Chapter Four #3
“This was a different thing, Jane.” Margaret’s voice carried an edge Jane had not heard from her since the week their mother lay too ill to bake and Margaret had run the ovens alone for seven days without once telling their father she was afraid.
“He made remarks about how quickly the Rennets had climbed in ducal favour. He used the word arrangement three separate times, and he looked at our bakery the way a man looks at a thing he has not yet decided whether to buy or to break.”
“Did he threaten anything outright?”
“Piers Garrick does not threaten outright. He implies, and then he waits, and then he lets the implication do the labour for him while his hands stay clean.” She dropped the rosemary and brushed her palms down her apron.
“I sent him off with nothing he did not arrive with. But I am telling you because you ought to know how your position here looks from the outside, and because Piers Garrick turning his attention to our bakery is not at all the same as him turning it to someone else’s. ”
“What do you think he wants?”
“I believe he wants to remind us who holds the deed to the building we bake in, and I think your being here has handed him a fresh way to frame the reminder.” Margaret met her eyes with the steady, unblinking directness that was the most formidable thing about her.
“None of which is a reason for you to leave. It is a reason for you to be careful what you hand people to talk about.”
“You sound like Papa, telling me the ovens are fine.”
“I sound like Papa because Papa is right more often than either of us likes to admit, and because the ovens are not always fine, and we both know the careful steadiness in his voice that arrives whenever they are not.” Margaret’s mouth tightened.
“Be careful, Jane. That is the truth of my errand, and I have ovens of my own to get back to.”
Jane watched her sister walk back toward the lane, and the warmth of the afternoon could not reach the cold feeling settling under her ribs, because Margaret was right.
The apprenticeship remaking her future could be turned, by the right man, into a lever against her family’s present, and the Garricks had held the deed to the building for two generations.
She worked until evening and said nothing of the visit, because the only person at Aldermere who could move against Piers Garrick was the duke, and she would not lay her family’s troubles at the feet of a man who had already given her more than she had any right to expect.
She would carry it herself, the way the Rennets carried things.
Lottie was still awake when Jane came up, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed with her hair already plaited, in the way of a sister who had been saving questions all evening.
“You have had a face on you since you came in,” Lottie said. “The good kind, which is worse, because you will not tell me what put it there. Did something transpire at the great house?”
“The duke tasted my tartlets and said they were the best on the table.” Jane sat to unlace her boots. “That is the whole of it, so you may stop looking at me as though I have run off and entered into matrimony with him.”
“That is not the whole of it, because nobody comes home glowing over a tartlet. What did he say, exactly?”
“He said it was excellent, and that it held when the others broke, and then he looked at me across the kitchen rather longer than a man looks at pastry.” Jane heard her own voice go careful and disliked it.
“And Whitlock told me he hardly ever says it, and I have decided not to think about that at all, and you are not helping me keep that resolution.”
“I have no intention of assisting you,” Lottie said cheerfully, and lay back.
“It is far too interesting, and I have been starved of anything interesting since the curate stopped coming round. A duke who looks at my sister rather longer than a man looks at pastry is the most interesting thing to happen in Millcombe in a year, and I intend to enjoy every moment of it whether you permit me to or not.”
“You will enjoy it quietly, then, and you will say nothing to Mother, who would have me wedded and installed at Aldermere by Sunday on the strength of a single tartlet.”
“I shall say nothing to Mother,” Lottie agreed, “which is a far greater sacrifice than you appear to understand, and you will owe me for it for years.”
When the candle had been blown out and Lottie’s breathing had gone slow and even across the room, Jane lay a while in the dark, and then she rose, and by the last of the dying wick she tore a narrow strip from the edge of her recipe book and wrote on it, in her neatest hand, the thing he had said to her over the tartlets.
She folded the paper once, and twice, and a third time, until it was small enough to hide in the spine of the book where no one would think to look, and told herself that keeping a duke’s praise on a scrap of paper was the most ridiculous thing she had done in a life that had lately included setting herself alight in his kitchen.
She was quite right about that, and she kept it regardless, and slept with the book beneath her pillow, and felt thoroughly ridiculous about that too.