“It was nothing of note. A batch of caramels. A visit from Lady Brightcrest.” Lucie pulled down three bowls from the shelf above the dresser and began setting the table. “And you? Were you busy?”
“Not especially. It will pick up soon enough once the Season begins, but for now things are quiet. I have received a few commissions already. Lady Featherlock has sent her measurements ahead, and the Asterleaf sisters wrote with instructions for their gowns, so that is something. Their figures have not changed, which simplifies things considerably.” She paused,considering. “Lady Featherlock’s, on the other hand, is an entirely new set of measurements, so either she has had a very eventful winter or she has sent me someone else’s numbers by mistake. I suppose I should?—”
The front door flew open with a bang, startling both Lucie and her mother. “It is I!” Charlotte announced. A second bang followed as she swung the door shut. “Do not be alarmed!”
“And yet,” Mrs Fields muttered, reaching for the bread knife.
Charlotte appeared in the kitchen doorway, a shawl slipping off one shoulder and a folded note in her hand. She was older than Lucie, married, a mother of two small children, and entirely unchanged from the girl who had once climbed onto the kitchen roof to try to catch a gossip bird that had been shrieking to the entire lane that Mr Fields had tripped over the Dunbars’ cat and landed face-first in a flower bed. She had Lucie’s coloring but a rounder face and an energy that seemed to occupy slightly more space than her body strictly required.
“I have a message for Father,” she said, brandishing the note. “From Theo. Something about a measurement for the display case Father is building for the shop.” She looked around the kitchen. “What are we having for supper?”
“Stew,” Mrs Fields said. “For the people who live in this house.”
“It smells wonderful.”
“Charlotte. Would you like to take that message to your father?”
“In a moment, in a moment.” Charlotte hoisted herself onto the edge of the table and positioned her feet neatly on a chair.
Mrs Fields turned from the range and regarded her elder daughter with a sigh. “Must I truly still say this after more than twenty years?”
Charlotte looked down at the table beneath her. She looked up at her mother. “What?”
“Chair, Charlotte.”
Charlotte slid off the table with a sigh that suggested she was being asked to surrender a fundamental liberty and dropped into the chair instead. She caught Lucie’s eye and pulled a face. Lucie pressed her lips together and busied herself with carrying the bread to the table and placing it in the center.
“Should you not,” Mrs Fields added, turning back to the stew, “be preparing supper in your own home?”
“Already done!” Charlotte said with a self-satisfied smile. “Do not worry, Mother. I shall not bother you for long. I will deliver the message, steal some of your bread?—”
“You will not.”
“—and be heading home shortly.”
Home, for Charlotte, was five houses down the lane, in the house where Theo had grown up. The house his parents had left to him when they moved to the country. Charlotte and Theo and their two children, Robbie and Belle, lived there now, close enough that Charlotte could walk to her parents’ house in under two minutes, and did so with a frequency that suggested she had never truly left.
“How fares The Honeycomb, Luce?” Charlotte asked. “Still throwing things at you?”
“Yes, actually. A pixie today. The one who keeps forgetting.”
“Oh, the poor little thing. Was anyone hurt?”
“Fortunately not.” Lucie turned to the shelf where the glasses were kept. “It is becoming a rather predictable routine.”
“Well, my day was quite busy, as it happens. I stopped by the tea house earlier to see Rosavyn. I amthrilledshe is here early this year. Kazrian is here early too, which is the reason Rosavyn came, and do you know it has beenthree yearssince he was in Bloomhaven? I doubt I shall recognize the boy.”
Not a boy anymore, Lucie thought immediately, then pressed her lips together and kept her attention very carefully focused on the cutlery she was laying out.
“Lord Kazrian,” Mrs Fields said.
“Hmm?”
“LordKazrian, Charlotte. He holds a title.”
“I know he holds a title, Mother, but I have known him since he was a boy tripping over things in the tea house kitchen?—”
“And he is no longer a boy tripping over things. He is a titled fae lord from one of the most prominent families in the Isles, and you will address him accordingly.”
