As soon as he said it, he realized that it was brilliant. Jeremy had two problems, as he saw it. First, there was the as-yet-unsolved problem of being a duke—he’d figure that one out somehow. Maybe. But second, and more immediately relevant, there was the problem of Chloe herself.
If he had said, Chloe, I want to marry you, she would have thought it a joke and thrown her board at his head—well, maybe not her board, not with her list attached to it—but she’d have found something else. Something like... He glanced at the bottles in her basket. Yes. Rather more like that. Those would shatter.
As it was, she froze in place. She glanced at him through downcast eyelashes. Her voice came out low. “My…qualities?”
The problem had never been how serious Jeremy was about her; it had been how serious she thought he was. She had to convince herself first. How better to have her do that, than to make a list? He wasn’t precisely sure how that would work itself out, but Chloe had always been better at details.
“Yes,” he said. “Your qualities. If I have to marry someone, it needs to be someone like you.”
She swallowed. “Like me?”
Yes, Jeremy thought. Someone exactly like you, in exactly every way. No other woman would do. He nodded.
She inhaled and turned away. When she spoke, her voice was very small. “I don’t think you could pay me to make that list.”
He hadn’t considered that, but actually, now that she mentioned it, it seemed like a good idea.
“On the contrary.” Jeremy grinned at her. “I could pay you to do it. Do you wish me to do so?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t do it for two pounds.”
She looked so earnest, saying two pounds as if it were an immense and insurmountable sum. Of course she had never thought him serious. The difference in scale between them was massive. For her, two pounds was a vast sum—the amount her father might make after working for a few weeks as a chef for hire, and that much only because of his exceptional skill. For Jeremy, two pounds was basically nothing.
“Not for two. What about three?”
She shook her head again, but this shake came more slowly. He should feel bad about bribing her into convincing herself that he was in love with her, but then, he’d already spent years trying to figure out how to convince her every other way, and the bribery had mostly been her idea anyway.
“Four?” he offered.
“Not even for five.” She truly didn’t sound convinced. She was as bad at misdirection as Jeremy was good at it.
For a moment, he thought about offering her a truly remarkable sum—something that would mean something even to him. Six thousand, perhaps. But she’d just roll her eyes and tell him to be serious. The amount would be outside her comprehension.
“Seven, then.”
“Not for—” She bit her lip, perhaps realizing how many pounds seven was. She swallowed and looked down. “Well, maybe for seven.” She glared at him. “But you don’t really mean to give me seven entire pounds just to make one fiddly list. That would be obscene.”
He’d been right to keep the numbers low. “If it’s a maybe for seven,” he said, “it’s a yes for ten, isn’t it?”
Her lips trembled a moment.
“I will swear a solemn oath on my father’s grave. I’ll give you ten pounds, and I’ll throw in an entire box of the thickest, creamiest, most perfect list-making paper that you have ever seen.”
She shut her eyes. “You’re not fair. You’re never fair.”
It was only right that he should warn her. “I didn’t come here to play fair.”
“What did you come here for?”
There was a simple answer to that. A terrible answer, he knew, but simple. I came here to convince you to marry me. Then to tell you who I am. And finally to convince you that you should still marry me anyway, after you realize what a bad bargain I would be.
In the end, he misled her with the truth. “I came here because I intend to get married.”
Still, she hesitated. She looked away, her shoulders rising and falling with every breath. “You’ll pay me ten pounds? You’ll sign a contract to that effect?”
“Of course,” he said. “Make that the first item on our list: whoever it is I marry must insist I sign contracts. I like that in a woman.”
She looked up to the heavens as if searching the light clouds overhead for patience. “I’m not sure ten pounds is enough. I’m not sure any amount would suffice, but…” She swallowed. “But very well. It’s agreed. I’ll take your ten pounds in exchange for a list.”
2
The air in Chloe’s small home was so perfectly aromatic that she could almost taste the dish her father was making. Ginger, garlic, the scent of fermented broad beans, as well as a hint of lingering incense… She shut her eyes and inhaled. This. This. This was the smell of home, the smell of comfort, and the smell of her ambition, all wrapped into one. It was the smell of steamed yeasted buns and pork and the Unnamed Sauce her father had spent a decade perfecting.
With ten pounds—ten pounds, what a ridiculous amount!—they would be able to start producing Unnamed Sauce in larger quantities. Chloe could hire Tim to assist with the production on a daily basis, maybe come to an agreement with the Wedgeford Collective on the empty space near the river—jars, manufacturing, everything. Her father could get the treatments he needed; he might rest more and maybe give the stiffening joints in his hands time to recuperate. He could avoid the flaring headaches that came if he pushed too hard.
She could not have said no to Jeremy.
Still, the idea of making Jeremy, of all people, a list to help him find a woman to marry… That made something in her want to lash out like an angry, cornered ferret. But that something was nostalgia and old, small dreams. All of those needed to die anyway, and this would be the best way to murder them.
“Ah Lin,” Chloe heard her father say as she kicked off her outdoor shoes and exchanged them for indoor slippers. “You’re back. Go and pai to Ah Me.”
Praying to her mother was as much a part of her morning routine as making a list. Chloe’s first memory was lighting hiong with unsteady hands and looking to her father for guidance.
She set the three unbroken bottles on the table where her father was laying out breakfast things. Then she took a steamed yeasted bun, a mug of tea, and a dollop of brown sauce from the bowl on the counter, before going to kneel before the low table on the far side of the wall.
She poured tea into two little cups, broke two pieces off the bun, and set these in a tiny dish. She then picked up a match and lit two fat, brown joss sticks. Flame sparked, caught, flared, and then subsided until only the tips of the incense glowed with red. The ritual had been like this her entire life. Nobody else in Wedgeford lit incense for their ancestors in twos, but it was how her father had taught her.
“Good morning, Ah Me.” She bowed. Two delicate curls of sandalwood smoke rose from the hiong. “I hope you are well.”
Chloe’s mother had died when Chloe was a baby. Her memories of Ah Me were only this—her father’s stories and an ancestral tablet of carved rosewood with her mother’s name engraved in Chinese characters. Those had been some of the first characters that Chloe had been taught. NyukMin—“bright jade”—that was her mother’s name. Her father had taught her to read that first, drilling her on stroke order until she could manage to duplicate the characters properly. Only after she knew her mother’s name had he gone on to her own. “YiLin,” he’d taught her, hand over hers on the pen. “Lin—see? It has the character for jade inside, the way your mother is inside you as well. That’s your mother’s family tradition.”