Chapter Three
“It will be a cancellation,” Jane said, and did not reach for the letter.
The letter sat on the bakery counter between a dusting of flour and the morning’s first tray of cooling rolls, bearing the Aldermere crest in dark wax.
Jane had been staring at it for the better part of a minute while her family assembled around her in various states of anticipation that she did not share.
She had spent three days waiting for this letter.
She had spent those three days convinced, with the steady grinding certainty of a person who had earned her pessimism, that Aldermere’s household had composed a formal explanation of why the bakery would not be receiving further orders.
The baker’s daughter had insulted the duke’s wardrobe and then set herself on fire, and neither of those things tended to generate repeat business.
“You don’t know that,” Lottie said, leaning across the counter with her chin on both fists and her eyes fixed on the wax seal. “It could be anything. It might even be a declaration of the heart.”
“It is most definitely not a declaration of the heart, Lottie.”
“You haven’t opened it.”
“I do not need to open it to know that the Duke of Aldermere has not sent me a letter proclaiming his affections three days after I nearly burned down his kitchen.”
“Open the letter, Jane,” Margaret said, from the doorway to the back room, where she had been scoring loaves with the steady, unhurried precision that characterised everything she did. Margaret’s authority in the bakery operated independently of eye contact.
Jane opened the letter.
She read it once, quickly, and the words did not arrange themselves into any order she recognised.
She read it again, more slowly, and this time the words cooperated, but they produced a meaning so far from what she had expected that her hands went still on the paper.
The bakery fell silent around her, because the Rennet family had lived together long enough to know what Jane’s stillness meant.
It did not mean bad news. Bad news made Jane talk faster.
“Well?” her mother said, from the kitchen doorway, where she had appeared with a bowl of proving dough against her hip and an expression that was trying very hard to be calm and not entirely managing it.
“It is a place in the kitchens,” Jane said.
“Under Mrs. Vale, the cook at Aldermere Hall, with good keep and a fair allowance. Training in pastry, preserves, French cookery, and formal household service.” She looked up from the letter and found her family staring at her with the collective expression of people waiting for the part where it turned out to be a mistake.
“They wish me to enter upon my duties this coming Monday.”
The silence lasted approximately two seconds.
“Monday,” Lottie said, in a voice that began at a normal volume and climbed. “Monday, Jane, that’s four days, oh my goodness, oh my absolute goodness, you are going to work in a duke’s kitchen, a duke’s actual kitchen with actual copper pans and actual French cookery and actual everything.”
“Lottie, please do not shriek in the bakery,” Margaret said.
“I am not shrieking, I am celebrating, which I daresay, is a meaningful distinction.”
“The distinction is volume, and you have exceeded it.”
Their father came through from the back with flour on his forearms to the elbow and the look he wore when something had pleased him and he was deciding how much of the pleasure to show.
William Rennet was a broad, quiet man who had baked bread since he was fourteen and who measured praise the way he measured yeast, carefully and never in excess.
He took the letter from Jane, read it through with his lips moving faintly on the longer words, and set it down and looked at his daughter with eyes that were brighter than usual.
“That is well done, Jane,” he said. “That is very well done.”
“I didn’t do anything, Papa. I set myself on fire and ran away.”
“And they’ve asked you back. Which suggests the fire was less memorable than the muffins.”
“Do dukes eat golden bread?” Sam asked, from somewhere near floor level, where he had been sitting on a sack of barley and listening with the patient, wide-eyed attention of a boy who collected information the way other children collected pebbles.
He was eight, small for his age, and possessed of a sincere conviction that dukes occupied a separate category of existence from ordinary people.
“Dukes eat the same bread as everyone, Sam,” Margaret said.
“Then why are they dukes?”
“A question for the ages,” Margaret said, and returned to her scoring without further comment, though the corner of her mouth suggested she considered the question better than most she’d heard that morning.
Jane’s mother set the proving bowl down and crossed the room and took Jane’s face between both hands and said nothing for a long moment.
This was more frightening than words, because Jane’s mother always had words, for everything, and their absence meant something had got past the careful machinery of her composure and reached the part underneath.
“You will make us very proud,” her mother said, and kissed her forehead, and went back to her dough before her voice could do anything she would later need to deny.
“The letter says full wages,” William said, reading it through a second time with the careful attention of a man who had learned that generosity usually came with conditions.
“Room and board not included, which is proper, since you’ll come home each evening.
And the cloak they’ve returned is yours, Jane, not a gift. They’re making sure of that.”
“They returned my cloak?”
“Wrapped in paper, with the letter. Your mother’s already hung it.”
Jane had forgotten the cloak entirely, which said something about the state she had been in when she’d fled the kitchen, because Jane Rennet did not forget practical things. She had walked home in the rain without one because her pride had been louder than her common sense.
“Will Mrs. Vale teach her French sauces?” Sam asked, with the grave interest of a boy who had recently learned the word béchamel and used it at every opportunity, regardless of context.
“If Jane earns it,” Margaret said. “French sauces are not distributed freely, Sam. They are earned through suffering, like everything worthwhile.”
“Margaret, do not terrify your brother,” their mother called from the back.
“I am merely acquainting him with the facts. Any subsequent terror is entirely his own concern.”
“It says here the position is subject to quarterly review,” William continued, setting the letter down with both hands flat on the counter.
“Which means they can end it at any time if the arrangement does not suit. It also means, Jane, that every quarter is a chance to prove the arrangement does suit. Do you understand what I’m saying? ”
“That I must not set anything else on fire.”
“That you must render yourself so invaluable, they should find the household quite lost without you.” William looked at her steadily.
“You have the hands for it, Jane. You have had the hands for it since you were ten. The question has never been whether you could do the work. The question has been whether anyone with the power to open the right doors would notice.”
Jane looked at her father’s flour-covered forearms and his steady, serious face and the letter on the counter between them. The weight of what he was trusting her with settled across her shoulders like something she would carry gladly even when it was heavy.
Jane folded the letter and pressed it flat against the counter and tried to organise what she was feeling into something manageable.
The apprenticeship was extraordinary. Instruction under a cook of Mrs. Vale’s eminence could entirely transform her abilities, her prospects, and the bakery’s reputation in the county.
A baker instructed at a ducal house carried a name that opened doors, and those doors led to the kind of stability that meant the lease, when it came due in spring, would be a conversation between equals rather than a negotiation conducted from weakness.
But if she failed, or gave offence, or proved herself unequal to a kitchen operating at a standard the village could not match, the failure would not stay at Aldermere.
It would follow her home. It would attach itself to the bakery’s name, and the Garricks, who owned the building, would have something worse than a reason to raise the rent.
They would have a tale to tell, and stories about families who overreached carried further than any lease dispute ever could.
“I’ll need to be perfect,” Jane said, mostly to herself.
“You’ll need to be competent,” Margaret corrected, without looking up. “Perfection is conspicuous. Competence is what they truly require.”
Jane looked at her sister and thought, as she often did, that Margaret would have made an excellent general if the army had the sense to recruit from bakeries.
***
Monday arrived with rain, which Jane chose to interpret as atmosphere rather than omen.
She reached Aldermere’s kitchen at seven on the hour, as the letter had specified, and found Mrs. Vale already at work with a ferocity that suggested she had been there for some time and considered seven on the hour, a generous concession to the weakness of people who required sleep.
The kitchen was hotter than Jane remembered, the ovens producing a deep, steady heat that meant bread had gone in before dawn, and the air smelled of yeast and rosemary and the sharp, bright edge of lemon peel.
“Apron on the hook,” Mrs. Vale said, without greeting. “Wash your hands twice. The first wash is for the mud, the second is for your standards, and if I see you touch food before both are finished, we will have a conversation you will not enjoy.”
“Yes, Mrs. Vale.”