Then everyone cheered for him instead while Hattie curled her bare toes against her slippers and prayed for the evening to speed along with no further uncomfortable observations.
“Well?” said Mal as Elias arrived at her side, the warmth of his hand sliding along the small of her back. “Did you read it?”
“What?” said Elias. “Oh, the letter.”
Mal’s face crumpled in like a wad of discarded paper. “Yes, the letter!”
“I haven’t had a moment,” Elias said soothingly. “I was dealing with my parents and the constabulary. I will read it, Lennox. I promise.”
“I read mine,” Hattie said, still a bit frantic to say anything that might diffuse suspicion.
It made both Lennoxes stare at her again, which was the opposite of what she had intended.
“Yes?” said Libba. “And what did it say?”
“Oh,” said Hattie, blinking. “Many things.”
Mal sighed loudly.
“Do you want to dance?” Elias asked her, amusement clear in his tone, though the offer was pure benevolence. “Do you dance, Miss French?”
“I am not Miss French,” she said without thinking.
“No,” he agreed, grinning. “You are not. Who are you now?”
She paused, an odd bashfulness rising in her throat. “I am Lady Selwyn,” she said, smaller and quieter than she’d been before.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Mal threw his hands up and stalked away.
“And will you dance with me, Lady Selwyn?” Elias asked again, smooth and low, while Libba watched with great interest.
Hattie nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”
And he led her away, into the spinning chaos of music and motion, languages she trusted him to speak, because she never had.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After the thirdincident where Hattie was certain her stockings were about to be discovered in Elias’s pocket, she made the decision that he should retire early, under the guise of preparing the marital chamber for their wedding night.
It was the only thing that would calm her nerves and it did seem to also please and placate the guests who were still assembled, well after dark, as well as signal to them that it was time for the party to conclude.
She suspected fairly strongly that her secret was less of a secret than a personally held bugaboo at this stage, with most of her fellow wards tossing her knowing looks at various points throughout the evening.
When she’d danced with Rhys, he’d scuffed the top of her foot with his boot and then grinned as he apologized for damaging her stocking, which he knew very well she was not wearing.
In any event, it was with relief that she stood near the doors of the Rest and shook the hands of departing well-wishers, many of whom delivered gifts to her as they departed.
“It is a puzzle for two,” Persephone Boswell explained, tilting the conjoined wooden cubes one way and then another as she pressed them into Hattie’s hands. “It can only be solved in tandem with a partner.”
“And she couldn’t sell it otherwise,” Rhys commented tartly.
She winked at Hattie, her Traveller’s lilt becoming more pronounced as she agreed. “And I couldn’t sell it otherwise.”
There were several handmade gifts from Libba’s actors, including a variety of prose and theatrical compositions about the wedding itself, hastily scrawled in the corner of the ballroom in what appeared to have become a makeshift poetry station devoted to either the incident with Elias’s parents or the general beauty of the ceremony.
The oddest gift, by far, was from Libba’s large, muscled bodyguard, the man Hattie had met that day in the jail. He approached her as the troupe was filing out of the house and handed her a waxy, yellow lemon, exactly the size of her hand.
“Lemuel,” he said, his voice deep and soothing as she marveled at the fruit in her grasp. “You asked me if that was my name. What does it mean?”
