Chapter Three #2
“You will learn pastry first, because your mother’s training gives you a foundation, and I prefer to build on what exists rather than start from rubble.
Preserves after pastry. French sauces when I decide you are ready, and not before, because a French sauce in untrained hands is not a sauce. It is an apology.”
Jane washed her hands twice and put on the apron and began.
The morning was relentless. Mrs. Vale’s standards were not higher than her mother’s.
They were a different species of standard altogether, the kind that lived at an altitude where the air was thinner and excuses did not survive.
Jane rolled pastry until her wrists ached, was told it was too thick, rolled it again, was told the butter had warmed, and started over with fresh butter from the cold store.
On the third attempt, Mrs. Vale pronounced the result acceptable, which was delivered with the same emotional temperature as a comment about the weather.
Whitlock appeared at ten with a cup of tea and a conspiratorial expression. “Still among the living, Miss Rennet?”
“Scarcely, and only because she has not yet found a fault she considers worth the breath of correcting.”
“Mrs. Vale once made a footman cry over an egg custard. You are doing better than most, I assure you.”
“The footman has my sympathy.”
“He recovered. Eventually. I understand he is engaged as a clerk in a banking-house at present.” Whitlock set the tea beside her workspace and disappeared before Mrs. Vale could object to social visits during working hours.
Jane drank the tea in three hasty swallows and kept rolling.
By noon, she had produced six batches of pastry, four of which Mrs. Vale rejected, and her confidence had been taken apart and reassembled in a configuration that was humbler and more precise.
Mrs. Vale corrected by proximity, appearing at Jane’s elbow with the silent inevitability of weather and making observations that were technically instructional and functionally devastating.
“Your left hand is lazy,” Mrs. Vale said, watching Jane crimp a tart shell. “It follows your right instead of leading. A pastry made by one hand is half a pastry.”
“My mother taught me to lead with my right.”
“Your mother taught you to bake for a village. I am teaching you to bake for a house. The standards are not the same, Miss Rennet. If you carry your mother’s habits into my kitchen without examining them, you will produce your mother’s results, which are fair. Fair is not what I require.”
Jane adjusted her grip and tried again, and the difference was small enough that she almost missed it and large enough that Mrs. Vale gave a single nod and moved on, which from Mrs. Vale was as close to praise as the morning was likely to come.
The duke made his appearance at half past eleven.
Jane was trimming pastry edges when the kitchen’s rhythm shifted in the way a room shifts when someone enters it who changes the weight of the air.
She looked up and found Thomas Bennister standing near the far door in his dark coat, observing the kitchen with the expression of a man who had come downstairs for a reason he was not prepared to name.
Mrs. Vale acknowledged him with a nod that contained exactly the right amount of deference, which was to say very little.
Thomas’s gaze moved across the kitchen, touched the hanging pans, the ovens, the preparation tables, and came to rest on Jane the way water settles to the lowest point in a room, without hurry and without being asked.
She dropped the spoon.
It clattered against the stone floor with the bright, ringing determination of a small object making itself heard in a large room.
Jane’s face went hot before the sound had finished, because dropping things in front of the Duke of Aldermere was apparently going to be a recurring feature of their acquaintance, and she could not decide whether it was comedy or tragedy.
Thomas crossed the kitchen, bent, and picked up the spoon.
He did not hand it to her, which would have required her to take it from his fingers.
He placed it on the table beside her workspace, carefully, as if the placement mattered.
As he straightened, his gaze caught on something near her face.
Jane realised a moment too late that there was flour on her cheek, a smear of white across her left cheekbone that she had not noticed because flour on her face was so routine at home that she had stopped checking.
His eyes lowered to the flour, only to rise again and fix themselves upon the vivid green of her own. Then he turned and left the kitchen without speaking.
Jane stood very still for a count of five, which was as long as she could afford, because Mrs. Vale was observing her with the look of a woman who had noticed everything and was storing it for later use.
“You will find,” Mrs. Vale said, when the door had closed, “that His Grace makes a habit of arriving at the precise moment one is least composed. I have decided, over eleven years, that it is best not to grant it any significance. Pick up your spoon, Miss Rennet.”
“Does he often come down to the kitchen, Mrs. Vale?”
“He does not come down to the kitchen at all, as a rule, which is why I have elected to notice nothing about the fact that he has done it once already today. Your pastry will not roll itself.”
Jane picked up the spoon, wiped it clean carefully and returned to her pastry, and Thomas appeared yet again at half past one, which made twice before the afternoon, and no duke in the history of the English peerage had ever needed to inspect his own kitchen twice before noon was properly cold.
He stood near the stillroom door for several minutes and said nothing, until Mrs. Vale, without turning, addressed him.
“Is there something specific you require, Your Grace, or are you inspecting the ventilation?”
“The ventilation appears adequate,” Thomas said, and left.
By the time the light began to fade and Mrs. Vale told her she was finished for the day, Jane’s hands were sore and her back ached and her apron was so covered in flour and butter that it could have been submitted as evidence in a trial about pastry.
She untied it, hung it on the hook, and turned to collect her things.
There was a stool beside the pastry table.
It was small, wooden, the right height for a woman who had been standing on stone floors for nine hours, and it had not been there when Jane arrived that morning.
It sat precisely where she had been working, as if someone had measured the distance between her feet and the table edge and placed it accordingly.
“Mrs. Croft,” Jane said, when the housekeeper passed through on her evening round. “Did someone bring a stool to the pastry table?”
Mrs. Croft glanced at it with an expression that revealed nothing. “I couldn’t say, Miss Rennet. Furniture has a way of migrating in old houses.”
“Furniture does not migrate.”
“You would be surprised,” Mrs. Croft said, and moved on with the smooth efficiency of a woman who had no intention of answering further questions on the subject.
Jane walked home through the cooling evening with flour still on her cheek and a warmth in her chest that she could not entirely account for.
It was not the kitchen’s heat and not the satisfaction of hard work alone, though both were part of it.
She told herself the duke was simply considerate to his staff.
A good employer noticed when someone had been standing too long.
A good employer provided a stool and picked up dropped spoons and appeared in his own kitchen twice a day because, presumably, dukes had nothing better to do.
She was still telling herself this when she reached home and found Lottie waiting in the parlour with her knees drawn up and her expression sharpened to a point.
“How was the duke’s kitchen?” Lottie asked.
“Exhausting. Mrs. Vale is terrifying. The perfection demanded of the pastry is unmerciful. My hands may never forgive me.”
“And the duke?”
“What about the duke?”
“Did you see him?”
Jane hesitated one beat too long, and Lottie’s face broke into the particular grin that meant she had identified a weakness and intended to exploit it thoroughly.
“He visited the kitchen,” Jane said, carefully. “Twice. He is the duke, it is his kitchen, and he may visit it as often as he likes.”
“He visited his own kitchen twice in a single morning, and you expect me to believe it was the ventilation that drew him.”
“It is a large kitchen, Lottie, and there are a great many things in it to inspect.”
“Jane Rennet, upon my word, you are the most charming simpleton,” Lottie said, with the affectionate certainty of a sister who had spent nineteen years studying the specific ways in which Jane was intelligent about everything except the things that mattered most. “An absolute and thorough simpleton and I adore you dearly, and we will speak of this again.”
Jane went upstairs and washed the flour from her face and changed out of her work dress and sat on the edge of her bed in the fading light.
She thought about the stool and about the spoon, placed carefully beside her hand rather than into it.
She thought about his gaze catching on the flour and the way he had looked at it, briefly, before turning away and leaving her standing in a kitchen that had become two degrees warmer than it had been a moment before.
She told herself it meant nothing.
She did not entirely believe herself, and she was not entirely sure she wanted to.