“Want your usual?”
Peter couldn’t believe the man remembered after all these years. “Yes, two.” He handed over enough money to cover the bill plus a generous tip. “One for me, one for my assistant.”
“I’ll pack them up for you to take back. Have a seat, Pete. Oh—forgive me, Omnimancer, old habits die hard.”
Peter gave free rein to an honest, non-D.C. smile. “Call me whatever you want.”
He sat by the door, watching Mr. Reed’s son ferry other people’s dinners from the kitchen, and tried to tally up how many sandwiches various members of that family gave him at no charge between first and seventh grades. It had to be close to fifteen hundred. He doubted they’d actually needed the sweeping up he’d done to repay them.
“Omnimancer Blackwell.” A prim voice. A prim woman, elderly, with white hair like an exclamation point against her black hat and dress. “I am Mrs. Amelia Price. Do you remember me?”
“Yes, I do,” he said neutrally, gripping the table as he stood. Mrs. Price—like Mrs. Harper, the polar opposite of the Reeds. Mrs. Harper, at least, was dead. “How are you?”
She waved his question away like a gnat. “Perfectly well. I want to talk to you about your choice of assistant.”
“I have every confidence in Miss Harper.”
“That is not the point. She is an unmarried lady, Omnimancer. It is inappropriate for her to work for you.”
He bit back an aggravated sigh. “She worked for Mayor Croft.”
“Mayor Croft is married. You, I take it, are not,” she said, casting a pointed look at his unadorned hands. “All a lady has in this life is her reputation, and I do not think you should hurt Miss Harper’s already diminished chances formatrimony by making people wonder what you are doing with her while you are alone in that big house.”
Neatly done, that. She’d insulted him, Miss Harper and the good sense of the entire town.
“Mrs. Price, anyone who saw or was part of the crowd queued up today for my services will immediately grasp what we are doing in that house. No one else in town could have handled that mob as deftly as Miss Harper, and I am not going to replace her with someone whose main recommendation is having been born male.”
“I am very disappointed in you.” Her evil eye was as potent at seventy as it had been at fifty. “Propriety is not something to be ignored when it happens to be inconvenient. You of all people should understand that.”
This jab at an old scar struck an open wound instead. He’d made peace with his illegitimacy, but he hadn’t thought he was a bastard in any other sense of the word until recently.
“Sometimes propriety is unjust,” he said, feeling like a hypocrite, and was saved from the need to dig himself further into a hole by Mr. Reed signaling to him that his food was ready. “Goodbye, Mrs. Price.”
He arrived back at the house as a supplicant exited and didn’t have the mental fortitude to do more than nod at the man. He found Miss Harper slumped over the receiving-room desk, head in her hands.
“On the bright side, you’ll never have to go through this sort of day again,” he said. “Was that the last request?”
Her “yes” sounded slightly choked. She sat up, revealing red-rimmed eyes.
Mrs. Price sprang to mind. “Did someone harass you?”
“No.” She chuckled half-heartedly. “Well, yes, but only when I insisted that second requests would have to wait until everyone’s firsts are filled, barring extreme situations, and Mr. Delarose declared me an idiot for not agreeing that his needs supersede everyone else’s.”
“Mr. Delarose might find himself at the bottom of my to-do list.”
She shrugged. “He’s more middle of the pack, in all fairness.”
“I see power has not yet corrupted you.”
“It would be quite quick if it had,” she said, her laugh more genuine this time.
“What happened, then?”
She looked at her hands. “I thought I understood the extent of the problems here, but I didn’t. Not really. Some of the requests made me wonder how I ever had the gall to consider myself poor.”
He thought of saying something cutting, of dredging up the memory of her telling him—at age eight—that poverty afflicted only the lazy and wicked. But this Miss Harper did not seem to be that Miss Harper. He handed her a sandwich and kept his mouth shut.
CHAPTER 6
