In practice, he knew, everything mattered. Family mattered. Money mattered. Who one knew, how one behaved, whether one had funds of one’s own or depended upon the stipend from the College endowments. A duke’s heir might wish to marry a magician, but if given the choice would certainly choose the magician from an upper-class family with twenty thousand a year, over the magician whose talents had been discovered while they’d been sweeping someone’s chimneys.
Theodore Burnett did not dress like a former chimney-sweep. Theo Burnett moved and spoke and dressed like someone who’d never worried about the price of bread in his life.
Henry’s family had not precisely had to worry either, being fairly well off. But there’d been attention paid to budgets, and secondhand bonnets, and concerned expres
