Chapter 6 #2
“Yes, I was wondering if we might beg the use of your oven and a corner of your worktable. Miss Darcy has agreed to help me make Shrewsbury cakes.”
The cook’s expression softened as she nodded at Georgiana and her finely-tailored morning dress. She had clearly not expected a lady of such high standing to appear at the kitchen door.
The kitchen maid, a rosy-cheeked girl rolling pastry nearby, looked up. “Shrewsbury cakes? My mum makes those from the old Clark recipe. Old John Clark baked for the king’s father.”
“Then we are connected by butter and flour.” I felt the small, warm bloom of it—a pride that drawing rooms would dismiss but kitchens would honor. “John Clark’s daughter was my grandmother. The recipe has survived four generations and one very determined cat who believes all butter belongs to her.”
The kitchen maid’s eyes went round. “The Clarks were suppliers to the crown.”
I did not look at Georgiana, as I did not need to. The silence behind me had changed from contemptuous tolerance to something considerably more attentive.
“Very well,” Mrs. Jolliffe said in a tone considerably more deferential. “You’ll be wanting butter, sugar, flour, and eggs. Caraway seeds?”
“And rose water, if you have it. My grandmother’s recipe calls for both.”
Ingredients were produced. Aprons were provided—mine was plain cotton, and Georgiana’s was offered with such reverent hesitation by the kitchen maid that I suspected it had been ironed on the remote possibility that a member of the gentry might one day wander into the kitchen.
Without her lady’s maid, Georgiana tied the strings and produced a bow so thoroughly lopsided that it listed distinctly to the left.
I said nothing. Some achievements deserve their moment.
“First,” I said, measuring flour into a bowl, “we cream the butter and sugar. Work it until it gives up being two separate things and becomes one. The trick is patience.” I demonstrated with the spoon moving in steady circles. “The butter does not respond to politeness. It requires persuasion.”
“That looks simple enough.”
“Then you do it.” I handed her the spoon.
She held the spoon as though it were a parasol—elegantly, at a distance, with her wrist at an angle that suggested generations of deportment training and no practical experience whatsoever.
“You will need to apply force,” I said. “Butter does not respond to politeness.”
“I am not accustomed to applying force to food,” said with that dry Darcy undertone.
“You will learn. The butter does not care about your lineage.”
Her first attempts were too delicate, producing nothing, followed by an overzealous attack that launched clods of buttery sugar onto the counter. Cinnamon appeared from nowhere, eager to polish the counter clean.
“Less enthusiasm,” I said, dropping my errant cat on the floor where she continued to pursue Georgiana’s catapult of butter and sugar. “More rhythm. Think of it as a waltz. The spoon leads.”
“I have had the finest dancing masters in London,” she said, through gritted teeth, “and not one of them prepared me for this.”
But she adjusted, her wrist finding the motion, and the butter began to yield, and it was time to add the eggs.
Georgiana cracked hers with the tentative horror of someone who had never touched a raw egg and found the experience viscerally distressing. “It is slimy,” she announced, as though this were a personal affront.
“All the best things in life begin unpromising,” I mused. “Eggs. Caterpillars. First impressions.”
She glanced at me with the same dark, assessing eyes like her brother’s when I quipped that he required a thicker coat to attend assemblies.
She also added a splash more rose water than the recipe specified, with the air of a woman making an executive decision and daring anyone to comment.
“That is a reckless amount of rose water—” I started.
“I am never reckless,” she said with the perfect enunciation of her class.
I set out the dough to roll it, but she wanted to try.
“Thinner,” I advised. “The cakes should be delicate, not defensive.”
“Perhaps I prefer defensive cakes,” Georgiana retorted, a hint of playfulness creeping into her voice as she attacked the dough with the rolling pin.
“That would explain a great deal about this household,” I replied drolly.
The twitch at Georgiana’s mouth grew broader. If this kept up, I might achieve an actual smile by Thursday.
Mrs. Jolliffe produced the biscuit cutters, and I was demonstrating their proper use, pressing straight down, no twisting, or the edges go ragged, elucidated in my most snobbish king’s baker great-granddaughter accent and gesturing my moment of theatrical instruction.
I was being insufferable, and I knew it, before a cloud of flour fluffed over my face.
Coughing, I shook it from my lashes and found Georgiana with her hand still extended like a battledore racquet after a particularly aggressive slam.
“Did you, Miss Darcy, just throw flour at me?” Around me, Mrs. Jolliffe pretended not to have noticed, and the kitchen maid pressed both hands over her mouth, her face going scarlet with the effort of not laughing outright.
I advanced on the younger Darcy, who held her stance, chin lifted, posture immaculate, with an aristocratic blankness that was anything but innocent and entirely too pleased with herself.
“My dear Miss Elizabeth, I’m afraid you’ve only yourself to blame. Your overzealous assault with the biscuit cutters has resulted in a most becoming flour adornment upon your visage.”
A smile tugged at my lips as I deliberately brushed the flour from my face, shaking my hair to create a delicate cloud that drifted in her direction. “I’ll have you know, Miss Darcy, that in the Bennet household, such an unprovoked flour assault is tantamount to a declaration of war.”
“Then we should count our blessings that we find ourselves at Netherfield rather than Longbourn.” Her voice was measured, controlled, and devastatingly reminiscent of her brother delivering a pronouncement on the inadequacy of country assemblies.
“You, however, were being insufferably superior. One might almost call it… snobbish, oh, great-granddaughter of the king’s bakehouse. ”
Her other hand was already reaching toward the flour bin. But I was not without my weapon of choice—the edges of my buttery dough curled invitingly around my fingers.
“Choose your next words with great care,” I cautioned, “for I can see your hand inching towards the flour bin. I would remind you that I was raised alongside Lydia Bennet, who once weaponized a blancmange at Christmas dinner. I am not a woman who accepts a first strike without swift retaliation.”
Georgiana’s fingers closed around a fistful of flour. Her chin came up another inch—pure Darcy, pure defiance, the granddaughter of an earl preparing to engage in hand-to-hand pastry combat with the granddaughter of a baker, and looking entirely too magnificent doing it.
“You would not dare,” she said. “I am your ward.”
“Indeed you are,” I agreed, my hand dipping into the bowl of sugared flour. “A ward who has just committed an unprovoked assault on her companion’s person with baking ingredients. That is an act of war, Miss Darcy, and in war…” I took careful aim. “…there are consequences.”
I flicked the dough at her, sending a dollop across her nose. In retaliation, she upended the entire flour bin over my head, coating me in a fine, powdery mist.
“Oh, excuse me!” The giggles were no longer suppressed but erupting, high and startled and wonderfully young, breaking across her face like something that had been dammed and could not be held any longer. “Oh, I did not mean to! I only intended…”
“You intended exactly what you achieved,” I retorted, shaking the flour from my hair like a dog emerging from a pond. “And now you’ve left me no choice but to escalate.”
What followed was, by any reasonable measure, an unforgivable breach of household decorum, companion protocol, and basic respect for the baking arts.
Flour, sugar, eggs, sugary paste, rosewater, butter clods, and caraway seeds flew back and forth in a dizzying ballet of culinary warfare.
Volley after volley, with screams, giggles, shouts, and Cinnamon running circles around our skirts.
Somehow, we managed to finish the cakes, cutting the rounds and watching with satisfaction as Mrs. Jolliffe slid the tray into the oven.
But we were, both of us, thoroughly and comprehensively covered with a surplus of ingredients while laughing hard enough that our dignity was entirely gone, and neither of us was calculating the loss.
And then disaster struck. Thundering footsteps descended the service stairs much like a herd of elephants, although in truth, I’ve only seen a single sad elephant at an exhibit—but I can well imagine a herd.
Georgiana and I exchanged a look of wide-eyed panic before turning our attention to the doorway.
I was, at that precise moment, wearing roughly half a pound of flour in my hair, butter across one cheek, and Georgiana had dough stuck in her hair, rosewater and caraway seeds sprinkled over her silk morning dress, and raspberry jam smeared over her nose.
Yet, even in this moment of potential mortification, Georgiana’s bearing transformed. She drew up her shoulders, lifted her chin, and clasped her hands like a royal princess who had never touched a mixing bowl, let alone weaponized one.
Her reaction was so heartbreakingly automatic that I understood something about Georgiana Darcy I had not understood before: she had been caught at joy before, and the consequences had taught her to hide it.
I did not have time to consider this further, because the doorway filled with a parade of figures, each more imposing than the last.
Mrs. Nicholls entered first. Behind her came Caroline Bingley, dressed for a morning call in champagne-colored silk with pearl buttons, her expression of scandalized delight upon discovering someone else behaving badly.
Her gaze swept the kitchen—the flour-dusted worktable, the smeared bowls, the eggshells scattered like casualties of a small domestic war, Cinnamon licking butter from the flagstones—and her smile sharpened like a lance about to be applied to a boil.
Behind Caroline, Mr. Bingley appeared, and his face performed an extraordinary journey in the space of perhaps two seconds, from concern to confusion to comprehension to a grin so wide and barely suppressed that he had to press his knuckles against his mouth, his shoulders shaking with the effort of not laughing outright.
And then, filling the doorway with his imposing presence, stood Mr. Darcy.
He did not speak, and that was worse.
His penetrating gaze swept across the room, covering the flour on every surface, the sugar ground into the flagstones, the caraway seeds scattered like birdseed, the kitchen maid frozen mid-curtsy with egg yolk on her sleeve, Mrs. Jolliffe wiping her hands on a towel with the resigned composure of a woman who had weathered far worse storms.
His eyes found Georgiana—flour in her hair, butter on her morning dress, and the ghost of laughter still visible around her mouth like a crime she had not quite concealed—and something moved across his face that was not anger, exactly, but was considerably worse: disappointment.
Then his gaze locked on me.
I was aware, with the acute self-consciousness of a woman standing in the wreckage of her own making, that I presented a spectacle.
Cinnamon, unhelpful to the situation at hand, leaped onto the worktable, washing her paw with the profound indifference of a cat who bore no responsibility for any of this and wished that to be noted.
“Miss Bennet.” His voice was the same one I remembered from the assembly—formal, frigid, final. “A word.”
Caroline’s smile widened to predatory proportions, while Bingley’s hand pressed harder against his mouth, unable to suppress the guffaws.
“I engaged you,” Mr. Darcy said, his tone laden with disapproval, “to provide cultural instruction and companionship to my sister. To improve her mind, broaden her accomplishments, and… to be a civilizing influence.”
He looked at the kitchen, and the rosewater pooled between the flagstones, at the broken eggs, spilled sugar, and my cat licking a curl of butter, and his gaze stopped on me in all my flour and sugar-covered glory.
“What I did not engage you to do, Miss Bennet,” he said, each word crisp and cutting, “was to turn my sister into a kitchen maid.”
Kitchen maid. Seen only what I could be used for.
Beside him, Caroline Bingley’s expression had achieved a state of rapture so pure it was nearly religious.
“Miss Bennet,” Darcy pronounced his judgment. “Your services are no longer required.”