Chapter Four
“Some girls burn a shawl and earn a place,” Bess said, without looking at Jane. “Others work three years for it.”
The remark went to the onion she was peeling, which gave it the look of a private thought rather than an insult aimed at a person, though no kitchen was large enough for that kind of misdirection and everyone within earshot knew exactly whom it was for.
Jane’s hands paused on the proving dough, and the heat that rose through her had nothing to do with the ovens.
“I did not ask for the position, Bess,” she said, quietly enough that the words carried only to the next table.
“Nobody said you did.”
“You said something very near to it, and you said it to an onion so that you would not have to say it to me.”
Bess’s knife paused for a fraction of a second before it resumed, with a precision suggesting the onion was now receiving the attention she would rather have aimed elsewhere.
“I said some girls are luckier than others. If you heard something different in it, that is your own conscience talking, not me.”
“It took me three years to be let near the pastry table,” Bess went on, lower now, the words coming out of her at last instead of into the onion.
“Three years of fetching and scrubbing and holding my tongue, and you walk in off a delivery cart and have your own station inside a fortnight. You will forgive me if I do not find it the charming accident everyone else seems to.”
“I do not find it charming either, Bess, if that is any comfort to you.” Jane kept turning her dough.
“And I am not going to pretend the manner of my coming here was fair, because it was not. The most I can promise is that I will not waste the place once I have it, which is the only answer I have that is worth anything.”
Bess said nothing to that, and her knife took up a fast, aggressive rhythm, a woman pouring a feeling into a vegetable, and there was no profit in pressing her further, because the splinter of the accusation that stung was the splinter that happened to be true.
Two and twenty, sharp, and quick with a blade, Bess had earned her three years through obedience and competence and the patience that grows in a person with no other options, and in her place, handed a fortnight what had cost her three years, Jane suspected she would have peeled her onions with exactly the same venom.
Whitlock, who had been polishing silver in the butler’s pantry and possessed the hearing of an unusually attentive bat, materialised in the doorway with two cups of tea and an expression of studied innocence that deceived nobody at all.
“Tea, Miss Rennet? Bess?”
“I don’t want tea,” Bess said.
“You always want tea, Bess. You are constitutionally incapable of refusing it, and if you refuse this cup on principle I shall be obliged to drink it myself and feel wretched about it, which will quite ruin an otherwise promising afternoon.”
Bess accepted the refreshment, as did Jane. Whitlock vanished as neatly as he had arrived, and the kitchen took up its rhythm again, a shade more strained than it had been five minutes before, though only Jane and Bess were in a position to measure the difference.
A fortnight at Aldermere had begun to make the kitchen legible to her, and she had taken to testing what she had learned against Ruth, who answered questions the way she did everything, without fuss.
“The left store is meat and the right is dairy,” Jane said, returning a crock to its shelf, “and I gather that mixing the two is treated rather like setting the house alight.”
“Worse,” Ruth said, not looking up from her basin.
“A fire can be put out. Mrs. Vale’s opinion of you, once formed on the matter of the cold stores, cannot.
” She dried her hands. “You learn quickly. The last girl took a month to stop reaching into the wrong one, and Mrs. Vale never quite forgave her the first week.”
“I have noticed she has more silences than most people have words, and that they are not all the same silence.”
“They are not. The short one is thinking. The long one is displeasure, and you will know it when it lands on you, because the whole kitchen knows it at once.” Ruth almost smiled.
“You will do well enough here, if you can bear being corrected by a woman who believes there is one right way to do a thing and that she invented it.”
It was a fair summary of the law Jane was learning, a kitchen of copper and steam and sharp edges, governed by rules no one wrote down because writing them down would insult the craft.
The work was harder than anything the bakery had asked of her, and at home a mistake had been absorbed quietly into the family by her mother and Margaret, who corrected her with affection, while here a mistake belonged to Jane alone, and the corrections came from a woman with no interest in her feelings and a great deal of interest in her results.
“You are pressing the curd through the sieve as though you bear it a personal grudge,” Mrs. Vale observed one morning, standing near enough that Jane could smell the nutmeg on her apron.
“A curd is not your enemy, Miss Rennet. It is your material, and you will treat it with the respect you would give anything more delicate than yourself and a great deal less forgiving.”
“Yes, Mrs. Vale.”
“And straighten that wrist. You are straining the tendons, and strained tendons at twenty become crippled hands at forty, and I will not have it said in any kitchen of mine that a girl of talent was ruined for want of being told to straighten her wrist.”
Jane straightened her wrist and pressed the curd with something close to tenderness. Mrs. Vale watched for the length of ten seconds and walked away without a word, which was how Jane learned the tenderness had been acceptable.
The afternoon brought a pastry lesson, three stations set along the main table with the same ingredients, the same tools, the same instructions. Bess took the first, and Ruth the second, and Jane the third.
“Three stations and one set of instructions,” Ruth said quietly as they took their places. “She is comparing us, Miss Rennet, which she does perhaps twice a year. Do not let it rattle your hands. The hands are the first thing to go when a person knows they are being measured.”
“Then I shall pretend I am at home over my mother’s table and being measured by no one.”
“That is the trick of it exactly,” Ruth said, and said no more.
“Lemon tartlets,” Mrs. Vale said. “Curd from this morning, pastry from your own hands, and the presentation is your concern and not mine. You have one hour, and I should not need to tell grown women to begin.”
“Are we to know what we are being judged against?” Bess asked.
“You are being judged against each other and against my standard, Bess, which is higher than either of you, so the comparison need not trouble you overmuch. His Grace will taste them when they are done, and he will not be told whose is whose, and you will each discover what your hands are worth when no name is attached to defend them. Begin.”
Jane worked. The curd was sharper than the one she would have made at home, the butter richer, the flour finer, and every adjustment she made to her mother’s method reminded her she was working in a kitchen pitched higher than her hands had yet wholly learned.
“Left hand leading on the crimp, Miss Rennet,” Mrs. Vale said in passing, for the fourth time that week. “Your right wants to take over and your right has no taste.”
“My right has begun to resent being told so, Mrs. Vale.”
“Your right may resent whatever it wishes, so long as it obeys.” She moved on down the table. “Resentment is permitted in my kitchen. Poor crimping is not.”
Jane crimped the shells left hand leading and set them on the board with what grace her unsteady fingers would allow, because the kitchen had gone quiet in the way it always went quiet when someone of consequence was approaching.
***
Thomas came in through the far door.
He wore the dark coat, which Jane had begun to suspect was less a garment than a settled condition of the man, and he moved through the kitchen at the unhurried pace of someone who understood that his presence altered the air of a room and preferred to alter it as little as he could.
“He has come to taste,” Bess murmured at her station, low and not quite kind. “He does not come down for everyone’s pastry, Miss Rennet. Mind you remember that before your vanity gets the better of you.”
“I shall try to keep my pride from puffing up, Bess, though I make no promises about the pastry.”
Mrs. Vale set the three boards before him on the tasting table without a word, without labels, without the smallest sign of which tartlets belonged to whom, and the kitchen held its breath, or Jane held hers, and which of the two it was did not seem worth deciding.
He looked at the three boards, and then he reached for Jane’s.
“You have not told me whose is whose,” he observed to Mrs. Vale, not quite a question.
“I have not, Your Grace, and I will not, since a man’s judgement is only worth the having when he does not know in advance whom he is judging.” Mrs. Vale folded her hands. “Choose as you find them.”
“I have chosen.” He had picked up the third board, with no marking to guide him and nothing to set it apart but some quality of the pastry or the curd that Jane, watching from her station, could not herself have named, and she could not have said whether his hand had gone to it by instinct or by accident.
He tasted the tartlet. The room had gone quiet enough that she could hear the fire shift in the grate, and though his expression rarely moved in ways a person could read across a kitchen, his eyes travelled from the tartlet across the stations until they found her, and something in his face settled, and he held her gaze a moment that ran at a slower speed than the rest of the afternoon.