Chapter Twelve
“You will need to wash your hands,” Margaret said.
Thomas stood in the doorway of the bakery kitchen with the expression of a man who had entered unfamiliar territory and was calculating the distance to the nearest exit.
He was wearing his good coat, which was unsuitable attire for a bakery, and his boots were clean, which was also wrong, and his composure, normally his most reliable garment, was sitting on him with the visible discomfort which did not quite fit the situation.
“I have washed my hands,” Thomas said.
“You have washed your hands to the standard of a drawing room. This is a bakery and bakery standards differ immensely.”
“I was not aware there were different standards of cleanliness.”
“There are. Mrs. Vale would confirm this. Wash them again, under the pump, with the soap on the left. The soap on the right is for the pans and will remove your skin.”
Thomas washed his hands again. Jane watched from her station, where she was rolling pastry for the afternoon batch, and the observation was a pleasure she had not anticipated.
Thomas Bennister, Duke of Aldermere, was standing at the pump in her family’s bakery, scrubbing his hands with kitchen soap while Margaret supervised, and the scene was so far distant from any picture Jane’s fancy had painted during their courtship, that the very disparity between expectation and reality gave rise to a sentiment little short of delight.
He had come because Jane had invited him.
The wedding was in ten days and Thomas had not been inside the bakery since the afternoon he stood at the counter and ordered muffins.
He had met her family at Aldermere, in the courtyard, on the lane.
He had not met them here, in the very region that had formed Jane's character, and such a neglect was a deficiency that cried out for correction.
“You are here to learn,” Margaret said, leading him to the proving table. “Not to observe. Not to supervise. Not to arrange. You are here to put your hands in dough and discover what your wife does with her mornings.”
“She is not my wife yet.”
“She will be before the fortnight is out. The interval is a mere formality.”
William appeared from the back with a board of bread dough and the steady expression of a man who had been baking since three in the morning and who assessed all newcomers by the same standard he assessed ingredients, which was whether they would perform under pressure.
“Your Grace,” William said.
“Mr. Rennet.”
“Have you kneaded bread before?”
“I have not.”
“Then you will learn today.” William set the dough on the table.
The dough was pale and smooth and sat on the floured board with the settled patience of something waiting to be handled by someone who knew what they were doing.
Thomas did not know what he was doing. His ignorance was visible in the way he looked at the dough, with the careful, analytical attention he gave to everything, as though the dough were a problem to be solved rather than a material to be worked.
“It is not a document,” Margaret said, from the far side of the kitchen. “Do not read it. Touch it.”
Thomas touched it. His hands were large and careful and entirely wrong for the task.
He pressed the dough with the deliberate precision he applied to estate correspondence, and the precision was the problem, because bread dough does not respond to precision.
It responds to rhythm, to the rolling push-and-fold that becomes automatic after years of practice and that cannot be taught through explanation, only through the hands themselves learning what the right pressure feels like.
“You will need to press a good deal harder than that,” William said.
Thomas pressed harder.
“Not like that. You are pressing it flat. You need to fold it. Push forward with the heel of your hand, fold the far edge toward you, turn it a quarter, and push again.”
Thomas tried. The result was not bread dough. The result was a flat, misshapen thing that looked as though it had been sat upon by someone who was thinking about something else while sitting.
“That is no matter. Do it again,” William said.
The word landed in the bakery with a weight that Jane felt in her chest, because again was Thomas’s word, the one he had given her when her tartlets collapsed, the word that had meant he had faith she could do the thing, and here was her father handing it to her fiancé in the same tone and with the same patient certainty, and the symmetry of it was so exact that she had to look away to keep from coming undone over a loaf of bread.
Thomas tried again. The dough was more cooperative on the second attempt, still some way from good, though recognisable as an attempt at kneading rather than an attempt at punishment.
“Better that time. Now do it again, and keep doing it until your hands stop arguing with you,” William said.
Thomas kneaded. Jane watched from her station. Margaret watched from hers. Lottie, who had been wrapping loaves at the counter and had repositioned herself for the optimal viewing angle approximately four seconds after Thomas entered the kitchen, watched with unconcealed pleasure.
Jane’s mother appeared from the front of the shop, assessed the situation with the swift comprehension of a woman who had spent thirty years reading kitchens, and placed a cup of tea beside Thomas’s elbow without a word.
The tea was strong and sweet, the way the bakery made it for anyone doing physical work, and the placing of it was Jane’s mother’s way of accepting Thomas into the bakery’s rhythm.
You worked, you received tea. The formula was universal and nonnegotiable.
“Thank you, Mrs. Rennet,” Thomas said.
“You are holding the dough too tightly, Your Grace. Bread is not a fist. It needs air.”
“I will attempt to provide air.”
“You will succeed. My husband is an excellent teacher, and the dough is patient.”
She returned to the front of the shop. Thomas looked at the tea, then at the dough, then at the cup with the expression of a man who wanted to drink the tea but whose hands were covered in dough and who was calculating the logistics of the transition.
“Use your elbow,” Lottie called from the counter.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Push the cup with your elbow. Everyone does it. The bakery does not have time for people who stop working to drink tea.”
Thomas pushed the cup with his elbow. He drank. The tea was strong enough to strip paint, which was not his preference, and he drank it without comment, which told Jane everything she needed to know about his willingness to adapt.
“He is terrible at this,” Lottie whispered, sliding up to Jane’s station with a tray of wrapped loaves.
“He is trying.”
“He is trying terribly. It is wonderful. I have been waiting months to see the Duke of Aldermere fail at something.”
“He fails at conversation regularly.”
“Conversation is invisible. This is flour. I can see this. I am keeping a tally.”
“A tally of what?”
“The number of times Margaret looks at his dough and does not say anything. She has done it seven times. Each silence is a judgement, and the judgements are escalating.”
“Lottie, you are keeping a tally of our sister’s silences while a duke ruins bread two feet away from you.”
“I am an observer of human nature, Jane, and Thomas is providing me with excellent material.”
Sam appeared from the back room with flour on his nose. He stood beside Thomas at the proving table and watched the kneading with the focused attention of a boy forming a definitive opinion.
“Do dukes have to wash their hands too?” Sam asked.
“Everyone washes their hands in a bakery, Sam,” Margaret called.
“But do they have to?”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “Twice, apparently.”
“Margaret makes everyone wash twice. She says germs do not respect titles.”
“Margaret is correct about most things. I have learned this.”
“She is correct about bread too. Margaret knows everything about bread.”
“I am beginning to suspect that.”
Sam watched Thomas knead for another minute. “You are not very good at this.”
“I am not.”
“My father is good at it.”
“Your father has been doing it for thirty years.”
“Will you be good at it in thirty years?”
“I doubt it, Sam. But I intend to keep trying.”
Sam considered this with the grave deliberation of a child who takes sincerity seriously. “That is acceptable,” he said, and returned to the back room.
William came back to check on the dough.
He stood beside Thomas and watched for a moment, then placed his hands over Thomas’s and guided the motion without speaking.
The guidance was physical and precise, the push-fold-turn demonstrated through shared movement rather than instruction, and Thomas submitted to the teaching with the humility of a man who understood that William’s hands knew things his hands did not.
“Feel the resistance,” William said. “When it pushes back, you have done enough. When it gives without resistance, you have done too much. The dough tells you what it needs. You have to listen.”
“I am not accustomed to listening to dough.”
“You are accustomed to listening. You listen better than most men I have met. Apply the same skill to a different material.”
Thomas applied himself. The dough improved, not by much, though enough that William nodded, which was as near as William came to saying well done.
“The yeast is alive,” William said, stepping back.
“People forget that. They treat bread as though it is an object, but it is a process. The yeast is living. The flour and water and salt are the environment. Your hands are the architecture. You are building something that is already growing, and the building must accommodate the growth.”
“That is a very good description of matrimony,” Thomas said, and the sentence came out before he could evaluate it, which meant it came from the honest place, and William looked at him with the particular expression of a father who has just heard something worth remembering.
“It is,” William said. “I had not thought of it that way. But it is.”