Page 93

He missed her in sugar and stone.

Twice, three times, he had the coachman pull up a little way down Harley Street. He sat behind the curtained window and watched the patisserie.

The door, painted a sober green, opened and closed on a little slice of the world he wanted and could not make himself enter: Once he saw Monsieur Duval himself, leaning in the doorway for a breath of air, hand pressed to his chest as if it hurt to breathe when the ovens were lit.

But there was no Pepper.

He had carried half of Brighton’s salt home in the lining of his coat to remind him of their kiss at the beach, and still his days were unseasoned—plain, gray things, waiting for the one bright, impossible pinch of her that would turn mere living into something worth savoring. Pepper would.

Or she could.

Chester’s own hand twitched on his knee. He had a Royal Warrant for the man in his desk, signed and sealed. He had a heart that felt as if it had left half of itself on a beach in Brighton.

So he sat in his own carriage like a coward and watched the door until the light failed. Pepper did not come.

His house, at least, did not allow room for self-pity.

The nursery, which his mother had furnished in a fit of heir-minded enthusiasm—lambs on the wallpaper, cots lined up like expectations—had been quietly invaded by the time she returned from Brighton.

The first day, the girls came in under cover of afternoon, bundled like contraband: Margy with her solemn four-year-old eyes, Bess with a smudge on her nose and fists full of someone’s discarded ribbon, and Anna, the tiny, pink-faced bundle of a creature who howled indignantly at the entire enterprise.

His mother had returned from Brighton to find them already asleep in her nursery.

The ensuing conversation had included the words disgraceful, unthinkable, and do you care nothing for appearances, followed by the trajectory of a porcelain vase across his study. It had shattered against the paneling; he had watched it fall and thought, irrelevantly, that Pepper would have said it was a waste of perfectly good glaze and that she could have turned even the shards into something worth keeping.

“Those children are not our responsibility,” his mother cried.

“They are now,” he said, holding Anna against his shoulder while she snuffled and fussed. “It was signed by Wyndale. I chose it. If anyone complains, they may complain to me.”

It turned out that orphans, unlike Boards, did not respond to firm declarations and circulars.

They needed feeding at inconvenient hours and took exception to the concept of sleep.

And the smaller the girl, the louder her cries. That was entirely new to Chester.

By the third night, Margy and Bess had finally stopped waking every time the wind rattled the windows. Anna, however, had decided the hours between midnight and dawn were an experiment in vocal endurance.

He found himself in the nursery in shirtsleeves, coat slung over a chair, cravat undone, walking slowly up and down with a warm, outraged bundle against his shoulder.

“Hush,” he murmured, swaying. “You’ll wake your sisters. And then none of us will survive to see the morning.”

She continued to complain into his neck in small, furious snuffles.

He had chaired committees. He had faced the House of Lords. He had walked into rooms where every man present wanted something from him he did not particularly wish to give. None of it had prepared him for the way a six-week-old infant could turn his bones to water and his heart to pulp simply by not sleeping.

“You are very small,” he told her. “You should not be able to cause this much havoc.”

In a quieter corner of his mind, Pepper’s voice murmured: I do not wish to marry a man I like, in case he asks me for more than I can give.

He closed his eyes briefly, breathing in milk and starch and the faint scent of the lavender sachet someone had tucked into the cradle.

“I am trying,” he told the child, though he meant Pepper. “I am trying to be the sort of man you could trust with the parts you think are broken. Even if they were never broken at all.”

Anna gave a sigh that was all exhaustion and indignation and finally, finally let her head go heavy against him.

“You see?” came Reed’s dry voice from the doorway. “Even she can be persuaded eventually, Your Grace. There’s hope for the Board.”

Chester let out a breath that might, on a weaker man, have been a laugh. “Get out,” he whispered. “Before she hears you and thinks us amusing.”