought appropriate, given how manageable the travel had been.
But she didn’t say so.
“It almost feels like a pilgrimage, doesn’t it?” she said to Mal. “Except we are not on foot.”
“I’d make a terrible pilgrim,” he told her with a nudge to the ribs, “and we both know it.”
She smiled, imagining him in rags, leaning on a walking stick, caves and forests around him, and yet still somehow smelling of excellent cologne and shaved to a clean, shiny cut of his square jaw. “Terrible,” she agreed. “Yes.”
Starling’s Rest sat beyond the fashionable terraces and well beyond the Royal Pavilion, deeper into the part of Brighton that was not necessarily for the footfalls of the late summer rush. It sat on a little hill, high enough that one could sometimes hear the sound of the Channel, when everything else was very quiet. The main building was surrounded by a variety of outbuildingsand amenities that had been installed and expanded throughout the whole of Hattie’s life.
The walls were gray, but in the bright summer sun, they looked black.
Shethoughtthey looked black.
The doors were thrown open the instant their carriage had halted, but it was not Errol Cagney who came bursting out of the house to greet them. At least not first. Errol lagged slightly behind their one-man reception party.
It was Rhys Caradoc, grinning broadly and loping down the entry steps, his dark-brown curls tousled in the breeze, with Errol’s paler, slower figure behind him only emphasizing the sprite-like energy of his greeting.
“Hattie!” he cried. “Libba! Mal! Come give us acwtch!”
