Burning Up

kitchen,” he instructed the fisherman.
    The steward did not offer to pay for the delivery, Jack noticed. Nor did the vendor seem to expect him to.
    “What do I owe you?” Jack asked.
    The man gaped until he resembled the spangled salmon in his arms.
    Sloat coughed. “No need to trouble yourself, Major. He’ll put it on account.”
    Jack frowned. Some of the officers he had served with lived on credit. They owed tradesmen for everything, their boots, their shirts, their wine. But Jack came from trade on his mother’s side. He knew the burden this placed on the vendors who depended on the gentry for a living. “Surely we can spare the ready better than he can.”
    “You’re not in London any longer,” Sloat said. “Or even the Peninsula. It will take time for you to understand how we do things here.”
    But as Jack watched Sloat stroll the market, patting, prodding, assessing, he thought he understood very well.
    The steward accepted two pints in the tavern’s silent taproom, helped himself to an apple from a stall. At the baker’s, he poked holes in two loaves before deeming a third fit to eat. No one questioned, no one protested his actions.
    Jack looked from the crumbs littering his steward’s waistcoat to the baker’s frown in his orange beard and laid a shilling on the counter.
    The baker’s gaze darted from the money to Jack to Sloat. “What’s this, then?”
    “Payment,” Jack said.
    The baker wiped floured hands across his wide middle. But he made no move to touch the coin.
    Sloat swallowed his bread. “Our credit is good here.”
    “No longer,” Jack said. “We pay ready money from now on.”
    Sloat’s cheeks puffed. “I really cannot advise—”
    “I am not asking your advice,” Jack said. “Inform the other merchants in town I expect them to send their bills directly to me. We will settle our accounts before beginning business on the new footing.”
    “You will regret this,” Sloat said.
    “To me directly,” Jack repeated. “By the end of the week.”
    Their eyes met.
    The steward’s gaze fell. Without a word, he turned and slammed his way out of the shop.
    “Well,” said the baker in the silence he left behind. “That’s two things I never thought to see all in one day.”
    They were the first words anyone had directed to Jack all morning. He turned from the door. “Two things?”
    “Woman came in before you,” the baker said. “Wanted to buy a loaf with a pearl. Big as an egg, it was.”
    Jack’s brows drew together. He was half convinced the baker was gammoning him. But why make up such a story? “Did you sell her the bread?”
    “I did not.” The baker picked up the shilling from his counter. “I had no change to give her for her pearl.”
    Jack met his gaze in acknowledgment. “Perhaps next time you will not have to send her away empty-handed.”
    The baker scratched his hairy jaw, half hiding a blush behind his floury hand. “Nay, I gave her a bun,” he confessed. “Face like an angel, she had.”
    Face like an angel . . .
    Jack’s pulse kicked like a pack mule. “Morwenna.”
    “Who?”
    He exhaled. “The . . .” But he would not call her a whore. “The lady who was in here.”
    The baker looked blank.
    “From the cottage beyond the bluffs,” Jack said.
    “That cottage has been empty a dozen years or more.”
    “But she was here,” Jack said. She must have been. A face like an angel. “You must know her.”
    The baker shook his head. “Never seen her before in my life.”
    Perhaps he needed an incentive to remember.
    Jack pulled out sixpence and set it on the counter. “For her bun,” he said. “Let’s settle all accounts today. How much more do I owe you?”
    The man rubbed his beard again, leaving matching white streaks along his jaw. “I do not do the fine baking up at the hall. Only bread for the staff. Say, six quartern loaves a week, one shilling sixpence?”
    A quartern loaf weighed four pounds. The price was more than fair. Jack nodded.
    “Then . . .” The baker’s lips moved as he calculated. “Nine shillings a week for six months.”
    “Six months,” Jack repeated. A slow burn ignited in his gut. “You have not been paid in all this time. Since my cousin died.”
    Since Sloat took over the management of the estate.
    The baker nodded warily.
    Grimly, Jack began to count out sovereigns on the counter.
    A commotion in the street outside filtered through the stone and daub walls.
    “Thief!” The cry penetrated to