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“He acts like he’s in charge of everyone! Like he’s the bleedin’ Lord Mayor!”

“That’s his job, isn’t it?” Reina asked gently.

June was silent as she folded freshly washed berries into a bowl of batter. She spooned it all into a buttered pudding mold and eventually spoke without looking up. “It reminded me of when Gil and the vicar decided I was going to marry. My life weren’t me own. I couldn’t breathe, like someone set a clamp of bricks on my chest.”

“Was Pembroke unkind to you?” Reina asked.

“No,” June admitted. “He listened to my side of it and explained his thinking. He said I could pick who goes with me.”

Reina relaxed a little. “Who did you choose?”

“Mad, of course.” Scowling, June went to set the pudding in the oven.

“Will that be so dreadful? I thought you and he got on well together.”

“We do, when we’re in my kitchen and I’m teaching him the alphabet, or he’s helping with chores. But I never gone nowhere with him. Not away from the house.”

“Oh,” Reina said softly. “June . . . if you’re nervous about being alone with him . . . we’ll find some other solution to the problem.”

“It ain’t that,” June said, rolling her eyes. “Mad would never hurt a hair on my head.”

“Then what?”

June picked up a rag and began to wipe the table, which was already spotless. “If I spend more time with him,” she said in a low voice, “it will encourage him liking me.”

“He already likes you.”

“I meant liking me all the way.”

“He already likes you all the way. Everyone knows it.”

June collapsed slowly into a chair and rested her forehead on folded arms. “Bollocks in a basket,” came her muffled exclamation.

“Are you really worried about him liking you? Or is it more that you’re worried about liking him?”

June pulled off her white cap, revealing a beautiful mass of braids and tiny coils. Brooding, she reached up to loosen a section that had been pinned too tightly and rubbed the sore spot on her scalp. “I could be a married woman now,” she reflected glumly. “Gil was set to inherit his dad’s sheep farm. He might’ve been a selfish arse-dingle with a little buttonhole prick, but he was handsome, and from a good family. A respectable, churchgoing lad. Every girl in Nether Wallop set her cap for him. But I couldn’t make myself go along with marrying him.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t nothing in particular. It was things like . . . when we was out walking, Gil would always go faster than me, and I had to run to catch up. Or if I was shelling peas in the kitchen and dropped a few, it never crossed his mind to pick ’em up for me. And he never asked what I thought, or what I wanted.” She settled the white cap back over her hair. “And now I’m keeping company with a giant clobberloaf who’s got tattoo pictures and big, scary muscles all over his body and never set foot in no church in his life. But . . . he likes everything I do. Never raises his voice. He empties the slop pail, carries in heavy crates from the grocer, and pays attention to every word I say. He may be the first man with a working pair of ears I ever met.”

Reina glanced at the empty doorway before asking in a low voice, “Are you considering . . . taking up with him?”

June covered her eyes with one hand. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. All the ways it would turn out wrong—I can’t even count that high.”

Reina drank some tea, her brow knitted in thought. “I think it’s impossible to predict the future.”

June lowered her hand. Her lips quirked. “Well, that’s your job, innit.”

“Economic forecasting isn’t fortune-telling,” Reina said. “What I’ve learned is that history by itself isn’t a reliable guide for what lies ahead. It’s how you interpret the new variables that changes the projections—”

“I don’t understand a blessed word you’re saying, Queenie.”

“Sorry. What I’m trying to say is, we can’t predict the future only by looking at the past. There are always new things, variables, that will change the outcome. Let’s take Enid’s situation, for example—”

“Enid? What’s she got to do with it?”

“Bear with me. Most people, upon finding out Enid was sent to prison for thievery, would assume she’s a person of low moral character and will probably steal again. In economics, that’s what’s called the theoretical model. But now let’s look at more information. Enid was a hardworking seamstress for a London dressmaker’s house. As a child, she came down with tuberculosis, which settled in her hip. Her health was stable for a few years, but eventually the tuberculosis became active again. Enid’s only chance of survival was to have the diseased part of the hip chiseled and scraped out.”