“No,” Giles said. He was holding one of his son’s tiny feet. “Did you ever imagine that a human could be so tiny and yet perfectly formed?”

His wife elbowed him. “She’s really trying, Giles. Your sister went to the Emporium and had Mrs. Quimby make her very first baby clothing. Our son is going to be the most fashionable baby in the kingdom.”

He didn’t answer, so Yasmin said, “You’ll have to get over it, love, because soon Lydia will have a baby, which means that Benjamin will have a cousin.” Yasmin smiled down at her baby. “You’re such a lucky, lucky baby.”

He was lucky. In his parents’ eyes shone the most important promises they would make in life: that they would always love him, and that they would always love each other.

“He’s so perfect,” Yasmin whispered, a finger stroking down Benjamin’s cheek.

“Just like his mother,” Giles said, his voice deep with certainty. “I have never been so happy in my life. I’m frightened, Yasmin.”

She turned her head and brushed a kiss on his mouth, and then said, with utter certainty, “There’s no need to be frightened because we’re here. Your family is here.”

An Author’s Note about Fiction and Truth—and Love

If you are a Jane Austen enthusiast, you may have recognized the inspiration behind the scene in which Lydia briefly transforms into Lady Catherine de Bourgh, horrified at the idea of Elizabeth accepting a second proposal of marriage from Darcy. It was great fun borrowing some of Her Ladyship’s sour rhetoric, but I do want to note that Lydia’s complicated unhappiness does not align with Lady Catherine’s personality in any other way, given Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s utter conviction of her worth and station in life. I chose that scene as a counterpoint in a novel that argues that worth has nothing to do with birthright.

The inspiration offered by Hippolyte Charles was more truth than fiction. I inserted my characters into a historical melodrama of lovers and spouses that circled around Napoleon Bonaparte. Early in his marriage to Joséphine, the lady had a much-publicized affaire with Hippolyte Charles, a volunteer in the French Army blessed with charm and extraordinary mustaches. Joséphine gave Hippolyte the funds to buy the Cassan estate, but in all fairness, there is no evidence that she revenged herself against her husband’s many mistresses. I gave Napoleon an English mistress—Yasmin’s mother, Mabel—who would have come between his historical affaires with Pauline Foures and the Countess Maria Walewka.

I also want to note that although there has been a small fruit-and-veg market at Covent Garden since the 1650s, the market as I describe it didn’t come into being for another thirty years when an Act of Parliament cleared up the brothels and a neo-classical building was erected to cover the market. I have dear memories of wandering the area while studying for a master’s degree at Oxford. I had little money, but I could not resist a pair of over-the-knee green suede boots, which I wore a year later when asked to dinner by a handsome Italian graduate student, whom I later married.