Chapter 2
Mrs. Hester Floyd stared at the broken egg yolks, the egg whites, and the pottery shards mixed together on her stone floor and let out a cry of frustration.
Tears threatened. She grabbed her frayed apron, wrung it, and brought it to her face. It had been so terribly stupid of her. She was quite tired and had been moving too quickly. And now the bowl was on the floor with the contents strewn about, unusable. What was she going to do?
“My lady, are you quite well?” cried Ellen, as she charged into the pokey little kitchen with its tiny window that barely let in light. The older woman’s eyes were wide with fear, for the part of town where they lived had proved to be quite dangerous, but it was the only place Hester could afford.
Ellen’s steel-gray curls trembled at the edges of her limp mobcap. “My lady?” she gasped, taking in the scene.
Hester drew herself up and willed herself not to break apart like the eggs and bowl on the floor.
“Ellen, I am perfectly well, except I have made a mess,” she confessed. “And please don’t call me ‘my lady.’”
Ellen gave her a gentle look. “You’ll always be a lady to me. But our friendship has become so dear, so I shall try to remember.”
It had been years since people had called her “my lady,” except for Ellen.
And Ellen only did so in times of distress, and she really shouldn’t be bothered by it, but she had been Mrs. Hester Floyd for a few years now, and it’s what she preferred.
And she hated being reminded of the fact that she had been born someone so very different to who she was now, with parents who had been unkind, wealthy, and powerful.
They were still unkind, wealthy, and powerful, but she chose to have nothing to do with them, just as they chose to have nothing to do with her.
Yes, she’d left it all behind. And in moments when she already felt awful, having it thrust in her face how very different her life was now, after having had her loving husband taken from her, as well as that old life, well, she didn’t really know what to do.
Ellen studied the eggs on the floor and her lips pursed. “Oh, Hester. Oh dear,” she whispered.
“‘Oh dear’ doesn’t really cover it, does it?” Hester murmured.
Their wonderful marmalade cat, Alabaster, jumped down from his favorite shelf and began licking at the eggs.
“At least someone will get a good breakfast out of it,” she said to Ellen, with a halfhearted attempt at a smile.
Ellen nodded, though her mouth was turned in a frown.
They had been making baked goods to sell on the street, and the truth was she did not have money to buy more eggs. Her widow’s pension was so terribly small that she couldn’t afford to buy more, and now she had nothing to sell and no income.
She closed her eyes, crossed to the chair that was uneven and creaky and would likely break any day now, and lowered herself into it.
“Tea,” Ellen said. “I shall make tea.”
“We’re out of tea,” Hester pointed out.
Ellen clucked. “I always have a little extra tea for times like this.” And Ellen headed to a cupboard in the corner of the small kitchen, whipped open the door, rummaged around in the back, and produced a tin.
Hester laughed. How could she not? “Ellen, you are a treasure.”
“I know,” Ellen said, giving her a cheeky smile. “It’s the only reason you keep me.”
“That’s not true,” Hester protested, smoothing her hands over her wrinkled skirts. “I keep you because you are the dearest woman alive and my most loyal friend.”
Ellen gave her a gentle smile. It was true. When Hester had left her father, the earl’s, house with nothing but a bag and a small amount of money, Ellen had decided to come with her.
Ellen had looked after Hester since she was small, and Ellen knew the cruelty and coldness of the house Hester had grown up in. She had not wanted to stay without her little girl, as she said. And it had been a moment where Ellen had chosen love over security.
Hester felt as if she had betrayed her dear old friend, for she had brought her to poverty and ruin, all because of love and escape.
Yes, she had escaped the coldness of that gilded house and her father’s cruelty and her mother’s distance, and she had found love, but her husband had always been gone because he’d been at war.
At first, everything had gone smoothly. Or at least well enough, despite his long absences, something she had intellectually understood would occur when she’d married him.
While alive, he had kept them comfortably enough in a small cottage right adjacent to Plymouth.
Roses had grown along the fence. They’d always had enough meat and a little bit of sugar.
All had been well until her husband had taken their savings, because he’d wanted to be sure that she had enough if something happened to him with the battles coming, and speculated.
Much to her deep regret, he had speculated on a spa town that had never materialized. And the builders who had assured them that there would be great opportunities had disappeared, claiming that unforeseeable circumstances had made it so that the town would never be built.
All of their money had disappeared, like the town.
And her darling husband had gone to war with that shadow upon his heart.
She sometimes wondered if that was why he had never returned, because he’d felt so broken by his mistake, as if he had let her down so tremendously that he’d chosen death in battle rather than returning home to a very different defeat.
He’d never let her down. He had been the loveliest and most wonderful of gentlemen. Perhaps he had been mistaken in some of his decisions, but she would take a good-hearted gentleman who made mistakes over a wealthy gentleman like her father any day.
Still, as Ellen boiled the water, warmed the pot, and then brought over the tea things, there was an inescapable weight to the pokey little rooms that they rented, that looked nothing like the lovely cottage that they had once had, because she had barely a hundred pounds a year to live on.
A hundred pounds a year to keep herself and Ellen. And she had not yet paid off all the debts that had been accrued from their financial losses. For on top of the poor investment, they had borrowed money, certain better times were ahead.
Those times had never materialized, and with her husband’s death, they had only grown worse.
She had longed for children, but in many ways, she was desperately glad that she did not have them now, because she had no idea how she would pay to rear them as they should be reared without being forced into the workhouse or onto the streets.
And she could not bear such a thing. The truth was she was only a few steps from the workhouse herself, because those debts and their interest were a debilitating drain.
She could not believe that her life was as awful as the eggs that had fallen and broken on the floor. No, she refused to believe it. There had to be an answer somewhere. Somehow. She wouldn’t give in. She couldn’t.
Her cat lifted his fluffy head and began giving himself a bath as if there was not a great turmoil all around him. Maybe he knew something that she did not. She hoped so.
Ellen poured out the tea and pushed a chipped mug towards her. “There you are, Hester, my pet,” she said softly.
She far preferred it when Ellen used her given name. They were too close for titles. They always had been. Ellen was more her mother than her real one.
“What am I to do, Ellen?”
“Drink your tea,” Ellen instructed. “It will not sort out all our ills, but it will do us good.”
Ellen sipped at her tea, letting out a sigh. “Now, that’s heaven,” she said. “All the way from across the world into our kitchen, then into our cups. It’s a miracle, really.”
“It is,” Hester agreed, laughing, though there was pain in it, as she picked up her own cup and forced herself to savor the beauty of that small sip. She’d never really understood what savoring was when she’d been the daughter of an earl.
When her husband had been alive, she’d understood it a little better because she had not had the vast abundance of wealth that she’d had growing up.
But now, dear God, now she understood what it was to savor something.
Bread, butter, sugar, tea, firewood. Warm, clean rooms, and clothes that did not have hidden patches.
Now, she knew what it was to savor something because she had a finite amount of it, and once she used it, there was no getting more without great cost. She drank her tea slowly. Ellen did too.
“I want to open a tea shop,” Hester said at last. “I think we could make a run of it. But I cannot get someone to finance it. No bank will give me the money, no moneylender in their right mind either. But baking is my only skill, and I refuse to give up my chance.”
Ellen contemplated her, then said, “We shall find a way. We must.”
She nodded. It was true. They must. For the other options were not options at all.
A lady of her sort usually had two choices.
She could go back to her mother and father, rejoin the ton, and live her life apologizing for her decisions, shamed at every moment for the rest of her life, or she could throw herself into a man’s keeping.
Neither of those options was one Hester was willing to choose.
She liked her freedom too well, even though she didn’t feel particularly free without money.
“Is there no one who could help us? Is there no one who might be able to honorably give you a small loan?” Ellen asked hesitantly.
They had had this discussion many times, and each time it had grown more fraught, for their circumstances had become ever more precarious. Hester was clinging to independence and safety with the sort of panic reserved for one digging one’s fingers into a cliff’s face, praying not to fall.
She didn’t like to go through her husband’s friends and think of them in terms of commodities, as people who could give her something.
But the truth was she had tried everything else.
She had tried selling her baked goods. She had tried working the markets with her sweets, but there was a great deal of competition from other street sellers, and there were risks as a woman alone.
Worse, none of that would work to get the shop she so desired, with rooms overhead to live in or provide stability.
The only thing that gave her joy now was baking with Ellen.
As a small girl, she had learned how to create the most delicate and delightful of confections from her father’s French chef, who had had a special love for children.
Often, trying to escape her parents’ terrible marriage and the effects it had on her, she’d gone down into the halls beneath the house and watched the alchemy of butter, sugar, flour, cream, fruit, and eggs turned into something that gave joy to anyone who partook of it.
And that’s what she wanted more than anything in the world. She wanted to be able to make her living giving people a moment of sheer heaven in a bite. It was also the only thing she was truly good at. She placed her teacup down.
“There’s one person,” she ventured cautiously. “But…”
“Yes?” Ellen prompted, her voice colored with hope.
“I don’t really want to return to that world,” she admitted. “It’s a dangerous one.”
“This world is dangerous,” Ellen pointed out, her wrinkled face tense with worry as she gestured to the window and the cacophony of gin-soaked Londoners just trying to survive in this part of the city.
“And the world you’re from, my pet, is the only world with real money,” Ellen added softly before she looked down.
Ellen’s hand tightened on her cup. “And perhaps someone who won’t try to use you. ”
Hester’s insides tightened. She wouldn’t let herself think of the rough men who tried to accost her when she took to the streets on errands.
The way they gazed at her lewdly, even daring to reach out and grab at her bonnet ribbons.
This part of London knew no boundaries or safety for a woman.
A woman alone was seen as fair game. And then there had been the debt collectors, who had been well-dressed, with bellies that spoke of vast quantities of meat and wine, who had whispered that they would happily release her from her debts if she chose a different sort of payment.
Her stomach turned queasy, and she shoved the memories aside.
There was no way out for her that had any sort of decent ending without her swallowing her reluctance and admitting the truth.
She had to go and visit a lord.
There was only one man who her husband had written of continuously as a great man, Captain Lord Calchas Briarwood.
She had resisted because she did not want to confess the mistakes her husband had made to such a great man. She didn’t want his memory to be muddied in such a way, but she could no longer escape the fact that she needed help. That Ellen needed help.
If Ellen and she were to have any sort of future at all, one that was outside the current misery of their lives, and the worse misery that was to come, she was going to have to act.
She could no longer lie to herself. She was fortunate even. London was full of the widows and orphans of men who gave their lives for their country and were now living in abject poverty with no recourse.
At least she had a chance. Yes, there was no argument now. She was going to have to go to Heron House and ask, as she had never dared to do before, for help.