Chapter One #2
“Mrs. Croft tells me the house is a quiet one,” Jane said, because curiosity had always been stronger in her than caution. “She made it sound rather grave.”
“She is being kind, which is her great failing,” Whitlock said cheerfully.
“The plain truth is that His Grace is held to be the coldest man in three counties. He turned half the household off some years back, he has not given a dinner in longer than I have been here, and the few callers brave enough to try the door were sent away so thoroughly that they stopped trying. There are children in Millcombe who believe he is a story their mothers invented to keep them from the lane.”
“Whitlock,” Mrs. Croft said, in a voice that could have pressed linen.
“I am only saving Miss Rennet the trouble of hearing it worse in the village, where they will tell her he is cruel and proud and has a temper like a winter sea. I find it kinder to give a person the gossip from someone who actually draws his wages.” Whitlock turned back to Jane, unrepentant.
“He is exacting, that part is true. He notices everything and forgives very little, and a body learns to do the work properly the first time. But you will deal chiefly with Mrs. Vale, who is more frightening than any duke, so you should think no more of it.”
“He is not cruel,” Mrs. Vale said, without turning from her pastry, and the flatness of it closed the subject more firmly than any defense could have. “He is a private man, and private men are easy to invent stories about. Mind your work, Whitlock, and let Miss Rennet mind hers.”
Jane filed all of it away, the cold master ,the discharged servants and the door that remained barred to all inquiries ,and resolved to be careful and quick and gone before she gave a man like that any reason to notice her. It seemed, at the time, an achievable plan.
“You may tell your mother the order is received,” Mrs. Croft said, “and that I will write to her within the week regarding further arrangements. We have a summer dinner planned for the twenty-third, and His Grace has expressed a preference for local suppliers where the quality warrants it.”
“I will tell her, ma’am. She’ll be very glad of it. A standing order from Aldermere would mean a great deal to us, more than I think I am supposed to say out loud in a duke’s kitchen.”
“Then we shall both pretend you did not,” Mrs. Croft said, not unkindly.
Jane’s hands tightened on the basket handle with the effort of keeping the hope off her face, the kind of hope that could carry the bakery through a hard season and remind the Garricks, come spring, that the Rennets had friends above the village.
She was beginning to feel almost steady when she noticed the tray.
It sat on the edge of the hearth shelf, close enough to the fire that the cloth beneath it had begun to darken at one corner. A platter of tartlets, she thought, or possibly small pies, left too near the heat by someone who had stepped away at the wrong moment.
“That tray is rather close to the fire,” Jane said.
“That is Bess’s tray and Bess’s carelessness,” Mrs. Vale said, “and Bess will answer for it when she returns from the cold store. Leave it where it lies, Miss Rennet. The hearth is my business and not a delivery girl’s.”
“It will scorch the cloth, ma’am, and the cloth will scorch the shelf, and I have watched a shelf fire take half a bakehouse before breakfast. I only mean to move it a hand’s width.”
“Do not touch it. The handle will be hot enough to mark you,” Mrs. Vale said, already moving.
But Jane’s hand was already reaching, because her body had made the decision before her brain could overrule it.
The same instinct had pulled burning loaves from her father’s ovens since she was twelve, and her mother had long since stopped trying to cure her of it.
Her fingers closed on the tray’s edge. The heat bit into her palm like a wasp and she flinched, jerking backward, and the trailing end of her shawl dragged across the open flame beneath the trivet.
It caught at once, dry wool meeting live heat with a quiet, steady with diligence that owed nothing to drama.
The left side of her shawl was alight before she understood it had begun, and the kitchen filled with the smell of scorching and the sound of shouting.
Mrs. Vale was calling for water, Mrs. Croft was pulling a cloth from somewhere, and Jane was producing a sound she would later describe to Lottie as a controlled exclamation and which was, in truthful fact, a shriek.
And then he was there.
The man from the courtyard crossed the kitchen as if silence were a mode of transport, and his hands closed over her shoulders before she understood what was happening.
He turned her away from the hearth with a grip that held her steady and did not bruise, and one arm came round her to sweep the burning wool off her shoulders in a single motion that pressed her briefly back against the whole length of him.
He dropped the shawl to the stone and set his boot to it until the flames sunk into a smouldering smoke.
It was over in seconds, and yet for the length of those seconds Jane was held against his coat, his forearm a hard line beneath her collarbone and his breath stirring the hair at her temple, and the heat of his palms through her sleeves had stopped being entirely about the fire.
His hands stayed a moment past the moment they were needed.
So did she, and the not-stepping-back was its own small admission, made and unmade before either could be held to it.
Then his hands opened and she turned in the space they left, and they were standing too close, near enough that she had to tip her chin to find his face, near enough to see that whatever held his expression was not the alarm she had expected.
He was looking at her mouth, briefly, in the instant before he caught himself doing it, and the catching was the most expressive thing he had done since the courtyard.
“You are not burned,” he said. It was the first thing he had said to her, low and uneven, and it had the sound of a man confirming something for his own sake rather than asking it of hers.
“Only my pride, and my palm, and my mother’s shawl, in roughly that order of severity.” Her voice was higher than she wanted it. “I saw the tray and I thought it would burn, and then I was the thing burning, which I think you will agree is no improvement at all.”