Elias still had not moved.
“‘Greedy’?” Elias repeated, so softly, only Hattie could hear him, could hear the way his voice trembled.
“I bet you’ve been paying the Widow Starling in good time, haven’t you?” Wallace was continuing to say as Harcourt stumbled out onto the aisle runner and made a pleading little gesture with his hands clasped together.
“We can discuss this outside,” he said again urgently.
“Are you going to drag us out, Harcourt?” Mr. Selwyn demanded.
“Be reasonable, sir,” Harcourt said desperately.
Elias’s mother sighed, taking a step backward. “Elias, wrangle your servants, if you please!”
Elias only blinked.
“Is this how you treat the mother of the groom?” The stepfather barked. “Elias! What is this? Have some pride!”
“‘Pride’?” Elias managed, still too quietly to be heard by anyone but his new wife.
“Just outside, if you could,” Harcourt said one last time, with what sounded like his final thimble of resolve.
“Why don’t we take you back to the Rest?” Monica said, her hair glinting golden in the sunlight as she also stood. “Ruby and I? And you can have a seat of honor for the breakfast?”
“Well,” said Wallace Selwyn, eyes flicking in quick assessment over Monica’s form. “At least he didn’t marry the fat one.”
Hattie blinked. She blinked and she missed the crack of bone to flesh.
It seemed to her only that she was watching a verbal horror tableau one second, and in the next, Harcourt had flattened the late baron’s cousin and bloodied his nose for good measure, Elias’s mother was screaming, and somehow half of Brighton was swarming into the aisle to meet them.
Chapter Twenty
Elias found himselfseated in the pews of a mostly empty church, some moments later, without much clarity on how he’d come to be there or what had passed in the time between now and when he had been standing in the aisle next to Hattie.
“Ruby and Errol took the guests to the Rest,” Hattie was saying to him, squeezing into the little space between his body and the armrest at the end of the pew and putting her newly bejeweled hand above his own. He had given her this gift quickly, and in the aftermath of the unpleasantness, but still, it was a thing of beauty. Still, her heart fluttered to see it. “We offered to see your parents to the nearest clinic, but they insisted on traveling on their own directly to the constabulary. Presumably they intend to file a complaint against Mr. Harcourt.”
Elias moved then, his head snapping over to look at the barrister, whose hand was currently being dabbed with a wet cloth by Monica.
Julian Harcourt’s pale eyes raised and met Elias’s and he gave a twist of his lips and a shrug. “Let them,” he said. “I know a judge or two.”
“Miss Thresher,” Elias said, surprised to hear his own voice, and more surprised still to feel himself standing, pulling away from Harriet. “Monica. I am so very, very sorry for what my stepfather said.”
Monica paused, the cloth, gone pink with Harcourt’s knuckle scrapes, hovering above the knuckles themselves, and glanced up at him. “Me?” she said, sounding surprised. “I think maybe I got the least of it, Elias. Besides, Iamthe fat one. No secret in that.”
“Miss Thresher,” both Harcourt and Elias said in immediate, alarmed voices, winning a shake of the head and a giggle from her.
“I am well with it,” she said. “Why should it be an insult?”
“They called me ‘the simple one,’” Hattie said, looking amused by it from her place in the pew. “It does beg the question of how they measure intellect.”
“Hattie,” Elias said, the name tearing from his throat in a ragged whisper. “I did not know they would do that.”
She blinked at him, eyes golden in the post-storm rays of sunlight. “Of course you didn’t,” she said, as though he’d just informed her that he didn’t have wings and could not fly. “No one thinks you did.”
“You will, however, likely be the one who has to get rid of them,” Malcolm said, leaning against the church doors with his arms crossed over his chest. “Or whatever solution you decide is most appropriate. They aren’t likely to listen to anyone else.”
“Certainly not us,” said Libba.
“I’m a little offended that they insulted everyone directly except me,” Rhys noted, squinting out the window. “They got their shots in at Ruby and Errol on the way out. The lightskirt and the farmhand, apparently.”
