“None of Them Will Be My Mother!” the Duke’s Son Declared — Until the Cook Brought an Apple Pie
Chapter 4
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She worked from memory, the way a person says a prayer she has said so often that her hands know it better than her head.At five minutes before 5:00, the pie came out of the oven, golden and glossy, with steam curling up through the star. Rosamund set it on the table and went back to her roast, because the household still had to be fed whether or not she had a place in it by Friday.She did not look beneath the table. She listened.There was a rustle and a long hesitation, and then a pair of muddy boots appeared at the edge of the tablecloth, followed by a pale, pinched face with a smear of soot across one cheek."There are no raisins in it," Master Edmund said, staring at the pie."No," said Rosamund. "You told me they looked like drowned beetles."The boy's head came up sharply. "I never told you that.""You told your mother, and I was there weighing the sugar. You were four. You had a very firm opinion about beetles."He looked at her properly for the first time: at her brown hair escaping its cap and the burn scar on her left thumb. And something moved behind his eyes."You let me lick the spoon," he said slowly."Only because you were crying about the beetles."And from somewhere deep in the boy, there came a small, rusty, startled sound which was very nearly a laugh.He ate three slices, sitting cross-legged on the flagstones with the plate in his lap, and he did not speak until the last crumb was gone."She cut the star because I cried over plain lids," he said at last. "I thought the pie could not breathe.""I remember.""Nobody has made it since. Papa leaves the room if anyone mentions it, and Aunt Honoria brings ladies who look at me as though I were a hurdle." He scowled at his plate. "Lady Philippa counted the windows in the drawing room. I watched her. She wants the house. They all want the house.""Windows are very easy to count," Rosamund said gravely. "I do it with pans myself."He glanced up, suspicious, and found nothing in her face but plain attention."Nobody calls me Ned," he said abruptly. "Only she did.""Then I shall call you Master Edmund," said Rosamund. "Until you tell me otherwise."He nodded once, as though a treaty had been signed.Theodore Blackwood, fifth Duke of Ashborne, had a reputation, and he had maintained it with great discipline for two years. London called him the Ice Duke: he sat in the House of Lords and spoke rarely, never wasted a word, and could cut a bad bill to ribbons in four sentences. He had closed the Mayfair house for most of the year, declined every invitation that crossed his desk, and ridden out across his own fields at dawn as though he were trying to outrun something.