Chapter Four #2
“Excellent,” he said, and then, when she had braced herself for nothing further, he added, “the best on this table by some distance. The crust on the others broke under the spoon. This one held.”
The kitchen stilled. From another man the words would have passed unremarked, but from one who spent each as though words were a coin he could ill afford, they landed differently, and Jane’s face went warm and her hands went still over a response so far out of proportion to its cause that being aware of it did her no good at all.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she managed, and her voice came out level, a small victory she intended to celebrate later when there were fewer people to witness it.
“And these two?” Mrs. Vale asked, indicating the first and second boards.
He tasted each, and nodded at each, and to neither did he say a word resembling what he had said to Jane.
“Both are sound. Neither is the third.” He set down the spoon, and the silence after the first and second drew a line beneath what he had given the third that every soul in the kitchen could see, Bess included, whose knife had stopped moving altogether.
Ruth, who had the good sense to be unreadable at moments of household significance, went on washing her hands at the basin and did not glance up.
“Adequate,” Mrs. Vale announced to the room at large, gathering the boards with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had witnessed the whole exchange and filed it under a heading she was not yet ready to name aloud, which was her way of restoring an order she had not authorised anyone to disturb.
Thomas departed the kitchen, and a collective sigh of relief seemed to restore the room to its usual energy.
Jane returned to her station and cleaned her tools, and when Whitlock arrived at three with the tea and a smile suggesting he was charitably withholding a number of opinions, she drank it and said little. Bess was listening attentively while Mrs Vale sat quietly observing the scene before her.
“He doesn’t say that often, you know,” Whitlock said, leaning against the doorframe with the studied carelessness of a man about to say something he very much wanted to appear accidental.
“That word. He doesn’t give it out, to anyone, about anything.
Five years I have been here, and I could count the times on one hand and have fingers to spare, and the better part of them were about horses. ”
“I am flattered to be ranked among the horses, Whitlock.”
“You ought to be, Miss Rennet. He thinks very highly of his horses, and very highly of very little else.” He let that sit, then ruined his own gravity with a grin.
“I have known him praise a hunter and a hayrick and, on one extraordinary occasion, the new drainage in the south meadow. I have never once known him cross a kitchen to do it.”
“Perhaps he was simply passing through the kitchen, Whitlock, on his way to inspect some further drainage.”
“He has no drainage on the kitchen side of the house, Miss Rennet, which I know because I have carried his correspondence about every ditch on this estate for five years. There is nothing on that side of the house worth a duke’s close attention.
There was nothing, I should say, until quite recently. ”
“You are looking at me, Whitlock,” Jane said, “as though you expect me to make some confession, and I have nothing whatever to confess except that I make a respectable lemon tartlet.”
“I expect nothing of the sort, Miss Rennet, I am merely a man delivering tea and observing the weather.” He paused at the doorframe.
“Though I will say the weather in this kitchen has been a good deal warmer since you arrived in it, and I am not speaking of the ovens, and I shall now leave before you ask me what I mean, because I have not the smallest idea and would only embarrass us both.”
There was a brief warm moment in which both of them understood the conversation had not, at any point, been about horses, and that neither intended to say so.
Then he gathered his tray and went, and Jane was left at her station with clean tools and a feeling in her chest she had no practical use for and no intention whatever of throwing away.
***
Over the following days, small comforts began to appear, and by the end of the week Jane had stopped Mrs. Croft on the evening round to account for them.
“There is a glass of lemon water beside the pastry table every morning before I arrive,” she said.
“On Tuesday I took it for an accident. By Thursday it held exactly two slices and never three, which is the number I mentioned once, to you, in passing. A hook on the apron rack mended itself overnight. The lane to the lower gate has been gravelled so it no longer eats my shoes. And there is a list of French cooking terms tucked in my recipe book, in a hand I cannot place, and I know every hand in this house. I should like to know whom to thank.”
“I could not say, Miss Rennet.” Mrs. Croft folded a napkin she had no reason to fold. “A great many things arrive in this house without anyone owning to them, and I have found it wiser, over the years, not to enquire too closely into the ones that do no harm.”
“Two slices and never three is not the work of a woman who declines to enquire, Mrs. Croft. It is the work of someone who listened very carefully to a remark I have no memory of making to anyone but you.”
“Then perhaps someone enquired on your behalf, and perhaps I am not the only person in this house with ears.” Her expression arranged itself into layers, the topmost a pleasant agreement, the lower ones suggesting she could have said a very great deal more and had chosen, out of professional restraint, to say none of it.
“I would not refuse the water on the grounds of not knowing its source. It is a poor sort of pride that goes thirsty to make a point.”
“And the hand I cannot place? You might as well tell me whether it belongs to a man or a woman.”
“I might, Miss Rennet, though I am inclined to find that I will not.”
“You are enjoying this a great deal, Mrs. Croft, for a woman who claims to know nothing whatever about any of it.”
“I am enjoying it more than I have enjoyed anything since Michaelmas, which I shall also decline to explain.” Mrs. Croft tucked the napkin beneath her arm and moved to continue her round.
“There is one hand in this house you have not yet learned, and I would not dream of teaching it to you before its owner sees fit. I bid you a good night, and do drink the water. It would grieve me to pour it out.”
She left Jane standing with the question still in her mouth, which was, Jane suspected, exactly the effect she had intended, and the failure to name the unfamiliar hand produced a feeling Jane chose not to look at directly, because looking would have led her somewhere she was not yet prepared to arrive.
Margaret came on a Thursday. She appeared at the kitchen door during the afternoon rest, in her working clothes with flour still at her cuffs, having come straight from the bakery without stopping to change, which told Jane that whatever had brought her could not keep until evening.
“Walk with me,” Margaret said, and Jane untied her apron and followed her into the kitchen garden, where the herbs grew in rows so exact they might have been planted by a woman with a ruler and a grievance against asymmetry.
“Piers Garrick came to the bakery this morning.”
Jane’s stomach tightened. “What did he want?”
“Information, dressed up as conversation, which is the only suit he owns. He asked about your arrangement here, his word and not mine, and he wished to know how the position had come about, who had written the letter, and whether the duke had made the offer himself or sent it through his household.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“That the household had written to our parents, that the terms were professional in every particular, and that if he wished to enquire any further he was most welcome to put his questions to Mrs. Croft, who would be delighted to explain to him the difference between an apprenticeship and whatever it was he had clearly spent the morning imagining.” Margaret pulled a sprig of rosemary from the nearest row and turned it in her fingers. “He was not satisfied.”
“He is never satisfied. That is hardly news.”