“I thought you told the lad to attend me, Beatrice. Who is the old man?” Francis turned to Beatrice with a sneer on his lips.
Beatrice looked to Elijah, her eyes wide as she shot him an unspoken question.
“Mr Hamilton, this is my grandfather, Algernon Hector. He was born in Kessel and has returned here to see out his twilight years. He wanted to pay his respects,” Elijah said.
Hamilton arched one pale brow. “Pay his respects? How provincial of you. He’s not incontinent, is he? These rugs are worth far more than the two of you combined.”
Elijah couldn’t vouch for the state of Hector’s bladder, given that was exactly their escape plan. Better to change the subject. “Miss Hamilton said you wished to discuss the child who was injured today?”
“Yes. I understand you broke an expensive loom.” He stretched one arm along the back of the sofa and examined his nails on the other hand.
Elijah ground his teeth, but held his tongue. He allowed himself an outburst inside his head while he considered what to say aloud. “I bumped the loom when I reached for the child. It must not have been sitting correctly that it stopped so easily.”
Francis dropped his hand to his knee and blew out a sigh. Still he refused to look directly at Elijah. “Would you make someone else liable for damage you caused?”
Elijah fell silent. He wanted to grab the man by the throat and ask how exactly he could complain about a piece of equipment and completely ignore that a child was nearly scalped.
Beatrice jumped from her seat and paced to Elijah’s side. “A child nearly had the hair ripped from her head. A child who should never have been working in the mill in the first place, given she is barely eight years old. Modern humane mills don’t employ anyone under the age of twelve. If our mill didn’t have such medieval practices like using children, this accident would never have happened.”
At last Francis looked up, fixing a cold stare on Beatrice. “It is not your place to make mill policy decisions.” Then he gestured to Archie, who leaned on the piano. “You need to learn to control your future wife, Lawson. Do you want her making rambling leftist comments at your dinner guests? She’ll quite scare away all your business associates.”
Those assembled laughed and Beatrice balled her hands into her gown. Elijah wanted to reach for her, to let her know he was on her side. But such an open display would cause more trouble than it would soothe.
Archie Lawson sneered at him, almost goading him to say something and reveal his growing feelings for Beatrice. Elijah locked glances with the other man and wished for the chance to push up his sleeves, raise his fists, and offer to settle things with the salamander.
“Is there anything else you wish to discuss with me, sir?” Elijah asked, turning back to Francis Hamilton. He kept his hands clasped behind his back where he could dig his nails into his palm to hold back his rising temper.
“Don’t interfere again. You are to assist Beatrice in her little hobby, not crash around damaging expensive equipment. You are lucky Beatrice will pay for repairs from her allowance. Next time, I’ll strip it from your hide.” He waved his hand, dismissing his guests.
You’re welcome to try, Elijah thought as he stared at the man who had ordered his father killed. He wanted to step towards him and say, My name is Elijah Seton. You killed my father. Prepare to die. But this wasn’t the time. He was outnumbered and he wouldn’t risk Hector.
He had taken stock of his enemy and now he would formulate his plan.
The butler moved forward and gestured to the door.
Elijah nodded to Beatrice and then followed Hector from the room. They were silent all the way through the servants’ hallways. They were halfway along the road back to the cottage before Hector broke the silence.
“I don’t know about you, lad, but the whole time I was staring at his throat, wondering if I was strong enough to snap his bloody neck.” He kept his tone low in case seekers were following them home.
“I had a similar thought,” Elijah replied, although he had been conflicted between lunging for Hamilton or thumping Lawson. “We can’t openly attack him, as there are too many of them. We need to find another way, like Aunt Lettie did in Whiterock.”
Hector grunted. “Samuel Thorn spent forty years setting the groundwork for that. You’re a smart lad. Come up with something that doesn’t take that long. I want to see the smug look wiped off that bastard’s face for what he did.”
“I’ll come up with something, Hector. I promise.” He just didn’t know what. His aunt Lettie had channeled her rage to summon the ocean to destroy the Ocram Soarer mansion. While using his element to rattle the Hamilton house off its hillside would be satisfying, he didn’t think it would redress the balance. He needed to do something bigger that would utterly destroy the Hamilton clan.
Then he remembered Beatrice jumping to his defence, and guilt knotted in his gut. What was he going to do?
The next day, as he entered the mill building and turned towards his usual destination, Mr Baxter called out to him.
“Yes, sir?” Elijah said.
“There’s a change of work for today and you will not be assisting Miss Hamilton. Mr Hamilton has said you are to report to the storeroom.” He waved his pencil to the room beyond the warehouse.
Elijah rooted himself to the spot. Last night, Hamilton had confirmed that Elijah was to assist Beatrice with her little hobby. What events had unfolded after he’d left that had changed that? “But I have not finished weaving silk for Miss Hamilton’s project.”
The pencil pointed back to him. “You have been reassigned, unless you want to anger Mr Hamilton.”
“No, sir.” Elijah suspected he already had angered him.
Work in the storeroom was repetitive and boring. Unlike watching the loom, where he had to pay attention, restocking all the bolts and spools gave him plenty of time to formulate, and then abandon, plans. He needed a way to bring down the family without affecting all the innocent people who relied on the mill for employment.
By late afternoon, he had the perfect idea: kill their phoenix. With the life and symbol of their clan gone, they would crumble. All he needed now was to figure out how to gain access to the highly guarded and secretive chamber that held the fiery bird.
There was the slight problem of how you killed a bird who supposedly could regenerate itself and was a symbol of immortality. It must be possible, since history said that after the Warders thwarted the plot against Elizabeth I, the monarch had the responsible Soarer family’s phoenix killed and baked into a pie. If only history had also passed down how she had done that, along with the recipe.
The whistle blew knockoff time and he laboured on, under strict instructions to finish unpacking all the crates before he could go. The mill had an eerie stillness about it by the time he put the last spool on a shelf. A glance at his pocket watch told him it was approaching 9:00 p.m.
As he walked through the empty warehouse, he contemplated his next course of action. He needed to find some calm in his mind before he walked back to the village. It would be unfair on Hector and Marjory to vent his frustration on them. Elijah stepped into the dark and walked around the side of the mill, moving towards the river.
The moonlight played with the rushing water and dotted sparkling gems along the surface. The peaceful gurgle of the river over rocks soothed his mind. He wasn’t an undine, but rivers and lakes did more to organise his thoughts than any field or hill.
He would prevail in Kessel. He had vowed to his family that he would. But each day it seemed harder to achieve, and his attempts to find the Esmeralda were going nowhere.
A rustle from the trees made him peer into the dark. Had he disturbed a fox? A shape stood and brushed out heavy skirts. No fox, but a vixen.
“I’m sorry. I thought I was alone out here,” he said. He should head home. Marjory would be watching the minutes pass by on the clock over the mantel and he didn’t want to cause her to worry.
“As did I,” came the voice of Beatrice Hamilton. Moonlight caressed her face as she moved from under the shadow of the tree’s canopy. The sharp planes of her face cast shadows of their own and made her seem otherworldly. Her hair was pulled free of its bun and cascaded down her back in curls and ringlets.
“I’ll leave you in peace.” He turned to go, not wanting to add to whatever trouble she was already in.
“Wait. Don’t go. I missed you today.” Her words curled around him and held him tight.
“I missed you, too,” he whispered in response. “I assume moving me to the stockroom was a punitive measure. What happened after I left last night?”
“Uncle was unhappy with me. Apparently I shouldn’t defy him in front of a common labourer. As punishment, he took my toys away from me for the day.” She tried to laugh, but it was a sad and forced thing.
She stood next to him, and they watched the river flow towards the mill. The dark stripped away who they were in the harsh light. They were no longer Warder and Soarer on opposing sides of a divide. Under the velvet sky, they were simply a boy and a girl who were drawn to one another.
His breathing seemed too loud in the silence while he racked his brain for something to say. Talking about her family was too fraught and opened up old wounds. He needed a different topic. Perhaps he could ask her view on Cicero’s canons of rhetoric? Or seek her opinion on Darwin’s evolutionary theory?
What he really wanted to do was discover what her lips tasted like.
“Do you ever wish you lived a different life?” Her voice was a soft whisper from beside him.
“Yes.” He imagined one in which his father lived and his mother was a woman with a gentle heart, not one consumed by greed. He dreamed of a life where the woman standing next to him wasn’t a Soarer, but someone he could freely love.
Beatrice reached out and laced her fingers with his. Her skin was dry heat against his. The spark ignited, and a soft orange glow encompassed their hands as the Cor-vitis wound tendrils around their knuckles.
“If we met in a dream, what would you do?” she asked.
“I would ask you to dance.” He turned and put a hand on her waist and drew her closer to him, lifting their clasped hands as though he were waiting for music to start. They waltzed a few steps over the grass to the music of the gushing river. Beatrice laughed, and this time it sounded genuine. Elijah halted, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her tight to his chest.
She sighed as she rested her head on his chest, their clasped hands caught between the two of them. The glowing plant sent out gossamer-thin tendrils to explore their skin.
“What do you dream about?” he asked, curious what a woman who had everything would change about her life.
She looked up, and her eyes were a luminescent amber in the moonlight. “I wonder about many things, and it is only in my dreams that I can explore all the possibilities that the world holds.”
His heart tightened in his chest as the moment stretched between them. “If this were a dream, what possibility would you explore to satisfy your curiosity?”
A smile touched her lush lips as she tilted her chin upwards. “I would kiss a man to see if he ignited the fire within me.”
Elijah slid his hand up her back until he swept aside the weight of her auburn tresses to rest his hand at her nape. He leaned down and brushed his lips against hers. Softly, he teased her, wondering if she would kiss him back or set fire to him. Another part of his mind touched his element, in case he needed to envelop his body with rock if she blasted him.
Beatrice parted her lips and her tongue licked at his. Heat jolted through Elijah. She most definitely set him on fire, and he wanted to burn with her. He buried his hands in her silken locks. The Cor-vitis twined around his fingers and then twisted into her hair, creating a fiery tiara of living jewels. As Elijah held her head captive, he deepened the kiss. His tongue danced with hers as they explored one another.
She made soft gasps that made him think of the tart flavour hit from biting into ripe cherries. The sound was a jolt to his consciousness. He swallowed each noise and sought more. She was delicious and intoxicating, and he didn’t want to stop.
“Trixie,” she murmured against his lips.
“Trixie?” Elijah tried to wrangle his brain to engage in conversation when other parts of his body wanted to take over proceedings.
A soft chuckle blew over his skin. “Beatrice is such a stuffy, old-fashioned name. In my dreams, the man I kiss, who turns me into something molten, calls me Trixie.”
“Trixie,” he said. The shortened form of her name suited her. It made him think of something small and fiery yet lush, like a shiny cherry. Then he kissed her again, trying different strokes with his tongue to make her gasp again.
Her hands curled into the collar of his jacket and she clung to him. For as long as he kissed her, the world stopped turning and nothing existed except the two of them.
“Beatrice? Stop this silly game of hide-and-seek. It’s time to return home,” a loud voice called out.
She pulled back a fraction and rested her head against his chest. “Blast. I can never escape for long before I am called back to my cage.”
Tendrils of the Cor-vitis pulled apart and dissolved into the air as they increased the distance between them. The sound of Archie’s voice forced them back into the world, and they stood apart again, on opposite sides of a divide.
Elijah drew a deep breath of cool air into his lungs. She had boiled his blood and the rock under his skin retained the heat. “I will stand here every night, dreaming under the stars and waiting for you to dance with me again.”
She kissed him quickly and then stepped away from his embrace.
“Coming, Archie! I needed to relieve myself,” she called out.
Elijah swallowed his laughter. Her reason would stop Archie from venturing further to find her.
He watched her run off into the dark and pondered how his life had changed. He’d journeyed to Kessel with the narrow focus of revenge against the Hamiltons, even if he died in the attempt. Now he had something far bigger to live for: rescuing his mate and showing her the life she deserved.