Page 27
The latch turned. The door swung wide.
Mother stood in the threshold with the Dowager Duchess beside her—eyes on the brazier, the copper, the hidden lemons—then on Pepper.
For one stupid, treacherous heartbeat, Pepper thought: if this woman sees me here and tells her son, he might know the truth of who baked what he eats. The second heartbeat remembered that her son signed Wyndale on notices that could ruin them.
Caught.
Chapter 10
The sea pressed its clean salt through the casement as if to remind a man there was more honest weather outside than in. Candles made a polite blaze along the table at North Steyne; silver steadied the light; the soup had been better than the fish and the fish better than the talk.
Chester realized he was eating as if the plate might run away. He set down his knife just when his mother said—
“You are not in a race toward dessert,” the Dowager Duchess observed, cool as porcelain. “This is a meal, not a contest.”
He slowed. Unfortunately, the word dessert turned his mind at once and entirely to a woman behind a counter and a lesson about layers of buttery pastry and sweet vanilla cream. Tomorrow at four, if the world cooperated, he would watch her work instead of imagining it. The thought rose so quickly it startled him. He took a sip of wine.
A discreet knock; the butler glided in with a card on a tray. “For Your Grace.”
His mother’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. “At the table?”
“From Mr. Reed,” the butler supplied, rescuing propriety with the right name.
Chester broke the seal without ceremony and let his eyes run once, then again:
Coin laid at noon; receipts honored.
Room secured by kitchens, as requested.
Hampers delivered; ice unspoiled; straw fresh.
Harley Street party accepted; baker to oversee on site.
—R.
Heat uncoiled low in his chest. Accepted. Baker to oversee. His mind offered the father first, sober and safe; his pulse supplied the daughter, bonnet tilted, hands sure on paper and pastry. He put the card facedown at his place and felt ridiculous for how much one line could improve an evening that contained both Darley and his mother’s matchmaking. Chester had been invited to this gathering at Darley’s rented house before he could think of an excuse to bow out. Simply saying he didn’t want to go, a privilege he’d hoped a duke could afford, wasn’t one his mother accepted.
“Bad news?” his mother asked, the sentence dressed as concern and tailored to fit.
“Work news.” He folded his napkin over the card. “Things will proceed.”
Either way—baker or daughter—the value of the small bakeries he had fought for would show that his circular would soon be an amended flour bill was justified. The Board wanted stability; he wanted stability that did not grind small kitchens under the wheel.
“I’ve been reassured on other subjects as well.” She set her spoon aside with the satisfaction of a move made on a chessboard. “There are several very nice young ladies here. Lady Dorrit’s second daughter, who rides well. Miss Fairchild, who does not. Two baronets’ nieces with acceptable fortunes and—ah, the Leinster party has grown interesting since their oldest daughter has made her debut this year.”
He could have recited the rest without help. “Pretty, accomplished, biddable,” he said, not unkindly. “All of them eligible, and you like all eligible women.”
None of them, he suspected, had ever sugared so much as a violet in their lives. None of them would know why a thin-skinned lemon mattered more than a thick one.
“What I like is order,” she returned. “And lineage that does not trip over sentiment. You need a wife, Chester. You need an heir.”
“You mean you want a grandson.”
“Preferably yesterday, yes. You’re four-and-twenty and more than old enough.” She smiled with just enough fondness to flatter and just enough steel to instruct. “Is that so terrible, darling? A woman’s worth ends if she cannot continue her line and no stubborn romantic son has ever been an excuse.”
He thought of the paddock last summer, of his mother watching a mare and saying almost the same words about foals and usefulness. Hearing it applied to any future wife turned his stomach in a way the horse talk never had.
He set his knife very carefully across the plate and looked at his mother the way a man looks at a familiar painting but suddenly notices the one brushstroke that has always bothered him.
