“Your parents agreed to leave you with Willa in exchange for continuing to maintain the allowance they had been issued by the late baron, including the amount that would have been presumed for your care. She agreed to be rid of them and was forced to maintain that allowance to prevent their interference with you at various continued points in your life after that day.”
“What?” Elias snapped. “Like what?”
“Like pulling you out of Eton,” said Harcourt, though it sounded like it pained him. “Or Oxford. Like forbidding your military service or appearing in Society at events that were important to you.”
Something in his chest wedged loose and shattered against his ribs. His insides felt cavernous and cold. “I see. And this allowance was paid out of the lands funding that I inherited, I take it?”
“Yes,” Mr. Harcourt said. “And so was the living costs she sent to her elderly aunt in the Midlands. Neither has been paid out since the death certificate was signed because Willa was very clear that it would be your active choice if you wished to maintain them, and that silence should be taken not as a rejection, but a refusal to begin a new series of debts to those to whom you owe nothing.”
“Release the aunt’s funds immediately,” he said. “As to the rest, I will make a decision bearing my conversation with the necessary parties.”
“Elias,” said Hattie, frowning. “You don’t have to.”
He looked down at her, glowing in her orange gown, and felt the full press of sadness against his chest. “I do,” he said, holding up the ring for good measure.
She knew what it said, after all.
And she knew what it meant.
Chapter Twenty-One
It took mostof the afternoon, but Elias managed to wrangle things into some semblance of order.
In all honesty, it was familiar to him. Almost military in its requirements. And as such, it restored him to something bordering a state of calm, despite the fact that his wedding day had been utterly ruined.
Engage or retreat. Those were the options he thought he would always have. And instead, in a moment of utter and pressing necessity, he hadn’t chosen either.
He had just stood there.
It was unforgivable.
Elias had found them at the constabulary, screaming at a baffled deputy while his stepfather’s bloody nose crusted and flaked in his beard, and had stepped between the tirade and the young man with an air of exhausted resignation.
“Stop,” he had said, unable to think of anything else. “Stop at once.”
Shockingly, they had not.
It had taken a threat to get to that point.
“If you wish to stay in an inn tonight instead of making the journey back to your home at once, you will cease this immediately,” he had snapped. “Or you will pay for it yourselves.”
That had, at least, punctured the volume.
It had taken a bit more time and cajoling to get them out of the constable’s offices and down the road into accommodations, though they complained the entire time.
Elias had not spoken much throughout it.
It occurred to him as they walked that he had not spoken much in their presence at all, ever.
Perhaps that explained his fluency in what Hattie called the silent language. Perhaps it was not a talent at all, but only a scar.
That would just figure, wouldn’t it?
“How much?” he said to them, once the door was closed and they were seated in the finest room the inn had to offer. “How much for you to run along and never come back?”
“Well, that’s a fine way to speak to your parents!” his stepfather had boomed, shedding more flecks of blood as he bristled. “She who bore you and gave you that name! It’s only for us that you’re wearing such a fine office this morning,BaronSelwyn.”
“Indeed it’s true,” his mother had said with a sniff. “If you had only been a girl, it would have been your stepfather who had inherited instead. Isn’t that right, Wallace? Isn’t that true?”
