Chapter 36 Omelette
OMELETTE
The bath, I would begrudgingly admit, was divine.
The water was warm and thick with lavender oil, the kind that clung to your skin long after the steam cleared.
The tub was deep enough to lose myself in, and for a few decadent minutes, I allowed the fantasy to bloom: I had arrived.
This was it—the kind of life where things were soft and perfumed, where someone else boiled the water and love came in the form of silence and soap.
But even paradise feels odd when you’re the only one living in it.
The towels were too white. The silence too curated. Not even the bathwater seemed to ripple unless I moved. It was like being wrapped in satin-lined museum glass.
Once I was scrubbed to gleam, powdered, and poured into a silk gown that cinched my waist into submission, Ealy returned to take me on a tour.
He beamed like a boy at a school presentation as we crossed the threshold of his home—the only marble house in Carsondale, he told me proudly, as if it had grown there naturally. In truth, it looked like a baby’s first tooth: pale, sharp, and strangely out of place in the dry, red dirt of the West.
Inside, the house was just as grand. Silk curtains I suspected had never been drawn. Rugs imported from somewhere expensive. China so delicate it looked see-through. The whole house smelled faintly of lavender, lemon polish, and nothing at all.
I noticed the dining room first. The table was set for twelve, but not a single plate showed the faint trace of use—no scratches from a knife, no heat mark from a soup tureen. Pristine.
Looking around the kitchen, I thought of Lessie Mae at the boardinghouse. Her sleeves rolled. Her arms full. Baby Freddie Karol swaddled tight against her back while she kneaded bread with the same hands she’d used to catch him.
Ealy, meanwhile, had shifted into a monologue about efficiency, about how help should be quiet and skilled and preferably invisible.
“You know,” I said, tapping a finger thoughtfully against the marble countertop, “I met a young woman on my way here—Lessie Mae. She’s looking for work as a cook.”
Ealy, mid-preening, turned to me, adjusting his lapel. “Well—this is what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, already fidgeting. “You were late and, well… someone came. A lovely woman, a chef. Bertha. She was trained in France. Studied under… um… Jefferson’s people.”
“Ealy. I know you wrote several letters to women.”
He opened his mouth, no doubt ready with some fiction about mistaken identities or bulk postage. But he surprised me with the truth.
“No harm was meant,” he said quickly. “Women get cold feet, you see? Four of the seven declined me at the last minute. You can’t predict these things.”
I said nothing, mostly because I wasn’t sure which part to respond to.
“My brother didn’t understand my process,” he went on. “But you don’t become the richest man in Carsondale by putting all your eggs in one basket. Only three women were bold enough to come. Could’ve been less.”
“Bertha is one of the wives you sent for.” I ticked one finger.
“Yes. And—”
“And the other?”
“She hasn’t arrived. As of yet.”
He was twisting his hat now, visibly sweating.
“And when she does?”
He paused. Thought about it. Not for drama, but because the wheels were truly grinding upstairs.
“Well, I thought we might… I don’t know. Have some sort of contest. A chef. A book woman. A business lady.”
“A business lady…” I repeated, flatly filing that bit of knowledge away. “You could’ve said that at the train station and saved me the time.”
“That’s the same thing I told Major,” he blurted, his voice high with panic. “He made it seem like I had to—you know, like you’d come all this way…. And my brother is a terrible fright in a bad mood.”
So Major hadn’t just convinced Ealy to meet me at the station. He’d browbeat him like a wayward child. Like someone who couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing on his own.
“I have no interest in a contest,” I said. “Not for you. Not for anyone.”
And I hadn’t known how much I meant that until I heard it out loud.
For so long I had been wrapped up in status. Trying to make myself look better than Eliza in comparison—lighter, neater, more educated. I had been playing the game, believing there was a prize.
Ealy’s shoulders dropped, and he let out an even breath.
“Well, that relieves me,” he said, too quickly. “See, the townsfolk are keen to avoid scandal. This being one of the few colored towns so far west… And I only told them about a Caroline, so Bertha’s been forced to be, well… under my hat, as it were, and it’s a shame because…”
He looked me squarely in the face.
“Bertha’s the one you want,” I finished. Did I have to script my own rejection? Would the humiliations never cease? “Miss Trained in France?” I said, tone light as air.
He nodded.
“Mon Dieu,” I murmured, my voice all velvet and venom. If he flinched—and I think he did—it was well earned.
“Then I must meet her.”
Ealy lit up like he’d passed a test. He was so pleased with himself.
He gestured toward the far end of the kitchen. “Bertha, my love.”
A stout, flour-dusted woman turned around, rolling pin in hand.
She looked like she’d lost a fight with a sack of dough.
Her sleeves were damp with kitchen heat, her apron streaked in batter.
Her face, round and honest, was obscured in a cloud of flour.
But even through the haze, I could see it: panic.
The fire was low, the knives dull, and the only food I could see was a slab of salted pork and a basket of potatoes, neither of which seemed to be doing anything particularly French.
“Ah! Mademoiselle Bertha!” I greeted her in my best, most-fluid Parisian French. “Que prévoyez-vous de cuisiner pour le d?ner?”
The plump woman went stiff. Absolutely rigid. Her mouth opened, then closed. Her fingers twitched around the rolling pin. Her eyes darted to Ealy, then back to me.
“Uh… omelette.” Bertha said it like she’d finally remembered a single word from a dream.
I blinked.
She blinked.
And we stood like that—two women who understood exactly what was happening, trapped on opposite ends of a lie.
Ealy beamed. “Bertha doesn’t want to confuse you. She’s more advanced than, say, your Louisiana Creole.”
I saw the fear in her eyes. The please don’t written all over her face. Bertha was now gripping the rolling pin like it might double as a weapon. Like if I told Ealy this woman didn’t know any French, I would get my head cracked open for my trouble.
And I could’ve. God help me, I wanted to twist the knife. Play the clever girl. Blow the whole scheme open right there in the too-quiet kitchen, just so Ealy would know what he’d lost—and the whole town could hear it echo.
Ah, we are so close. But even this—almost bigamy, French chef fraud, all of it—is not the scandal that made me the most talked-about woman west of the Mississippi.
Besides, if I made a scene, ran straight into the square to announce what Ealy had done, what would I have won?
Ealy?
A man who had to be threatened with bodily harm even to greet me at the train station? Who couldn’t tell a bonjour from a bonsoir? I’m not sure I’m motivated by that prize anymore.
And so I smiled. Sweetly. Magnanimously. And let the moment pass.
Bertha blinked once, slowly. She understood.
Ealy, of course, beamed. “See? The real thang,” he said, smiling that piano-key smile.
And I—Caroline Bliguet, Spelman graduate, daughter of a seamstress turned shopkeeper, orchestrator of the Great Sandwich Heist of 1893—stood there in that gown, in that polished house, and knew I had come all this way for nothing.