Rosamund Vale knew none of this when she woke on the gray October morning that began everything. She was merely the cook at Ashborne Park, 28 years old, with flour in her hair and £6 to send her widowed sister every quarter day. Before the week was out, she would hide the Duke's only son beneath her kitchen table, defy a lady who had the power to ruin her, and hear that same boy scream that none of them would ever be his mother.And in the hush that followed that scream, with a shaking hand and an old stained recipe card, she would bake an apple pie.The kitchen at Ashborne Park was the one room in the great house where Rosamund could breathe. It lay at the back of the east wing: a long, vaulted chamber with a black range that took two men to feed, a scrubbed oak table large enough to dress a calf upon, and a wall of copper pans polished to the color of sunset. There were 31 of them. She had counted them on the day she arrived in March, and she had counted them on most days since, because counting was the habit that held her spine straight when everything else threatened to bend it. Thirty-one was a number that never argued back.It was 20 past 3:00 on a gray Thursday afternoon when the quiet was torn in half. Small boots came pounding down the back stairs. A door banged against the stone, and Master Edmund Blackwood, Marquess of Wexley, ten years old and sole heir to the Duke of Ashborne, shot into the kitchen with his collar torn and his face blotched red. He did not look at the kitchen maid or the scullery girl or the cook: he dropped to his knees, scrambled beneath the great oak table, and pressed himself against one of its thick legs like a fox run to earth."None of them will be my mother!" he screamed, and his voice cracked clean down the middle. "None of them! Not one!"Rosamund set down her paring knife very slowly, the way one puts down anything in the presence of a frightened animal. Beside her, Dorcas, the kitchen maid, had gone white, and little Nell, the scullery girl, was clutching a wet cloth to her chest as if it might defend her."Dorcas, the bread wants fetching from the cold larder," Rosamund said quietly. "Nell, go and see whether the hens have laid. Take your time over both."They fled, and the kitchen settled into a stillness so deep that she could hear the range ticking, and underneath the table a thin, furious, ragged breathing.She had barely turned back to her board when the footsteps came: slower this time and far heavier, accompanied by the sharp tap of an ebony cane.