Chapter Eight
“Do you prefer pastry to sugar work?”
The question arrived without warning on a Tuesday morning, delivered in Thomas’s low, careful voice while Jane was scoring piecrust at her station.
She had not heard him approach. She never heard him approach.
He moved through his own house with the habitual silence of a man who had spent four years not being noticed, and the effect was that Jane routinely discovered the Duke of Aldermere standing three feet away when she had believed herself alone.
She straightened. The scoring knife paused in her hand. “I am competent in both, Your Grace, though Mrs. Vale has focused my training on pastry.”
“That was not what I asked.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked which you preferred. Not which you had been assigned.”
Jane blinked. The question had sounded, to her ear, like an evaluation. She had answered with the careful professionalism of a woman who understood that her position was conditional.
“Pastry,” she said, after a pause that lasted longer than it should have. “I prefer pastry, Your Grace.”
“Why?”
The follow-up caught her off guard. Thomas’s questions did not usually come in pairs. “Because pastry is honest work. It either holds or it does not. Sugar work is beautiful, but beauty can conceal poor structure. Pastry cannot conceal anything.”
Thomas looked at her with an expression she could not read, and the word honest hung in the kitchen between them while she grew aware that she had described pastry in terms that applied to a good deal more than pastry, and that a man who had spent years practising silence in place of speech had certainly heard the application.
Then he turned and left, and she went back to a piecrust she scored slightly too deep, the fingerprints of a woman whose concentration had been disturbed by a conversation about sugar work.
It happened again the following day.
“Is the cold store adequate for your needs?”
Jane, who had been arranging preserves on the lower shelf, looked up and found him in the doorway. He filled the doorway without any effort, and the cold store was suddenly smaller than it had been ten seconds ago.
“Entirely adequate, Your Grace. Mrs. Vale keeps it very well organised.”
“I was not asking about Mrs. Vale’s organisation.”
“I, yes, Your Grace. The cold store is perfectly fine for my needs.”
“Fine is not a word that conveys any great enthusiasm, Miss Rennet.”
“Then the cold store is excellent, Your Grace, and a credit to whoever designed it. Is that more satisfactory to you?”
“Marginally more satisfactory, though I suspect you have chosen the word to humour me rather than because you mean it.”
He left. Jane stared at the door. The Duke of Aldermere had come to a room full of butter and cheese to parse her adjective choices.
Either he was conducting an inspection, or the cold store had been a pretext for a conversation he did not know how to start.
Jane could not afford to believe the latter.
It happened again on Friday. “Do you find the walk from Millcombe tiring?”
“Not at all, Your Grace. The lane is very well maintained.”
“You are limping.”
“I turned my ankle on the garden step this morning. It is nothing.”
“You should not walk on an injured ankle.”
“It is not injured, Your Grace. It is mildly inconvenienced.”
He looked at her ankle, then at her face, then at the ankle again, and then he did something that stopped the breath in her throat.
He crossed the small distance between them and began to lower himself, one hand already moving toward the hem of her skirt as though he meant to see the injury for himself, the way he might have examined a lamed horse or a cracked stair, without the smallest awareness of what it would mean for the Duke of Aldermere to kneel at his cook’s apprentice’s feet and put his hand to her ankle in a working kitchen.
He caught himself halfway down. She watched the understanding reach him, watched his hand go still in the air a foot from her, watched him straighten with a slowness that was its own kind of confession, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, because the moment had walked them both up to the edge of something the arrangement was not supposed to contain, and they were standing rather closer to it than either had intended.
“Forgive me,” Thomas said, and his voice was not quite even. “I forget myself.”
“You were going to look at my ankle.” Jane’s own voice had gone unsteady, and she despised it for going unsteady, and could not make it stop. “As though it belonged to a mare.”
“As though it were yours, and hurt, and I wished it were not.” He stepped back to maintain a respectable distance, and the stepping back cost him, and she saw that it cost him. “Which is worse, I believe. The horse would have been more easily explained.”
She had no answer to that. It sat in the warm kitchen air between them, too honest to acknowledge and too large to ignore, and she turned back to her station because looking at him a moment longer would have required her to decide what the unsteadiness in her own chest was, and she was not ready to decide it.
***
He offered the carriage. Jane refused. He offered a chair. Jane refused. He offered to have the garden step repaired.
“Your Grace, the step is not the problem.”
“What then, is the nature of the trouble?”
“I turned my ankle. People turn their ankles. It is not a matter requiring ducal intervention.”
The almost-movement that preceded an almost-smile crossed his face. “Ducal intervention,” he repeated.
“I did not mean to be impertinent.”
“You were not. You were accurate.” He paused. “The step will be repaired regardless.”
“Of course it will,” Jane said, before she could stop herself.
Thomas left. The ankle improved by the afternoon. The memory of his expression did not.
The questions continued. On Monday he asked whether she used the recipe book often. On Wednesday he found her adjusting a shelf and asked whether the afternoon light was sufficient at her station.
“Perfectly sufficient, Your Grace.”
“You were squinting yesterday.”
“I was concentrating. Squinting and concentrating share certain facial characteristics.”
“I am aware of the difference.”
“Then you will know I was not squinting.”
Whitlock, passing through with a tray, produced a cough that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
On Thursday he asked which of Mrs. Vale’s lessons she found most useful.
Jane said the one about tempering chocolate, which was true but not the truest answer.
The truest answer was the lesson about resting dough.
It had arrived on the same afternoon Thomas said “again,” and it lived in her memory braided with the sound of his voice and the smell of burnt pear and the feeling of faith arriving from a direction she had not expected.
She did not say any of that. She said “tempering chocolate” and Thomas nodded and left, and Jane went back to her station and told herself that the distance between the true answer and the safe answer was the distance she needed to maintain, and that maintaining it was common sense rather than cowardice, whatever Lottie believed.
On Friday morning he appeared in the kitchen corridor before Jane had even reached her station and asked whether she was sleeping well.
“Perfectly well, Your Grace.”
“You have shadows beneath your eyes.”
Jane’s hand went to her face before she could stop it. “I was reading late. It is not a matter of concern.”
“What were you reading?”
“Mrs. Vale’s notes on French sauces.”
“You are studying outside your working hours.”
“I wish to improve, Your Grace.”
“I did not say it was a problem.”
“Your tone suggested an observation, and observations from employers often precede criticism.”
The word “employers” landed on Thomas with visible weight. His expression changed, and for a moment something crossed his countenance that looked like disappointment, aimed less at her work than at the word itself, as if it had placed a wall between them that he had not expected.
He said nothing more and made his exit. Jane leaned against the corridor wall and pressed her palms flat against the stone and breathed.
Whitlock materialised. “Are you quite well, Miss Rennet?”
“I am perfectly fine.”
“You are leaning against a wall and breathing in a deliberate fashion.”
“I am resting.”
“Before seven in the morning?”
“I am an early rester.”
“He lacks a certain proficiency in this, do you not agree?” Whitlock said, gently.
“At what?”
“At whatever it is he is trying to do.”
“I do not know what he is trying to do.”
“Yes you do, Miss Rennet. You are simply not ready to admit it.”
He handed her a cup of tea and disappeared. Jane drank it standing up and did not admit anything to anyone.
Each question, taken alone, was reasonable, and taken together they formed a pattern she could not ignore and would not interpret.
They were not conversation, since Thomas did not make conversation, and they were not quite flirtation, since flirtation implied an ease he did not have.
They sounded instead like an investigation conducted by a man who kept his findings in a private ledger, and she answered them like an apprentice rather than as woman, would have required her to hope, and hope was the most dangerous thing within her reach.