Chapter 10 #2
Three days had dragged by since Sunday with no word, no sighting, no visit from Mr. Tremaine.
In a place as small as Wychwood, silence was never simply quiet—it was a kind of noise all its own, humming with what was not said.
Merry found she could not abide it another moment.
If she sat in the morning room, the clock beat out anxieties with every tick.
If she walked in the park, the bare trees seemed to hold their breath as she passed.
She could not ride, because the ice was treacherous on the north path, and she did not trust her temper upon an icy lane, nor would she risk her horse.
And so, out of stubbornness as much as sense, she took herself where heat and work might conquer useless feeling: into the kitchens to bake.
It was New Year’s Eve. The house smelt of evergreens and beeswax and the scent of pies baking.
Copper pans hung from their hooks, and the range glowed with flame.
Mrs. Dempsey, the cook, ruled the room with curt orders.
Two scullery maids darted to and fro with pans and pails.
Someone laughed in the corridor and a footman’s whistle came and went, cheerful and just shy of impertinence.
It was a world of purpose. Merry loved it for that.
“Miss Merry!” cried Mrs. Dempsey when she entered with her sleeves already rolled to her elbows. “You’ll turn your hands to butter in here, you will. The heat would melt a statue.”
“I shall risk it,” Merry said, tying on an apron. “I mean to make biscuits, if you please.”
Mrs. Dempsey’s eyebrows climbed, pleased and suspicious at once. “You are always welcome, though the making of biscuits is a servant’s task, to be sure.”
“Then let me be a servant for an hour,” Merry returned, and there must have been something in her tone that made Mrs. Dempsey stop looking for the pretty reason and settle for the honest one.
“Well, then—your chocolate’s there,” she said briskly, pointing with her floury elbow, “and your sugar there. Beat the eggs well. You will need more flour. Bess, fetch another bowl for Miss Merry—no, the big one.”
Merry smiled and set to. The ritual soothed her.
She had been a nuisance to their own cook at times, she was sure, but that lady allowed her to help when Merry needed something to do.
She measured flour into the great bowl—two pounds, then a third.
She added three ounces of salt, and one pound of sugar as Mrs. Saxby had taught her when she was twelve and determined to master the art.
She cut in cold butter by hand, rubbing until the mixture looked like snow rubbed with sunlight.
Then she used a wooden spoon, relishing the familiar effort in the shoulder and wrist as the whole came together.
When the spoon could do no more, she turned the dough onto the table and worked it with both hands until it yielded—not sticky, not dry, just the right texture.
It felt as though she were kneading her impatience into something that might bear being near other people.
“Roll it thinner than your temper, my dear,” Mrs. Dempsey advised, passing her the rolling pin. “Then cut us angels and stars. The little ones like the shapes.”
“The little ones shall have them,” Merry said, setting the pin to the dough. The first pass spread it smooth, while the second took shape.
“Miss Merry bakes like a dream,” declared Daisy, the younger scullery maid, bobbing past with a pan of peeled potatoes and eyes like saucers. “I wish I could make them as even.”
“You shall,” Merry said, with cheer she manufactured on purpose. “It is only practice—and not eating half the paste.”
Daisy giggled and darted away. Merry kept her eyes upon the biscuits.
It would have made no difference had she stuffed her ears with fruit cake.
Gossip in a country house was as sure as the sunrise.
Two laundry maids came in with a basket of clothes, talking in low, fast tones.
Mrs. Dempsey told them to hush and they hushed, which only made it worse, for they began to whisper, which rang louder than normal voices. Merry’s ears centred on every word.
“Lord Bruton’s house has gone through sugar like sand this week,” said Bess, the other scullery maid, working a whisk with elegance. “Cook says their people fetched more from Cheltenham yesterday. There’s company.”
“Quality company,” Daisy breathed, arranging plates, “with a London sound to them. I heard it at noon in the yard—‘my lord’ this, ‘my lady’ that. The new lot came Monday night. Cousins maybe.”
“Not cousins,” said Tom, a footman, appearing with the coal scuttle and the air of a man who knows everything. “Lord Dunning and his daughter. Saw their coach myself. The arms were as plain as daylight—three ravens and a cross. That’s Dunning, sure enough.”
Merry took the first tray from the oven, then took the tin cutters—a star, a bell, and the angel—and pressed them down in neat lines. She lifted each shape to a waiting tin, spacing them with a care she hoped would keep her from bursting into tears for no good reason at all.
“Dunning?” Daisy repeated, blinking. “But Miss—what was her name? The one in the blue bonnet—?”
Merry’s hands faltered over a bell-shaped biscuit. She set it down and picked up a star instead, as if changing the shape of the thing could change the words’ meaning.
“Lady Lydia Dunning,” Tom supplied with relish, as if he had memorized the syllables expressly to deliver them in a kitchen. “A tidy piece, by what I saw. Lord Dunning’s girl and neighbour in London to Lord Bruton himself. Like as not the families dine together often when they’re in residence.”
Tremaine’s damsel was not a tenant’s chit, then.
“Lord Bruton wants a marriage made,” Tom went on, lowering his voice even as he swelled with the importance of knowing.
“He wants it set up quick. His lordship’s boy has got wagers in half the houses from Bond Street to St. James’s, so they say, and he means to mend it with a wife who brings money. ”
“Her father will be cautious,” Mrs. Dempsey observed, as though she had not just rebuked them. “A father with sense is always slow, more’s the pity for the foolish. He will have heard the talk.”
“He has,” Tom said, to his own satisfaction.
“My cousin’s wife’s brother sells candles next to a coffee-house where the clerks all read the papers out loud and call it improving their minds.
The talk there says Lord Dunning’s not easy.
Says he dislikes Mr. Tremaine for his cards and fast ways. He won’t promise anything yet.”
“Out,” Mrs. Dempsey said, and flicked her towel at him. “You’ll drop ash in my dough when you get puffed up with knowing. Go on, tell the footmen they shall have sugared biscuits if they fetch baskets from the dairy without breaking the handles.”
Tom fled, grinning. The kitchen’s hum shifted into a higher key, like a pot reaching the boil. Merry stood very straight for a moment, biscuit cutter in hand, while the world arranged itself into a new, uglier sense.
Lydia Dunning. Barnaby had not lied about her name.
He had only neglected to mention the little matter of her father’s title.
A family friend, yes. A tenant, no. A neighbour in London, no less, which meant long acquaintance, easy habits, the same social sphere.
No wonder Lydia Dunning had been sitting so close to him in the pew.
No wonder Barnaby had looked indulgent, as if intimacy were familiar.
No wonder he had not introduced her. He had said—what had he said?
—that he would present Merry to his father when the matter had been arranged.
He had been eager to keep her secret. It struck her then, as sharply as the edge of the tin star in her fingers, that secrets might be kept for more than one convenience at a time.
The biscuit she held broke under her hand. She stared at the jagged half-star and laughed, a sound that startled even her. She gathered the scrap, and ground it hard onto the table, hard, as if pressure could force the truth into a shape that suited.
Mrs. Dempsey came to stand at her shoulder, not intrusively, only near. “You are working that like it were the devil himself,” she said after a moment, her manner as mild as milk.
Merry eased her hands at once and blinked, brought back from the edge of something frayed and unhelpful. “Indeed I am,” she remarked, and softly set the broken biscuit down.
They laid two trays with neat shapes. Merry brushed them with milk and a dust of sugar until they shone.
In the cool minute between tasks, conversation resumed as conversation always does when work allows it—the soft domestic current that makes a house a village.
“I will take the next trays,” Merry said, reaching for the scraps and turning them without resentment now, because she had found a thing she could control.
Her mind marched, however unwillingly, with what she had learned.
Lord Bruton wanted Lydia Dunning. Lord Dunning was reluctant, but reluctance was not refusal.
Barnaby Tremaine could be charming and was, in all likelihood, even now softening the Earl.
It was clear what Lady Lydia wished for.
Meanwhile Barnaby had engineered an engagement that lived in a little box with a ribbon around it and could be kept or put away as his prospects arranged themselves.
It was an ugly thought. Worse, indeed, was the fact it rang true.
“You’ll burn your fingers,” Daisy warned, passing with a rack. “Here—use the cloth.”
The aroma of warm chocolate rose richer by the minute, curling around the room. She was grateful to be distracted. For that span of time she belonged to the ordinary magic of turning a bowl of common things into a comfort.
Yet even comfort did not abolish thought. While she sifted a little extra powdered sugar to fall upon the cooling biscuits, her mind churned.
No wonder he would not introduce her. No wonder he had asked for secrecy.
No wonder he had looked through her in the churchyard as if she were a familiar piece of furniture he could claim when it suited him.
If Lord Dunning could be persuaded, Merry’s fortune would become an alternative at best, to be applied if his other prospect failed.
Heat rose in her face at the insult of it.
Then, just as quickly, shame followed—shame at being surprised.
Had she not known some of this already? Had not Joshua—without words, without any ungenerous triumph—warned her?
Barnaby’s words had been satin, but his actions were plain cloth.
She was nothing to him but a last resort.
She placed three stars upon a plate and dusted them as if she were blessing them. She would not cry in a kitchen full of servants.
“Mama will want these for the tea-table,” she said, because she had to say something, “and the nursery must have their share or they will storm the larder.”
“They will storm the larder regardless,” Mrs. Dempsey said with a fond smile. “Why do you not take a plateful up, Miss Merry?”
Merry laughed, the sound small and grateful.
She set aside a dozen for the nursery and arranged the rest on a good plate for the parlour, the little pale crystals of sugar catching light through the window.
As she turned, the back door opened and a gust of honest winter shouldered in, bringing with it Joshua Fielding.
Her humiliation only wanted this, she thought bitterly. Joshua had been right all along. She had to escape because she could not allow him to see how much the betrayal hurt.