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Chester’s jaw set. “I am a duke,” he said quietly. “And I am English. My people are anyone who has the right to look to my protection, whether they sit at my table or sweep its floors. Those girls will grow up under my roof. Their bakers’ sons and daughters will eat bread shipped under rules I helped write. If that displeases the men at White’s, they may take their custom elsewhere, but you, of all people, do not get to call my actions small.”

Darley stared at him as if he’d begun to speak a language previously reserved for madmen. “What about us?” he demanded. “What about our investments? Our profits? You can’t turn against your own class.”

Chester thought of Pepper standing in the Pavilion, voice steady as she spoke for Harley Street; of the way her hand had shaken slightly when she slid the ramekin toward him in the corridor; of the look on her face when Your Grace had cracked the world between them.

“What about the women who bake your nephews’ bread and can’t pay for flour until noon?” he said. “What about the men who lift your crates on the docks and lose their wages when someone decides to play games with grain? Are they not also…our people?”

Darley made a disgusted sound. “This is what comes of spending time in bakeries,” he said. “You start thinking like a tradesman. The next thing, you’ll be trotting over to a baker and asking to marry one of his daughters instead of one of our own.”

The room went very still. Even Anna seemed to pause in her breathing.

Reed, at the edge of Chester’s vision, did something very strange with his mouth that might, in a more relaxed circumstance, have been called a suppressed grin.

Chester looked at Darley. Slowly, something in him that had been flailing since the Brighton road…settled. As if a thought he’d been circling without naming had finally stepped into the light and bowed.

“Perhaps I will,” he said.

Darley laughed, sharp and incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

Chester glanced at the basket, at the sleeping child who had not asked for any of this and would still bear its consequences, just as Pepper had not asked for his title and still bore the weight of it.

He thought of sea-green silk and boots full of sand and a woman who had asked him to see her whole and then watched him fail her spectacularly.

“I have never,” he said quietly, “been more serious in my life.” A baker’s daughter. His baker’s daughter. And he meant to ask for her hand as often as necessary, if ever she would let him near her, until she finally agreed.

Chapter 31

By mid-afternoon, the Beaumont’s townhouse was in a full dither.

A maid flew up and down the stairs with ribbons streaming like flags of surrender. The cook kept sending up frantic notes for more cream, as if the fate of England depended on a custard. Mother’s bell rang every three heartbeats.

Pepper paused at the turn of the stair, fingers biting into the banister.

The whole house fluttered around her while she felt more like the girl who’d fallen out of the sky in Brighton and never quite landed. For days she’d been drifting—between Dr. Fernando’s careful questions and the knowledge that her body was more uncertain than broken, between the pâtisserie ledgers Mrs. Hart had laid before her and the hollow ache where Chester used to sit in her thoughts.

Well, he still sat there but he was Wyndale now.

And Pepper would never excuse her heart for erring that far.

Now there was a guest coming and everyone was frantic, which meant the guest mattered.

Pepper wasn’t sure she had any pieces left to give to the matter.

She escaped sideways, into the breakfast room. Aunt Florence and Mrs. Hart were at the table, heads bent together over a small mountain of papers. Tea cooled by Aunt Florence’s elbow; Mrs. Hart’s spectacles perched halfway down her nose.

“Who is it?” Pepper asked, closing the door behind her with something like relief. “Has the prince invited himself to luncheon? Are we feeding all of London?”

Aunt Florence jumped; a sheet of paper slid to the carpet. “Dear girl, wear a bell.”

Mrs. Hart recovered first. She calmly bent, retrieved the page, and laid it back on the stack. “Nothing you need to worry about,” she said. “Just facts and figures. You are to think of dresses and callers. Your mother said so.”

They both exchanged a look.

Pepper narrowed her eyes. “What sort of facts and figures?” she pressed.

“It is the new society we have joined,” Aunt Florence said at last, with the air of someone throwing crumbs to the persistent ducks. “A charitable endeavor we joined. Widows, children, that sort of thing.”

“What sort of widows?” Pepper asked. “What sort of children?”