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London, 1818

Most debutantes kept no secrets—or none as complicated as Pepper’s.

They walked without thinking, danced at balls, and hunted for husbands as if it were a game. Pepper did not dance. She had no plans to marry. Love would be nice, one day, but she did not set her hopes there.

It only hurt that her mother did, and not only for Pepper’s sake. Lady Erica Beaumont wanted nurseries full of grandchildren, as if a full cradle might mend all the old griefs of her own life.

Society said Lady Erica had lost her great love early, widowed by a war hero before Pepper was born. That tidy tragedy had made Pepper a lady: Lady Barbara Beaumont, granddaughter of the Earl of Hartleigh. With her mother present, she was always Lady Barbara—polished, careful, a young woman meant for drawing rooms and balls.

But Mrs. Hart, her former governess and now chaperone—as far as the ton was concerned—her mother’s trusted sister-in-law, had long ago made a daily stroll part of her “constitutional.” Since the bout of mumps that had “left potential consequences” when Pepper was a child, the very word constitutional opened doors and earned her mother’s instant permission. The doctor had said she must walk if she wanted to keep using the leg the fever had nearly taken.

That walk led, very naturally, along Harley Street. It ended, just as naturally, at a particular shopfront where the windows gleamed and the air tasted of sugar: the Pâtisserie de La Loire.

That narrow route was her bridge to the truth. The story that made her Lady Barbara insisted her father had died a noble death years ago. In reality, her true father had been no gentleman at all, but a man who had earned his place in the world with flour and custard. Monsieur Duval owned the pâtisserie a half-hour from the townhouse she grew up in, and she had learned him there in small, careful visits—the way other girls learned minuets.

Even now at twenty, on fair days, her constitutional always included the bakery. Mrs. Hart set a sensible pace and quizzed her in French as they walked, but inside the pâtisserie the lessons changed. Pepper learned to roll pastry, to test the butter folds for a croissant, to laugh with the staff who knew only that she was Pepper and did not ask more questions of the baker’s daughter who had grown very handy with a whisk. For a few hours, she was exactly that. Mrs. Hart stood by, approving—très bien, continuez—as if the “French lessons” advanced beautifully.

Pepper’s nickname had begun as a jest, a name flung across the nursery when Grandfather Beaumont complained that a baker’s child was “too much salt in the Hartleigh soup.” Her mother, fierce and pale after the fever, had lifted her and said, “Not salt. Pepper. She gives bite.” The name had stuck harder than Barbara ever had, and it suited this divided life.

Those daily constitutionals had begun as the doctor’s prescription when the mumps fever left Pepper unable to walk more than a few steps without pain. Mama would rather let her slip away with Mrs. Hart for her health than keep a daughter as pale and fragile as fashion admired.

“Delicate girls make pretty ornaments and miserable lives,” she always said. She wanted no such difficulty for Pepper—which was why she spoke so often of a good marriage, one that would spare her daughter the sort of doomed love stories that had shaped both her own life and Mrs. Hart’s.

A constitutional with French lessons built in for Lady Barbara counted as education; her mother praised it. Even on this day, Pepper walked with Mrs. Hart again.

“Now,” Mrs. Hart said, tucking Pepper’s hand more firmly into her arm as they turned toward Harley Street, “conjugate marcher for me, if you please. We must convince Lady Erica that you are improving your mind as well as your ankle.”

Pepper smiled. “Je marche, tu marches, il marche…” She placed each step with care—left sure, right careful—feeling the familiar pull in her weakened ankle and the familiar relief that she could walk at all. “Nous marchons, vous marchez, ils marchent. Now in past tense or subjunctive?”

“Très bien,” Mrs. Hart said. “And the doctor would be satisfied. You see? Nothing to alarm your mother. A little French, a little movement, a great deal of fresh air.”

“And nothing to inspire her curiosity about where we are going,” Pepper murmured.

Mrs. Hart’s mouth twitched. “Your mother prefers, very firmly, not to ask where we are going. And we, my dear, prefer not to say. It keeps everyone’s consciences tidy.”

Mama preferred, very firmly, not to know that Pepper’s papa was in England at all, let alone that her carefully polished Lady Barbara slipped away three times a week to knead dough in his kitchen. If she ever truly learned it—if the polite lie she had lived inside since Pepper’s birth were dragged into the light—Pepper could not say what would follow, only that life would not remain as lovely as it was. There would be physicians again, questions about her health, about “future children,” about what sort of husband would take a girl with a weak ankle from a childhood fever and a baker for a father—if the latter scandalous detail ever came out.

They turned the final corner. The windows of the Pâtisserie de La Loire shone ahead, filled with fruit tarts and sugared puffs, a sweet little stage for passersby.

“Eyes forward,” Mrs. Hart murmured. “We are respectable ladies taking the air, not girls rushing to a sweetshop.”

They strolled past the front door as if they had not seen it at all. At the next lane, Mrs. Hart steered Pepper into a narrow alley that ran behind the buildings. The cobbles were uneven; Pepper adjusted her weight instinctively protecting her ankle, familiar now with where the stones dipped.

“At least it is dry today,” Mrs. Hart said. “If it rains tomorrow, we visit your aunt Florence instead. I refuse to explain to your mother why her daughter slipped and broke her neck in pursuit of pastry.” When Grandfather died, Aunt Florence chose a little house near the park rather than move in with Mother. She said it was easier to breathe when the walls were her own.

On wet days, when the pâtisserie lay beyond reach, Pepper visited her aunt Florence instead. Her aunt never asked outright what Pepper did on fine mornings; she only sniffed delicately at Pepper’s sleeve and said, “No flour today? How dull. Sit down and tell me everything you are not telling your mother.”

At the back of the shop, Mrs. Hart rapped twice on the plain door and opened it without waiting. Warmth and the scent of butter rushed out to meet them.

“Back entrance,” she said briskly. “For staff.” And young ladies with more secrets than are strictly proper.

Pepper stepped over the threshold into the kitchen, her heart easing. Here, no one looked for Lady Barbara. Here, she was simply Pepper.

But there were other storms brewing besides England’s rain clouds.

It was Papa’s health that worried her first, not the weather or the shop. His cough had deepened over the winter, and the apothecary had begun to hint that stronger medicines would be “dearer.” Now the flour shortage pressed close as well—prices creeping upward ever since the Corn Laws, like ivy over every baker’s door—while her mother fretted over finding her a “good” husband. Papa’s health, the flour policies, and Mother’s pressure to wed were sometimes too much. Pepper much preferred to knead dough and whisk vanilla cream to forget about the world beyond the bakery riddled with problems.

Plus, any husband would tangle everything. He would forbid the work that steadied her hands; if he discovered it—and if the world discovered it—she would lose the only life that made sense. Worse, no man deserved to learn after the vows were said that his wife might never safely bear the heir he thought he was taking. The doctors had never said as much, but their murmurs about her “delicate constitution” and “future children” had been enough to frighten her mother, and then Pepper herself.