Chapter Twelve #2
Thomas kneaded for another thirty minutes.
By the end, the dough was passable, which meant it could be baked without embarrassing the oven, though Margaret’s expression suggested it would not be offered to paying customers.
Thomas’s coat was dusted with flour. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow.
His hands were covered in the evidence of honest, persistent failure.
William took the dough and shaped it, in four quick motions, into a loaf that bore no resemblance to anything Thomas had produced. The four motions were so practised and effortless that they made Thomas’s hour of effort look spectacularly inadequate.
“That will take me another thirty years,” Thomas said.
“At least. But you will enjoy the practice.”
Jane’s mother reappeared bearing a plate of freshly sliced bread from the morning’s first baking, warm and golden-crusted.
She set it before Thomas with the quiet determination of a woman who had judged her future son-in-law’s altogether too slight of frame, and who fully intended to remedy his deficiency by the immediate application of wholesome sustenance.
“Eat,” she said.
“I have not finished kneading the.”
“Eat. The dough will wait. Mothers do not.”
Thomas ate. The bread was excellent, because William’s bread was always excellent, and Thomas ate it with the focused attention he gave to everything, tasting each bite with the deliberate appreciation of a man who was cataloguing flavour the way he catalogued everything.
“This is very good,” Thomas said.
“It is bread,” William said. “It is not meant to be very good. It is meant to be reliable.”
“Reliability is its own form of excellence.”
William looked at him. The look lasted a long time, the evaluation of a man who had been assessing the structural integrity of a new arrangement and who was finding the structure sound.
“You will come again,” William said. “Next week. The dough needs practice, and practice requires repetition.”
“I will come again.”
“And bring different shoes. Those are for drawing rooms, not flour.”
“I will bring different shoes.”
“My name is William, when you are in this kitchen,” he added, “since a man who has kneaded my dough badly for an afternoon has earned that much.” The offering of the name landed between them, the same threshold Thomas had crossed in the parlour when he gave Jane his own name before she was ready to use it, except that William attached no conditions to it, because William Rennet did not attach conditions to the things he gave, whether bread or names.
“William,” Thomas said, and the use of it was its own kind of acceptance.
“Splendid. Now go home and rest your hands, and come back next week when they have stopped aching, and we will see whether a duke can be taught to fold a loaf without bruising it.”
“I should like that,” Thomas said, and meant it.
Margaret appeared with a cloth and handed it to Thomas without comment. The cloth was for his hands. Thomas wiped the dough from his fingers, and Margaret watched the wiping with the evaluative expression she applied to all kitchen procedures.
“Adequate,” Margaret said.
“I have been told that word before. From Mrs. Vale.”
“Mrs. Vale and I share certain standards.”
“The county should be grateful you have not yet joined forces.”
“The county would not survive it,” Margaret said, and the corner of her mouth moved in a direction that, on a less disciplined face, would have been a smile.
Jane accompanied Thomas to the door. The afternoon light was warm and the bakery smelled of bread and flour and the deep, settled heat that comes from ovens that have been working since dawn.
Thomas stood in the doorway with flour on his coat and his sleeves rolled and the old guardedness back in place, though it sat more lightly on him than it had when he arrived.
“Your father is an excellent teacher,” Thomas said.
“My father is an excellent man.”
“I know. I knew it before today. But today he taught me something I did not expect to learn.”
“What was that?”
“That competence is not required for acceptance. He did not need me to be good at bread. He needed me to try.”
Jane’s eyes met his. The truth of his words was so absolute, capturing the very essence of her father as she would have painted him in a single breath, that she was struck with wonder to hear it from someone whose acquaintance with him numbered a mere handful of hours.
“He approved of you,” Jane murmured. “He would not have used the word ‘again’ had you not found favor with him.”
“You observed it, then?”
“I observe everything about the word ‘again,’ Thomas. It is the word that taught me you were paying attention.”
Thomas looked at her. The flour on his coat caught the afternoon light, and his expression held the open, unguarded quality she had seen in the library on the rainy afternoon, the quality that meant his composure had been set aside rather than removed, because setting aside was a choice and removing was a loss, and Thomas always chose.
“Ten days,” he said.
“Ten days.”
“I will practice the bread before then.”
“You should practice the bread for the rest of your life, Thomas. It needs the work.”
“Everything worth doing needs the work.”
“That sounds like something my father would say.”
“Your father said it, approximately forty minutes ago, and I am shamelessly borrowing it.”
“Borrowed clumsily, then.”
“Borrowed in earnest, which you have taught me is the only kind that counts.”
Jane watched him walk to the gig with the flour still on his coat, white traces of an afternoon he had spent failing at something in front of people who were watching, and he made no move to brush a speck of it away.
A man who weighed every word he spoke had walked out of her family’s bakery wearing the evidence of his own incompetence as though it were a decoration he had earned, and she understood that he would come back next week and the week after, and that the bread would get better by slow and clumsy degrees, and that his efforts and his willingness to return, was the whole of what he had been offering her since the morning he caught a falling basket and said nothing at all.
“He left flour on the gig,” Margaret observed, coming to stand beside her in the doorway. “On the leather. He will never get it out.”
“No,” Jane agreed, watching the carriage turn down the lane. “I do not think he means to try.”