Chapter Seven
“Miss Wrenfield, you must come at once. Everyone is whispering, Papa is in the kitchen, and the Cook has gone the colour of a beetroot.”
Theo had her by the hand before she had set down her pen. The back stairs were lined with footmen and maids in attitudes of fascinated horror, the look of people watching a house quietly begin to smoke, and not one of them moved to stop a governess going down into whatever was happening below.
“What is happening, Lord Theodore?”
“Papa tasted the Cook’s rice and went very quiet and took off his coat. James says a duke has not taken off his coat below stairs since the flood. What is the flood?”
“A great inconvenience involving a quantity of rain. Mind the bottom step.”
“James says her ladyship will have an apoplexy if she hears of it, and the Cook is too frightened to send anyone in.”
“Then James had better not be the one to tell her. Lower your voice, Lord Theodore. A kitchen at war keeps no secrets, and we are walking into one.”
Lady Cassandra had driven out after noon with the Wexcombes and was not looked for before dark, and the house had the loose, daring air of a house that knew the cat was three miles down the road. The kitchen, when Elinor reached it, was very warm and smelled of scorch.
The Duke of Rothmere stood at the great range, coat gone, cravat loosened, shirtsleeves turned back to the elbow, doing a thing she had not known a duke’s forearms were built to do.
A pot of the first attempt sat condemned on the table.
Mrs Coombe stood by the sideboard wringing her apron, scarlet to the hairline.
“Your Grace. You cannot be in the kitchen,” Elinor said.
“Plainly, I can. I am demonstrably standing in it.”
“You cannot cook for your governess.”
“I am correcting an educational deficiency.”
“Mine, Your Grace, or the cook’s?”
“Both, apparently. The broth, Mrs Coombe, the simmering pot, a single ladle, and we do not add the next until the first is gone. That is the whole secret, and your predecessor’s effort died of haste.”
“The entire household is on the stairs, Your Grace.”
“Then the entire household is learning to make Italian rice, which is more than it could do this morning. Shut the door if their faces trouble you. They will not, however, learn it with the door shut, and a thing worth doing is generally worth being seen to do badly first.”
“It went to glue, Your Grace,” the cook ventured, miserable. “I left it to bake while I saw to the pastry.”
“It went to glue because Italian rice cannot be left, Mrs Coombe. It is the one dish in the world that knows the instant you stop minding it, and it takes its revenge at once and in public.” He tipped in the ladle she handed him, and the pan hissed and settled.
He stirred slow and even, the wrist sure with it, a thing learned once with his whole attention and never since forgotten.
“You toast the rice first. Dry, in the butter, until it smells of nuts and goes pearl at the edge. Then the wine, and you let it vanish entirely before there is any broth at all.”
“Tell about the inn,” Theo demanded, scaling the stool the cook would never ordinarily have allowed within a yard of the range. “You said you learned it at an inn. Tell it while you stir.”
“It was no inn. It was a house off a courtyard in Milan, the rain coming down straight and grey and for days together, the way it only comes in Milan.” The spoon went round.
“I was four-and-twenty and a great distance from anyone who knew my name, which I had believed I wanted, and I had taken a fever from the bad water and could not eat. The old woman who kept the house took it as a personal affront.”
“Was she the cook?”
“She was a grandmother, which is a higher rank than cook and answers to nobody on earth. She had no English, and I had schoolroom Italian, so she decided the cure for an Englishman dying of his own consequence was rice, made in front of him, every evening, until he learned to respect it.”
“Why did you have to respect it?”
“Because she would not let a man eat a thing he held cheap, and she had concluded I held everything cheap, which was very near the truth.” Another ladle, another slow disappearance.
“How much broth in all, Your Grace?” Mrs Coombe had crept nearer, her misery giving way to the helpless interest of a craftswoman watching better work than her own.
“As much as the rice will drink, and not a drop you pour at once. It is done when it is done, Mrs Coombe, which is a thing I cannot teach you with a measure, only with a week of evenings and a wooden spoon across the knuckles.”
“I have had a spoon across the knuckles, Your Grace. My own grandmother. I did not think to meet the method in a duke’s kitchen.”
“You did not think to meet the duke in it either, and yet watch the colour. When the broth is drunk, the rice draws a line behind the spoon, and the line holds for a breath before it closes. That is when the next ladle goes in and not before. She rapped my knuckles with the spoon the first three nights for adding it early.”
“She rapped a duke’s knuckles?”
“She did not know I was a duke, and would not have cared, and it was the most useful week of my education.”
“Were you very ill?”
“I was ill enough to stop minding whether I lived, which at four-and-twenty a young man mistakes for sophistication. She minded on my behalf, ferociously, on principle, having never met me before the week I arrived to die in her spare room.” The spoon kept its slow circle.
“It is a strange thing, Theo, to be kept in the world by a stranger’s stubbornness.
I have spent rather a long time since trying to deserve the trouble she took.
” He reached for the little cup at his elbow where warm broth was.
“I have since eaten at the tables of three ambassadors, a cardinal and a man who owned more of Venice than the Venetians. I never once ate anything that frightened me the way that grandmother’s rice frightened me, because it was the first food in a year made by a person who would have minded if I died. ”
The spoon stopped a moment, and went on.
“Miss Wrenfield, come and taste this, and tell me whether it wants salt.” He dipped a clean spoon and held it out across the pan, not so near as to be improper and not so far as to be easily refused.
“You have read more recipes than I have eaten dinners, by your own account. Put the reading to some use.”
She crossed the warm flags and took the spoon from his hand without their fingers meeting, which required attention from them both, and tasted.
“Salt,” she said. “Just a little more.” The spoon went back to him the same careful way. “And it is the most extraordinary thing I have had in my mouth in my life, which I shall deny entirely if you repeat it.”
“I shall hoard it against you instead.” He added a pinch of salt from the cup at his elbow.
“The broth now,” he said, and stirred, and the gathered staff made a small sound they tried to pass off as nothing.
“At the end, so it keeps its scent. The cheese off the heat, never on it, or it ropes. And then the part your governess will approve of, being a woman of method.”
“What part?” said Theo and Mrs Coombe together.
“You take it from the fire while it still moves on the plate. Rice served stiff is rice served too late, by a cook who wanted to be finished more than she wanted it to be right.” He drew the pan off, beat in cold butter and a fall of grated cheese with quick hard strokes, and the rice went glossy and loose and smelled, all at once, of a country Elinor had read of for fifteen years and would never set foot in.
“There. Italian rice, made by an English duke from the memory of an Italian grandmother, against his rank, his cook’s feelings, and the considered opinion of his whole household. ”
“It is yellow,” Theo breathed.
“It is gold,” said his father. “There is a difference, and learning to tell the one from the other will occupy a good deal of your education.”
“Which is this one?”
“Gold, plainly, since I made it. You will know gold hereafter by having tasted it once, made properly, by someone who minded. That is the only way anyone learns the difference, and books are no help to you at all.” He glanced, once, at Elinor as he said it.
“Mrs Coombe, you watched. Could you make it now?”
“I could attempt it, Your Grace, and not leave it, and rap my own knuckles if I reached for the ladle too soon.”
“Then the dish has a future in this house, which is more than I expected when I came down. Thank you. You will find I do not say that often, so spend it carefully.”
“You should not have done this, Your Grace,” Elinor said it low, while the staff dispersed to their stations with the air of people carrying news. “By Sunday the county will have it that the Duke of Rothmere cooked for his governess.”
“By Sunday the county will have it that the Duke of Rothmere cooked. They may furnish the rest themselves.”
“They will furnish it correctly.”
“Then they will be right for once, which will be a novelty for the county.” He wiped his hands on the cloth without the least appearance of concern.
“A man may feed his son’s teacher the dish his son demanded, Miss Wrenfield, without the roof coming down, whatever her ladyship would say of it over the tea.
The roof has held through worse. Eat it while it is hot. ”
He would not let it be carried up by anyone else.
Wrapped in a cloth, the warm dish went up in his own hands to the small breakfast room where the trouble with the chairs had first begun.
He laid three places and sat Theo between them as chaperone, with a gravity that made the boy sit very straight, conscious of his office.
“Eat it at once, before it stiffens. It will not wait for a long grace and would not survive one.”
Elinor took up her spoon and tasted it.
The page had given her the word, but nothing else.
An hour of one person’s attention arrived all at once in her mouth.
She had read of such things for half her life and put them away where she had been raised to put them, under the long heading of what lives in ink and ought to be grateful for the lodging.
No one had ever lifted one of those things off the page and set it in front of her. Not once in twenty-four years.
She put the spoon down, because her hand had grown unreliable, and turned her face to the window and the long light. The one thing a governess may never do is be seen to want a thing so much that the granting of it undoes her.
“Miss Wrenfield, you have stopped.” Theo eyed her plate with the stern attention she turned daily upon his. “You always say we do not stop until the plate is honestly finished.”
“I am making it last, Lord Theodore. Some things are improved by being made to last.”
“Is it wrong?” Nathaniel’s voice had changed. She did not turn to check it. “I worked from memory. I have not made it in years.”
“It is not wrong, Your Grace. It is exactly right. That is the difficulty with it.”
He did not ask her what the difficulty was, nor reach for the kind words a lesser man would have produced, the gentle prods, the questions dressed up as concern. He let her keep her face to the glass and her moment unwatched, which was the most watchful thing he could have done for her.
“Papa,” said Theo through a heroic mouthful, oblivious as only the entirely safe can be, “may we have it every week for the rest of my life?”
“That depends wholly on your Latin.”
“Then I shall learn all the Latin there is. I shall learn Greek as well, and Italian, and whatever the grandmother spoke, so that I may go to Milan and tell her you made it correctly.”
“She is very likely dead, Theo.”
“Then I shall tell her grave. Graves like to be told things. Miss Wrenfield said so, about the dog.”
The spell let go gently, a held breath released rather than snatched, and Elinor could turn back to the table.
She caught the duke watching her as she did.
He did not look away in time, and perhaps did not trouble to.
She had been seen, the whole of it. The man, who had stood an hour at a stove to put a country on her plate, had got from her face the exact thing he went down to the kitchen to find.
“It is only rice, Miss Wrenfield,” he said.
He did not believe it, and she knew he didn’t. And in the warm room, with the boy safe between them and the gold going slowly stiff on three plates, she was afraid, suddenly and entirely, that neither of them did.