Page 23

The coach turned toward the Town’s edge, the street narrowing to an argument of wheels and the occasional clatter of a dropped pail. A fishmonger lifted his cap. Children gaped at the ducal crest as if it would speak. When they stopped at a crossroad, Chester imagined watching a girl in a kitchen beat egg whites in a bowl and test the peaks with a spoon, then shake her head and begin again. A woman passed with a loaf balanced on her palm, the bread’s bottom crisp from a clean hearth. He pictured the back rooms behind them all—the water that never boiled quite fast enough, the flour that arrived a shade off last week’s grind, the morning when a supplier wouldn’t extend credit and a shelf went empty by two. It could mean a child’s stomach rumbling by four and bedtime without proper dinner.

“I sent word to Harcourt and Reed that you’ll meet them in Brighton,” Talbots mumbled. He wasn’t even trying to hide his displeasure with Chester today.

“Yes,” Chester said. “A small room. No pomp. Two men, three signatures, and done.”

“And the Duke’s lodgings remain the same?”

“North Steyne House,” Chester said. North Steyne House was a smart rented lodging just off the Steyne gardens, with its front windows catching the sea light from Marine Parade. “Quiet, windows that open, a walk to the Pavilion that won’t make a scene.” Farther from the card rooms his mother favored, closer to the servants’ entrance where a pâtisserie’s hampers would arrive.

Talbots noted it down. “You’ll want a valet and one footman.”

“One valet,” Chester said. “I can open my own doors.”

Talbots did not smile. After five years with him, he expected Chester to say such things and then do what rank required.

“Mr. Talbots, you disapprove of my methods,” Chester said. His father had never asked a secretary’s opinion; he’d preferred sharper tools—Bligh’s strap, cold lectures about “sound management,” the reminder that a duke’s heart belonged in his ledgers. Chester did not miss the man who thought tenants and servants interchangeable, but he missed, absurdly, the chance to prove him wrong. “You may say so.”

Mr. Talbots’s gray moustache twitched into a smile. “Then let me say this plainly, Your Grace: I prefer serving a duke whose coronet sits firm on his head and not over his eyes—one who remembers other men’s hands as well as his own ledgers.”

It was as close as Talbots would ever come to saying it outright: he preferred Chester to the old duke.

“Good,” Chester said. “Draft the orders.”

The carriage leveled onto Cheapside. Chester turned the Harley Street note over. The back was clean—no flourish, no thanks written for the sake of thanks. He liked that. Women who handled money for their houses learned where gratitude cost more than it bought.

He pressed the page against his coat for a moment and felt like a silly green boy for the comfort that gave him. Not her. Her work. He could tell himself that and have it be most of the truth. He could also admit that the work came from hands, and the hands had brushed his.

“Add a line,” he said, tapping the allocation sheet. “Under ‘licensed shops by receipt.’ ‘Receipts recognized at the counter and at the dock; coin honored where the goods are taken up.’”

Mr. Talbots wrote it out, his brows lifting. “That will set men’s teeth on edge, Your Grace.”

Of course it would. The Board liked every shilling to jingle in their hands at the docks before a single sack moved. This clause meant a baker could send a boy down with a slip of paper from the counting house instead of a purse—take the flour at dawn, bake, sell bread, and only then bring his coins by noon. It robbed no man, but it robbed the middlemen of the pleasure of watching small shops stumble. He pictured the Harley Street kitchen, Pepper’s careful hands dusted with flour. This was not enough to win her good opinion, but it might at least mean her ovens did not go cold because of his ink.

“It will stop the rich men’s games,” Chester said, and signed. The nib bit the paper; he liked the feel. He was good at being the dull certainty the rich men cursed and the working ones later thanked. He would accept the curses first as long as he could bring security to the working hands, because patience fed people better than pride ever had.

He folded the allocations back into the folder and returned to the list.

A kettle that boils and keeps boiling. He pictured the small room he’d asked the steward to find at the Pavilion—a place where water would be ready when it was wanted and not when some polite schedule allowed. Two shallow ramekins for proofing. The house wanted to test its own edges. It wanted to be right in a small way before it tried to be right in a larger one. He understood that kind of humility. Politics did not.

“Send one of our men to the icehouse,” he said. “No fragments from old blocks. New cut. Wrap in cloth.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And to the straw man: no stable straw. The new bale—tell him we’ll pay for the waste.”

Talbots marked it. “Do you wish me to alert the Pavilion that the Harley Street party includes the proprietor’s daughter?”

I can only hope she’ll be there. Chester’s hand tightened on the paper before he controlled it too. “No. Alert them that a famous pâtissier will require the room and nothing more.” He stared out at a stretch where the river showed itself like a promise and then ducked behind warehouses again. “I’ll know who walks through the door.” Let his mother parade titled girls in silk before him in the ballroom if she wished; he would take his measure of the woman who walked into a kitchen with sugar on her cuffs and a demand for clean ice.

“As you wish. But famous, Your Grace?”

Hmph. She deserves to be.

The coach slowed at the Customs House. Men shifted their weight and pretended they had not just been talking about him. Talbots climbed out to place the necessary orders in the necessary hands. Chester watched the small theater through the glass and thought of women who did not stand in rooms like this and yet felt every decision made here as if it had been whispered into their palms.

If small bakeries can pay at noon, they stand equal for a day. He had said as much at his desk to the empty room and written it in the margin of a draft that no one needed to see. If they cannot, credit will be a fantasy, and men like Darley will call it prudence to refuse them twice.

He could hear the counter-argument as he sat there. Taxes, Wyndale. Tonnage. Duties. The bottom line. The Regent’s banqueting table. Keep prices dull and nobody riots. He believed in parts of it. He did not believe in starving kitchens so that a rich man’s ledger would look neat to someone who had never paid for sugar ruined on the stove.