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“Mr. Farlow’s coming for tea.”

“The toff from the bank?”

“He ain’t a toff. He’s Miss Martin’s mentor.”

“Mentor?” he repeated, peeking under a cloth covering a pyramid of crumpets.

June tried to recall how Reina had explained the word to her. “A mentor is someone smarter than you, helpin’ you better yourself.”

“Oh, like you,” Mad said casually, continuing to take inventory. “Crumpets, sandwiches, sweet pickles, beefsteak pie, currant cake . . . that bloke can’t eat all o’ this, can he?”

In her surprise at being called a mentor, June was slow to reply. “You can have one of them crumpets.”

“And marmalade?” he asked hopefully.

“Help yourself.” As she watched him spoon the glimmering citrus paste onto a crumpet, she said, “I ain’t smarter than you, Mad. Different, is all. You’re good at your work, and I’m good at mine.”

“You’re ’elping me to better meself,” he pointed out before biting into the doughy crumpet. He made an ecstatic sound in his throat and came to sit at the table.

“Just cheerin’ you on, is all I’m doing.” June poured a mug of tea for him, added milk and sugar, and then turned her attention to a platter of Charlotte Russe squares. With a pair of delicate steel tongs, she placed a shred of candied lemon peel on each sponge cake filled with Bavarian cream.

Whenever Mr. Farlow came to visit, June lent all her art to making delicacies she thought might please him. She knew how important he was to Reina, and she understood, too, that Reina’s feelings for the man were complex.

For her part, June liked Mr. Farlow. Despite his high rank and great wealth, he was friendly to people who were beneath him, even those considered to be the dregs of society. He was nicer than he had to be, for a man of his position. Farlow had a somewhat romantic view of working people, associating them with wholesome values and industrious habits: an entire class of Bob Cratchits.

As a champion of the common man, Mr. Farlow liked to show that he too was “salt of the earth.” For example, he would change into a tweed coat after work, and drink claret with dinner instead of champagne. He also loved knife-and-fork tea, a meal for people who came home late in the day. Basically it was teatime with heavier foods added, such as bangers, eggs, and slices of meat pie. Having knife-and-fork tea made Mr. Farlow feel like a close friend of the working class, which was not unlike thinking you were French because you liked croissants.

Still, Mr. Farlow was a decent sort, especially considering his lofty origins. And June was glad of that, because in her private opinion, there was a chance that Reina’s business arrangement with Farlow could lead to a far more personal kind of partnership.

Of course, June knew all about Reina’s reservations when it came to marriage. But she could also tell that Reina was lonely, and in desperate need of companionship with a suitable partner. Mr. Farlow might be older than one would wish, but he shared Reina’s interests and was obviously fond of her. It hardly hurt that he was handsome and rich, and his social position would open doors that had always been closed to her.

After finishing the Charlotte Russes, June fetched the sand tray and set it on the worktable in front of Mad. They had fallen behind in his alphabet-learning lately, as Mad and Mr. Pembroke had been working odd jobs around the house. Last week they’d cleared out the rubbish from the cupboard beneath the main staircase and installed shelves and hooks to make it a proper cloakroom. This week, to June’s gratification, they had started to line the shelves of the kitchen larder with zinc sheets that would help to keep the food cool.

Mad drank from the mug of tea, watching attentively as June drew the letter K and explained the sound it made.

At his lack of response, she glanced at him and was surprised by the scowl gathering on his face.

Thinking the letter might have intimidated him, June traced K through the sand again, more slowly this time. “It looks like a little bloke kicking up his foot, see?”

Mad’s scowl remained. “If a bloke kicked up his foot like that, he’d fall on his arse.”

June wondered how a man who was adored by small animals, horses, and cookery students could look so vicious when he scowled. With his brows scrunched down low like that, and his mouth clamped so hard and mean, Mad would scare the devil himself.

“All right, then, what do you think it looks like?” she asked with exaggerated patience.

“It looks like a letter I ain’t learnin’.”

“You can’t skip over K,” she told him. “It’s part of the blinkin’ alphabet.”

“It does the same job as C. Why should I learn another letter when it’s trying to take C’s job? It’s a scab, that K.”

He folded his arms and gave her an obstinate glance, having decided to take a stand.

June glowered at him. She had too much to do, and there was no time to talk him into learning a letter he didn’t like.

But she couldn’t help noticing how the muscles in his arms bulged when he crossed them. And how his dark hair fell over his forehead in a way that practically begged her to push it back.

He was a big stallion of a man, not the pretty kind she usually fancied. But Mad had a sweet side, a patient and generous side, one she’d never seen in Gil. And in spite of Mad’s criminal background, June was starting to think of him as a genuinely not-terrible man.