Chapter 14 #2
“Oh, Mrs. Barnacle’ll hire me—if I want her to.
” Lucy smiled and hefted one of her valises, which clinked and clattered meaningfully.
“You hear that? That’s all my special sauces and flavors I got ready to make her—what did you call it?
—‘proper and elevated cooking’? That’s what she wants, that’s what I’m going to give her.
” Lucy closed her eyes and nodded in a gesture of confidence. “She’ll hire me.”
Marigold felt her worries give way before Lucy’s assurance. “Then let us get you there straight away.”
Marigold led the way, walking her bike down the well-tended sidewalk at Lucy’s side until they reached the house, where they were greeted before they might even ring the bell.
“S’pose you must be that cook she was talking about.”
Lucy took charge of the situation directly. “Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Barnacle, I presume? How do you do? I am Lucy Dove, and I am prepared to give you a demonstration of my cooking.”
That put Mrs. Barnacle a bit on the back foot. “Well, I don’t rightly know, I s’pose.”
“But first, I should like to see the kitchen, if I may, ma’am, to make sure it is everything that I will need it to be to make the most proper and elevated kind of cooking that you require. If you would lead the way?”
The woman could be heard clomping her way down the second-floor balcony’s stair before she came through the screen door. “Kitchen’s round the back. Easier than finding your way through the house.” She stopped a moment to take in Lucy’s stature. “You look a tall strong woman. I like that in a cook.”
Mrs. Barnacle nodded to herself, as if she had made up her mind.
“Can’t cook a decent meal myself. No taste for it.
But we can’t all be geniuses. I’ll show you my private entrance, where you can come and go to shopping and whatnot.
” She waggled a finger at Lucy. “Now, I’ll want you to use Henry’s butcher shop up off the square.
I keep an account there,” she told Lucy in a confidential sort of voice.
“So I know he won’t cheat you if you tell him you’re buying for my house. ”
If Lucy took any offense at being walked around to the back instead of being shown in the front door, she kept it to herself, although Marigold saw the slight lift of her chin. But she was smiling as Mrs. Barnacle held the door for her and showed her into the private entranceway with some pride.
“This way is just for my particular friends. These are my own rooms. Kitchen and housekeeper’s closet—well, that’s me, you see—just through here. I get a woman in a few days, but most of the house, I look after myself. Makes a difference, that personal touch.”
Lucy blessed May Barnacle with a beaming smile. “I could not agree more, ma’am.”
Marigold followed mostly from curiosity and was pleased for Lucy’s sake to see that the kitchen, with its gleaming, up-to-date Hub Grand Range—spelled out on the shining front grille—was as immaculate as her mother’s.
“Now, that’s a stove,” Lucy said admiringly as she surreptitiously ran a gloved finger along the top of the oak cabinets.
“Seven medals at the World’s Fair in Chicago,” May Barnacle said with evident pride.
Lucy took a full turn to take in the whole of the kitchen before she nodded in satisfaction.
“Now, let me cook you something your boarders are going to love, Mrs. Barnacle. You can get along now, Marigold—I know you’ve got a powerful lot of scholarly work to attend to.
I’m sure Mrs. Barnacle and I will come to a right agreement, but we thank you for your assistance with the introduction.
” She patted Marigold’s shoulder as she gently shoved her toward the door. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“Naturally.” Marigold squeezed her hand in pleasure and thanks before she saw herself out the kitchen door.
“Now, you know my momma keeps a boardinghouse for Black folk up on the North Shore, Mrs. Barnacle, but she will be pea green with envy when I tell her about this range. Well, let’s get this beauty up to heat.…”
Marigold cycled back toward the campus without any of the strange feeling of being watched she had experienced the last time she had come this way.
Granted, it wasn’t yet gone dark—perhaps the afternoon sunshine had its own salubrious effect upon her mood.
Or perhaps it was the satisfaction of having taken action in installing Lucy at the boardinghouse.
The sight of her, pinning on her apron to begin cooking in that extraordinary hat—
Which gave her another idea—now that she had someone monitoring her prime suspect, she needed to look out for some others.
Sarah Appleton with her strong arms and convenient antipathy and easy assignment of blame returned to mind. And although Marigold could not picture Sarah as the physically violent type, she did seem the type who would be a member of the Société des Belles Lettres.
“Miss Manners!” The journalist James Wilkerson came jogging up the sidewalk of Washington Street, his camel hair overcoat flaring out behind him, cutting him a dashing figure. “I was hoping I’d run into you. Have you thought any more about my offer?”
Marigold did not miss a beat. “Have you thought about mine?” Isabella had promised to buy the full run of the Boston papers for her daily, but no further articles regarding the death seem to have been published.
Wilkerson gifted her with his smile. “As a matter of fact, I have. And I’ve decided to join your cause.”
“Excellent.” Marigold would have rubbed her hands together in anticipation if she were not holding her handlebars. “What do you know so far?”
“I am more interested in what you know so far.” His smile was meant to flatter. “You’re clearly the one in the know.”
Marigold was experienced enough of the world to be leery. “What makes you think that?”
He smiled and flicked his gaze over his shoulder toward the boardinghouse. “You put a woman of your own on the inside. Very clever. Might I ask why you’re so almighty interested in that boardinghouse?”
Marigold was instantly uneasy. She had no want to expose Lucy to any aspect of tabloid journalism, especially when she was just on the cusp of success in her new career as a cookbook writer.
Her hat deserved to be on the cover of McCall’s Magazine or the Ladies’ Home Journal, not a second-rate yellow-dog tabloid.
“I am not almighty interested in that boardinghouse. I had a friend in need of a job as a cook, so I told her about it. That’s what I was doing there, two days ago, when I first took notice of you there asking after rooms—inquiring about the position.”
“So, you took notice of me that day?” His smile grew more relaxed, appeased, she thought, by this version of himself as unforgettable.
“Certainly.” Marigold decided to try her own hand at flattery to see where it got her.
“I was pleased that my friend might be working at a ladies-only boardinghouse, as it seemed safer, but your presence told me that the neighborhood must be eminently salubrious to have such a handsome, well-spoken gentleman wanting to live there.”
His smile deepened, scoring soft little lines at the corners of his eyes. “What else did you think?”
“About you? I was surprised to find you a journalist, I must say, for I thought you were a gentleman—in the old-fashioned sense of the word.” Marigold said what she thought was useful, not what she actually believed.
“You don’t look the sort of a man who has to make his rough and ready way in the world.
You look much more …” She searched for the right word to flatter without being too obvious. “… cultured than that.”
“Well, I thank you.” His smile was as broad as his accent. “I’d like to think I’m a cultured sort of gentleman.”
“Do I detect a hint of a refined accent in your speech?”
“Do you? Well, aren’t you clever. I hail originally from Virginia.
I was raised to think a great deal of gentlemanly behavior and conduct.
” He took the liberty of taking her arm to steer her away from the lodge gate and back up the sidewalk toward a tearoom.
“For instance, you seem all parched and worn out from this bicycling, and I would be remiss as a gentleman if I didn’t offer you some refreshment. ”
Marigold spared a thought for her studies—she would likely miss her class on the History of the Hellenes—but decided that a fish on the line was well worth landing. And she wanted to see where Mr. Wilkerson’s apparent vanity might take them.
He was, in the common parlance, a very good-looking man—her fellow Classics scholars would have dubbed him an Adonis.
She, however, felt a comparison to the more vain Narcissus was more appropriate—as they walked into the tearoom, he could not help but check and momentarily admire his appearance in the mirror hung in the hallway.
And when they were shown to a table, he sat himself facing a very pretty mirror hung on the wall behind her head.
Wilkerson, it seemed, could not resist the temptation to look at himself and, occasionally, to preen. More than once, he raked his hand through his hair, lowered his chin and looked up at her through his luminous brown eyes, all the while watching himself perform as if he were in a melodrama.
She would have to tell her brother Seviah about the move—it might go down a treat in his stage performances.
While Wilkerson was clearly not what she might call her ideal man—that position remained securely taken by another—what remained was to find if this man might be useful.
She batted her own lashes at him. “Tell me more about how you made your way from Virginia up to Boston to work for a tabloid?”
“Well, that’s a long tale,” he began, sitting back a little as if settling in to regale her with his favorite subject—himself. He hooked one arm over the back of the chair and rubbed his thumb over his signet ring in a small gesture that Marigold attributed to familial pride.
“Marigold?” A different voice had her turning.
Directly behind Mr. Wilkerson, her one-time beau and all-time favorite Jonathan Cabot Cox seemed to have materialized, as if she had called him forth from her unspoken desires.
As if the universe, in its infinite wisdom, wanted to be sure Marigold would stop making unconscious comparisons and confine herself, once and for all, to the real thing.