A small chamber fitted with several wooden chairs, the waiting room is in fact a front for the Harem of Confections, which the servant girl has never entered. Nor has she any need to do so; the bleached white expressions on the faces of her lady’s guests as they depart speak entire Novels to her. It is quite clear the real room is nothing more than a method for dissecting indulgences, the men mostly Merchants or Captains for whom the merest whiff of Marzipan might spell the end of such privileges, not to mention Marriages.

The Pharmacist, that old buzzard, might well be described as their leader of sorts, Lady d’Almonde’s confectionery paramour. Beck shudders at the memory of her first encounter with him; how he had arrived upon some dull pretext and, once the consultation was performed, leered. She was eighteen at the time, and the Pharmacist fifty years her senior; and yet this did not seem to prevent him from telegraphing his oddly impotent desires over her, as a seagull hovers above a half-eaten sugar bun.

When he called her Lue she did not speak. Enjoying her new home, eh? There was that sweating again. One day she will understand how fortunate she is, to have been offered sanctuary by Lord and Lady Peele, eh? One doubts, however, that her present insolence could entertain such a thing as gratitude. Etc. Beck watched his mouth then, as though not hearing the words, perhaps hoping to read in his lips a different version of the story she had come to accept as her own. He brushed past her then, dismissive, bee lining for that small, cold room.