Dinner was informal and relaxed, a family meal, people talking across the table and serving themselves, no footmen or butler hovering in attendance. Phoebe wasn’t there. Dex’s cousin, Octavius, and his new wife had taken her down to Dorset with them, which Dex was pleased about—it was splendid that Fleabee was no longer the only young female in the family, splendid that she and Pip had become bosom friends—but he was sorry, too; he hadn’t seen his sister since August and he missed her.
As family dinners went, this was a relatively quiet one. Of the Numbers—as the ton called the Pryor males—only one, two, five, nine, and ten were present. Dex’s uncle, Tertius, and his wife were in Derbyshire, his cousin Sextus was in Westmorland, and Octavius was in Dorset. His uncle, Mercury, who’d escape
