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They’d made a promise and she wasn’t capable of keeping it. She’d seen the man, Chester. But she wasn’t capable of looking past the other side, Wyndale.

She had stood with her back pressed to the wall until the muffled sounds from the square—an impatient stamp of hooves, a groom’s murmur—faded away. Only when the house settled again into the uneasy quiet of a family licking its wounds had she crawled into bed, pulled the blankets over her head, and cried herself hoarse.

Hours had passed and the darkness of the night has lifted from the sky but felt as though it had found a new home in her chest.

Now he was gone. The rented house was behind them. London waited ahead.

The coach jolted over another rut. Pepper’s teeth clicked together. She dragged her thoughts back to the cramped interior of the travelling carriage.

Mother sat rigid in her corner, wrapped in a dark pelisse, hat ribbons tied with military precision beneath her chin. Aunt Florence occupied the seat beside her, shawl bunched over her knees like a battle flag. Opposite them, Mrs. Hart had taken the remaining corner; Pepper sat next to her, their skirts just touching.

Today she wore a plain gray travelling dress that made her feel like a smudge on the world. The little pearl bracelet Mother had fastened on her wrist for the tasting had not been removed. It knocked against the heel of her palm with every jolt of the wheels. She wished she had left it on the Pavilion floor.

“Barbara,” Mother said at last.

“Yes,” Pepper answered. The one syllable came out shredded.

“How long”—Mother swallowed; Pepper heard it over the rattle of the wheels—“have you known that Monsieur Duval is your father?”

The question sliced through the dim interior like a blade. Pepper’s head snapped up. Mrs. Hart’s hand went still on the edge of her shawl. Aunt Florence’s eyes sharpened, blue gone suddenly bright.

Pepper opened her mouth. Closed it again. For a moment, all she could hear was the Pavilion: the breathless beat of silence after she’d fallen; the prickle of laughter, quickly smothered; the rustle of silk as the room shifted to see. The taste of crème and humiliation, of sugar and betrayal, thick on her tongue. Wyndale’s hand reaching for her and the memory of knocking it aside.

“I didn’t want to take him from you,” she burst out. The words tumbled over one another, clumsy and raw. “I thought if you hadn’t looked for him, there must be a reason. I thought it was…your story. Not mine.”

“You did not tell me,” Mother said. Her tone was odd and flat; edges sanded off. It was worse than anger.

Pepper’s spine tried to straighten; her heart could not keep up. “Mrs. Hart took me to Harley Street and I’m glad for it,” she said. “Because I needed somewhere I wasn’t—” she groped for the right word “—half of something. He was only the baker then, at first, right?” She glanced at Mrs. Hart who wiped a tear off her cheek. “I was a baby in a perambulator, then a girl on a stool by his counter. I didn’t know until I was old enough to notice…until I watched the way he looked at me and said he saw you.”

Mrs. Hart drew in a breath. “That was not how it began,” she said quietly.

All three Beaumont women turned to her.

“You were seventeen, my lady,” Mrs. Hart went on, eyes on Pepper but voice aimed at Mother as well. “Pepper was a babe. London was ruthless, and you were miserable. Your parents had forbidden the match and called Monsieur Duval a mistake, but your heart”—she flicked a brief, careful glance at Lady Erica—“did not agree. You would not speak of it. You would not speak of him. I thought, if anyone could mend that heartbreak, it would be the man who had helped cause it.”

Mother flinched. It was small—a tightening at the corner of her mouth—but Pepper saw it.

“My husband was gone, died. Yours was still alive and lost in a way that could be found again. So I wrote to him,” Mrs. Hart said. “I told him the babe had been born healthy and that you were in England. That your daughter existed and was precious. There was talk in the house of needing economies, of letting servants go. I knew you would never ask him for anything. So I used my wages to help him with the passage.”

Pepper stared. “You brought him to London,” she whispered.

“I gave him a direction,” Mrs. Hart corrected gently. “Work first, or pride would never let him come. There was a small pastry shop in Harley Street looking for a man who understood sugar and flour the French way. I arranged the introduction. He did the rest. By the time your parents had finished deciding what you ought to do with your life, he had a stake in the place and a roof over his head. Then he became the proprietor a few years later.”

“And you started walking me there,” Pepper said slowly, the pieces rearranging themselves in her mind like shards of cooled caramel finding a pattern. “Every afternoon.”

“Every fair afternoon,” Mrs. Hart agreed. “In the perambulator at first. Later with your hand in mine. We walked as far as Harley Street so you could breathe air that didn’t come with expectations.” Her voice tightened. “I thought that once he was close enough to touch, your mother might finally choose to do something about her own broken heart.”

Pepper swallowed. “Except when it rained,” she said. “When it rained, we went to Aunt Florence.”

Aunt Florence made a small, guilty noise. “You did,” she admitted. “We played at reading improving novels and not talking about French pâtissiers who had somehow acquired London addresses.”

“You sent him clients, Florence?” Mother gasped.

“He needed to build a business to thrive so you could, perhaps, be reunited as a family,” Aunt Florence said. Her gaze on her sister was level, unflinching. “If you ever chose to be.”

Mother’s fingers clenched in her lap. “So you knew,” she said, looking from Mrs. Hart to Florence, her composure beginning to crack like sugar taken a shade too far. “All this time. You knew he was there. And you never told me?”

“We told you,” Aunt Florence said softly. “You refused to hear the whole of it. You said you would not risk Pepper’s prospects on a man your parents had already labeled a mistake.”