Scales and Sensibility by Stephanie Burgis

Chapter 13

Mr. Aubrey stalked into the house and slammed the door behind him...leaving Elinor and Mr. Hawkins in the garden, staring at each other.

Heat flooded Elinor’s cheeks. She took a deep breath. Be Mrs. De Lacey. She tried for a careless, unaffected laugh. “Well! That was rather…”

“I think I had better warn you, Mrs. De Lacey.” Mr. Hawkins’s voice was clipped and colder than she had ever heard it. “My friend may seem distracted from everyday life, but he is no fool.”

“I—what?” Elinor frowned. “Mr. Hawkins, I don’t know what you imagine—”

“Other ladies have tried to trap him into marriage before,” Mr. Hawkins said, “but he has escaped every single time, even from the most determined. I would advise you not to waste your effort on the attempt.”

Elinor gaped at him. “You think I—what? You cannot be serious!”

Mr. Hawkins’s expression did not warm. “He may be the heir to one of England’s greatest fortunes, but he is not available as an additional source of income, nor as an accessory for your entertainment. It would make him utterly miserable to be taken away from his university studies…and no matter how much wealth his wife might gain, I can promise that she, too, would be miserable after using my friend in such a way. He is one of the best men I know, not a pawn to be manipulated for anyone else’s comfort.”

“The way you plan to use Miss Hathergill, you mean?” Elinor glared back at him.

A flush crept up from Benedict Hawkins’s jawline. “I have great respect for Miss Hathergill.”

“Oh, really? Is that ‘respect’ what brought you here in the first place?”

“That is an entirely different situation.” He crossed his arms. “If Miss Hathergill agrees to marry me, I will do my utmost to make her happy for the rest of both of our lives. My friend Aubrey would never be happy to be ripped away from Cambridge and forced to attend Society balls as the puppet of a fashionable wife.”

He swept her with a scathingly dismissive look. “You may be accustomed to everyone in London falling down before your reputation, Mrs. De Lacey, but Aubrey cares nothing for fashion or popularity, and your status means nothing to him. Don’t waste your time, or his, by pursuing him any further.”

“You really think I was trying to entrap him.” Elinor shook her head wonderingly. “So much for what you said about me earlier!”

“I said…” Benedict’s face tightened. “I thought I saw something different in you. Better. Clearly, I was mistaken.”

“Clearly.” Tears burned behind Elinor’s eyes, but she was far too angry to allow them to escape. “I was wrong about you, too, Mr. Hawkins. I think you and Penelope are perfectly suited to one another, after all!”

She stalked towards the door, head held high and vision blurred. Sir Jessamyn let out a cheep of protest as they neared the house, but she ignored it. He nudged his face against her cheek, trying to push her back towards the tree and the rest of the outdoors.

“Later, Sir Jessamyn,” she whispered under her breath. “Later.”

Later, when they were alone, she would sit outside with him in the fresh air and enjoy the beautiful day...without any other company. First, though, she had to sweep past Mr. Hawkins in a way that made her disdain perfectly unmistakable, for the sake of her remaining pride.

“What did you just say?” Mr. Hawkins’s voice sounded strained as she approached, but then, her heartbeat was thumping so loudly in her ears, it muffled every other sound.

Still, Elinor tilted her chin another half-inch higher, the better to look down her nose at him despite their difference in height. “I was talking to my dragon,” she said. “You and I have nothing left to say to each other, Mr. Hawkins.”

She swept straight past him, ignoring the unfairly appealing warmth that rose from his body and the soft, swishing sound that her long skirts made as they brushed against his boots. She pulled the door open.

He pushed it closed with one hand.

She gaped up at him. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“You just called your dragon Sir Jessamyn.”

They stood only half a foot apart. His strong arm, holding the door shut, nearly brushed against her shoulder. His broad chest rose and fell with his quick breaths.

Elinor’s own chest felt so tight that she could barely breathe. “You must have misheard me.”

“I don’t believe I did.” He leaned closer, his hazel gaze fiercely intent. “You called him Sir Jessamyn. That was the name of Elinor Tregarth’s dragon.”

She felt herself leaning forward, tugged by invisible threads like magnets drawing her into his warmth. They stood so close now that she could feel his warm breath against her face. Her voice came out as thin as gossamer. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Did you paint those markings on his face to confuse people? If you have Elinor Tregarth’s dragon—”

“Yes?” She only shaped the word with her lips. She couldn’t summon enough air to speak out loud.

“She would never have given her dragon to a stranger for any reason.” Mr. Hawkins’s voice hardened; his face drew into a scowl. “What have you done to her, Mrs. De Lacey?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Elinor jerked backwards. Air flooded back into her chest in a rush that left her reeling. “How absurd can you possibly be?”

“Nothing would have induced Elinor Tregarth to betray her dragon’s trust.” Benedict Hawkins stood as stiff as a soldier, glaring down at her. “He was no mere toy or ornament to her. She truly loved him, unlike any other Society lady I’ve met. There is no payment so high that she would have sold him to you!”

“Then it is a good thing I never asked her to,” Elinor snapped. “This is my dragon, no matter what his name might be, and those markings on his face are not painted, they are real. You may feel them for yourself if you require any proof.”

He frowned down at Sir Jessamyn, who reared his own head back on his long neck to return the inspection with open curiosity. “Why does he have more markings now than he did this morning?”

Elinor ground her teeth. “You will have to think up an answer for yourself. I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Hawkins—and as you have already insulted me in every possible manner, you can have nothing more to say to me, either.” She narrowed her eyes. “Now, will you let me pass through that door unimpeded, or must I walk all the way around the house to find another way inside?”

Slowly, Mr. Hawkins stepped away from her. He swept a graceful bow.

Elinor stalked past him without a word.

Voices rose in the distance, but she headed directly for the grand staircase, bypassing the closed dining room door. She felt Mr. Hawkins’s presence behind her like an itch, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of looking around or even speeding her steps at any turn.

At the first-floor landing, he finally turned in a different direction. That sudden coolness at her back was a blessed relief. Still, she kept her pace steady, even after she knew he couldn’t see her anymore. She walked with dignity down the long corridor to her room, opened her door, stepped inside…

…And stopped short as she saw the maid who sat at her dressing table, holding open the packet of Elinor’s private letters from her sisters.

Sally looked up without any sign of embarrassment.

“Miss Elinor,” she said wonderingly. She shook her head. “How in the world have you managed it?”

* * *

There wasa long moment of silence before Elinor heard her own voice, as if from very far away, ask: “Whatever do you mean?”

“It can’t be a mask.” Sally was peering at Elinor’s face with open curiosity, now, in the reverse of her earlier submissive posture. “It’s too good to be a mask, no matter what that Carter says.”

Elinor closed the door carefully behind her. “Carter thinks I’m wearing a mask?”

“Oh, her.” Sally shrugged dismissively. “It was the only reason she could think of why you wouldn’t let her touch your hair. But where you’d find a mask that good, she couldn’t say, nor where you’d find a wig so fine in only half a day’s journey from the Hall. That was why she gave up in the end and said you must be Mrs. De Lacey after all, only touched in the head by too much sun.”

“But you don’t believe that.” Elinor met Sally’s gaze as the maid stood up, still holding Elinor’s letters in her right hand.

Sally smiled ruefully. “You and your family might not know us in service, Miss Elinor, but trust me—we all know you. Even if you hadn’t tried to walk right back into your old room as if you’d never been away, I haven’t ever seen any fine lady but you say please and thank you the way you do. Mostly, though…” She raised the packet of letters high in the air and waved it teasingly. “Everyone knows you’d cut off your own hand before you left any of these behind, no matter how fast you were running.”

Elinor knew every swirl of ink from Rose and Harry on those pages, every story they’d related, every word of love. She’d read them a thousand times across the last six months, whenever she was safely alone in her room.

But servants went into every room in Hathergill Hall, as a matter of course…and there was no way to ever be completely private.

“I see.” Elinor drew a long breath. Sir Jessamyn was a warm presence on her shoulder, watching Sally with his head alertly cocked. She wished—as absurd as it would have sounded even to her a mere day earlier—that she could ask him for advice. She had no idea what to do next.

All she knew was that she couldn’t run again…because Sally had been correct. Elinor would never leave those letters behind.

“I haven’t any money,” Elinor said flatly, standing still. “I cannot pay for your silence.”

Sally’s eyes widened. They were a lighter brown than her hair, which was pulled back into a knot so tight, Elinor could barely see any of it beneath her cap; but after a moment of petrified surprise, laughter shook her whole body so hard that several strands of thick, dark hair fell loose from underneath her cap to dance around her shoulders.

“You think—you actually think I—!” Sally sank back down onto the chair and hung onto the back of it as she shook her head, still laughing.

Elinor crossed the room and sank down onto the bed. Sir Jessamyn crawled down her arm and sat down next to her on the bedcover, his neck stretched high and his warm body pressed tightly against her side. Together, they waited for Sally to stop laughing.

When she finally did, Elinor spoke before the maid could say a word. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve insulted you.”

“You have.” Sally shook her head, but she was still grinning. “Were you really afraid I’d try picking your pockets, Miss Elinor? I’m no fool. If I was going to blackmail anyone for money, I can promise it would be someone who had at least a penny or two to her name. Just a bit of a waste otherwise, don’t you think?”

“A great waste,” Elinor said, and felt the last remnants of tension inside her relax into a sigh. “How do you explain the way I look, anyway? It isn’t a mask, nor a wig, I assure you.”

“Well, you have a dragon now, don’t you?” Sally shrugged. “Jem the footman saw yours breathe fire in the sitting room not even an hour ago, so who knows what else it can do? Everyone knows they’ve got some magic in ’em.”

This time Elinor was the one who laughed, although it sounded broken to her own ears. “Everyone except the dragon scholars,” she said. “Mr. Aubrey didn’t believe me when I tried to tell him.”

“Scholars!” Sally’s tone was scornful. “What do they know outside their books? And why would all the old fairy stories talk so much about dragon magic if they didn’t have any?”

“Well…” Elinor bit her lip. She wasn’t thinking about scholars, though. Not anymore.

She was remembering the scene with Benedict Hawkins in the garden, and how angry his accusations had made her—how offended she’d been that he would even consider them as possibilities. He’d had far more evidence for his horrible assumptions about her than she had had about Sally, when she had accused the maid of attempting blackmail. Perhaps…

Then she finally caught the meaning of Sally’s earlier words.

“Wait,” she said. “You’re not blackmailing me for money?”

“Well, of course not,” Sally said easily. “You’re as poor as a church mouse, aren’t you?”

Elinor looked into the maid’s amused, intelligent brown eyes, and felt something clench inside her. “So...what are you blackmailing me for, then?” she asked.

Sally smiled. It was an open, friendly smile—the smile of someone Elinor would have quite liked to be friends with, under any other circumstances. Just at the moment, though, it filled her with dread.

“Don’t you worry, Miss Elinor,” Sally said. “What I need should be no trouble to you…or no trouble for Mrs. De Lacey, anyway.” She patted the packet of Elinor’s sisters’ letters as she tucked them neatly into the pocket of her apron. “And just so long as you help me with what I need, there’ll be no reason for me to tell Sir John what I know. So you can just think of me as a partner from now on, can’t you?”

Elinor’s eyes locked on the letters in Sally’s pocket. All she had to do was lunge forward to try to wrestle them away…

…But she couldn’t escape Hathergill Hall again. Not with Rose and Harry depending on her to keep her promise to Sir John and remain here all week. And if Sir John was given enough reason to start asking hard questions...

Elinor drew in a deep, shivering breath that rattled every bone in her body. With a worried look up at her, Sir Jessamyn leaned even more tightly into her side—but for once, his warm support couldn’t make any difference. Not with her sisters’ letters so close…and so completely out of reach.

“Very well.” Elinor’s shoulders sagged. “Tell me what you want me to do.”