Chapter 15: Pellow and Daughters

I was dressed before the tea boy reached the end of the passage.

Alistair grabbed his coat off the chair.

"I'm coming."

"No, you're not."

He stopped with one arm in a sleeve.

"Half the city thinks I'm your mistress," I said. "If you walk me to my own shop door, they'll say I can't open it without a prince."

"Elinor."

"Go and sit with your father. He walked down a lot of stairs yesterday."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he kissed me once, hard, and took his arm back out of the sleeve.

"If anyone touches you," he said, "I'm burning the street down."

"Noted," I said, the way his brother would have.

I took the tea boy and my mother's box and went out the carters' gate.

Quay Lane was full by the time we got there.

Fishwives with baskets on their hips. Carters. The baker from the corner with flour on his arms.

The shop door was shut, with a new brass padlock on it the size of a fist.

Two men in the Duke's black livery stood in front of it with cudgels.

A third man, older, in a good black coat, held a paper with a red seal.

The Duke's steward. I'd seen him at the presentation, carrying the Duke's gloves.

My blending girls sat on the step in their aprons.

The younger one's face was blotchy from crying.

The old porter sat beside them with his cap in his lap, looking twenty years older than he had a week ago.

He saw me and got up too fast.

"Miss Elinor. They wouldn't let us take a thing."

"Are you hurt?"

"No, miss. They only shoved."

I walked up to the steward.

"That's my shop," I said.

"It's your father's shop, madam." He held up his paper. "By Sir Oswin's own order, it's in the keeping of His Grace the Lord Chamberlain."

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