One
Eleanor Ashford—Nell to those who love her—stood behind the counter of The Mill Street Bakery, arranging cranberry tarts in neat rows while dawn crept through the misted windows. Flour dusted her dark sleeve. The scent of butter and sugar hung warm in the cold air, and the brick oven at her back radiated heat that seeped through her wool dress.
The shop bell could ring at any moment. Every time it jangled, her heart seized, a quick, animal spasm she’d never learned to control. She pressed her thumb into the edge of the counter until the wood bit her skin, and the sharpness brought her back. This was her bakery. Her counter. Her morning.
Her body was built of full breasts, generous hips, and a soft belly that had carried twins and showed every evidence of it. She’d been taught to be ashamed of it.
But before the twins, before her body had changed, there had been a different kind of shame.
The women on their street in Cheapside had been less kind. Barren, they’d whispered over their washing, their gazes sliding toward Nell’s flat stomach while their own had swelled year after year. Eight years married and not a single quickening toshow for it—there had to have been something wrong with her. Something broken inside.
They were wrong, of course. There had been two babes. The first bled out of her in the fifth month, alone on the kitchen floor while her husband, Gabriel, played cards in Southwark. The second came and went so quickly she might have imagined it—a fortnight of hope crushed to nothing in a single night of cramping and grief. After that, a midwife had pressed a pouch of dried pennyroyal into Nell’s palm. She had used it for five years without faltering, hiding the bitter tea behind the flour bin, drinking it before Gabriel stirred. Let them call her barren. Barren was a word she could survive. The alternative—bringing a child into that house, into those hands—she could not.
Then Gabriel found the herbs. He upended the flour bin in a rage, scattering white powder across the kitchen like snow, and when the pouch tumbled free he held it up between two fingers with a look she would never forget. He burned it in the grate. Called her a scheming, ungrateful wretch. Took her that night with the ash still warm in the hearth.
She quickened within the month. And Gabriel, who had raged about a barren wife for years, turned his fury on the cost of what was coming instead. Built like a brood mare, he’d said, his eyes scraping over her thickening waist. Good for nothing else. She had fled before the twins drew breath—eight months gone and nothing to her name but her mother’s green silk, a small pouch of jewelry she’d hidden beneath a loose floorboard after Gabriel had found her mother’s garnet brooch and sold it to cover his gambling debts, and the desperate certainty that her children would never know his hands.
Gabriel was dead. She had watched them pull the body from the rubble herself, stood dry-eyed while the constable told her she was a widow. Dead and buried and gone. But the dead hadlong memories, and Gabriel Hyde had left his ugly fingerprints on every corner of her life.
Five years she’d owned this place. The business barely broke even most months, and the lodgings upstairs were cramped—two rooms for her and the children, a third rented to Martha, a seamstress friend. But it was hers. Every creaking floorboard, every temperamental oven brick, every smudge on the windows. She had bled for it in ways she did not intend to discuss with anyone, and it belonged to her, and no one would take it from her again.
A thud from upstairs; then a shriek, followed by the unmistakable sound of a pillow striking a wall.
“Oliver, give it back!” Lily’s voice cut through the floorboards.
“It’s mine! You borrowed it three weeks ago and never returned it!” Oliver’s reply came muffled, like he was speaking from beneath a blanket or possibly a sister.
A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth despite herself. She crossed to the foot of the stairs. “If I come up there and find feathers on the floor,” she called, resting one hand on the banister, “you are both sweeping the shop after lessons. With the small broom.”
Silence. The small broom was a punishment of legendary cruelty in the Ashford household, its bristles so sparse it took an hour to clean what should take ten minutes.
“We’re getting dressed!” Lily announced, her tone shifting to angelic cooperation so quickly it could give a person whiplash.
Nell shook her head and returned to the counter, and they were nine years old and growing far too fast. Lily had her spectacles and her sharp tongue and her mother’s stubbornness. Oliver watched everything in silence. He had a gentleness that made her chest ache. She knew where he learned it. He did notlearn it from kindness. He learned it in a house where silence meant safety.
She didn’t think about that. Not this morning.
The back door swung open, letting in a gust of cold air and the sound of cheerful humming. Her assistant, Daphne, was twenty-seven and built like Nell—soft, round, and utterly unapologetic about it. Her cheeks were ruddy and her fingers were perpetually stained with berry juice or flour.
“Morning, Nell!” Daphne shook the rain from her cloak before hanging it on the peg by the door, water pooling beneath the hem onto the stone floor. She scraped her boots on the mat, leaving streaks of mud. “It’s coming down something terrible out there, and the lane’s turned to soup. But I brought my appetite.”
Nell felt the tension in her shoulders ease the way it always did when Daphne arrived. “You always bring your appetite,” Nell said, wiping a stray smudge of flour from the counter. “I am starting to think that’s why you took this position.”
“Starting to think?” Daphne pressed a hand to her chest in mock offense and leaned against the workstation. “Nell, I told you plain as day when you hired me. I said, ‘I will work hard, but I expect to eat well.’ And you shook my hand and said, ‘Fair enough.'”
Daphne plucked a broken piece of cranberry tart from the tray, one of the pieces too misshapen to sell, and popped it into her mouth. “Best decision you ever made,” she added around a mouthful of pastry, grinning as she reached for her apron.
“Modest as ever.” Nell arched an eyebrow, her hands still working the dough with rhythmic, grounding pressure.
“Modesty is for people who haven’t earned the right to brag.” Daphne moved to the seed cakes, arranging them with practiced, nimble hands. “It’s a shame Dr. Hartley is still in London. He would have bought half of these by now.” She cut a glance atNell, the corner of her mouth twitching in a silent tease. “That man finds a great many excuses to visit your shop, Nell.”
Nell kept her eyes on the tarts, refusing to look up. “He is a physician, Daphne. He buys cakes because he likes cakes.”
“He buys cakes because he likes you.” Daphne’s tone remained light, but her stare sharpened as she leaned over the tray. “Don’t think I have failed to notice the way he looks at you. It’s like you are the only tart worth having.”
“That’s enough.” Nell’s cheeks burned despite the cold air whistling through the window frame. She busied herself by straightening her apron with a sharp tug.
“Is it, though?” Daphne’s grin widened, her teeth catching her bottom lip as she waited for a reaction.
