Chapter Eighteen
The sabotage announced itself in stages.
The flour delivery arrived damp. The flour was not ruined outright, only damp in a way that suggested exposure to water during transport.
The sugar had been opened and resealed, leaving the granules clumped.
Margaret’s shaping tool, the one she had used since she was sixteen, was missing from its hook.
A strange labourer was seen by the back door by Lottie, who apprised William of the matter; however, when he went to look, the man had vanished.
“Carelessness,” Margaret said, though her mouth was tight.
Jane was not sure. One problem was carelessness. Two was misfortune. Three was a pattern, and patterns had authors.
The next mishap involved the oven flue.
The back vent, which drew smoke from the main oven and expelled it through the chimney, had been mysteriously blocked.
The blockage was at a point inside the flue where soot and wadded fabric had been packed into the opening.
The chimney failed to draw, causing the smoke to back up into the oven.
The temperature rose past what the dough could tolerate, until the loaves were quite burnt to a cinder, filling the bake house with a dense, choking smoke in mere moments.
The smoke was dark and chemical and smelled of something that did not belong in a bakery. Later, Thomas would identify the chemical smell as lamp oil, applied to the wadding in the flue, designed to burn fast and produce maximum smoke. In the moment, Jane did not identify anything. She acted.
“Everyone out of the bakehouse this instant,” Margaret shouted.
Jane grabbed Sam. The boy was coughing uncontrollably and his eyes were streaming with tears that stung.
Jane lifted him off his feet and carried him through the back door into the yard.
Lottie followed with the proving baskets, which she had grabbed by instinct because Lottie’s instinct in a crisis was to save whatever was nearest. William was at the oven, pulling bread with bare hands.
Jane’s mother appeared from the front with a bucket of water and the focused expression of a woman who had been managing crises for thirty years.
The bakehouse was filling with smoke. Jane could see the glow through the back window where the oven temperature had pushed the coals beyond their normal range. The wood beside the oven was dry. If the temperature held, the wood would catch, and if the wood caught, the bakehouse wall would follow.
Amidst all the commotion, Thomas arrived.
He came through the back door at a run, and Jane had never once seen him run, and the sight of it alarmed her almost as much as the smoke did, because Thomas Bennister did not run.
He had left the supply cart on the lane the moment the smoke showed, and covered the distance at a speed that suggested all his years of controlled composure had been, underneath, a lid held down over a great deal of physical capacity.
“The vent is blocked,” Jane told him. “Something is in the flue.”
Thomas did not hesitate. He stripped his coat and entered the bakehouse and worked beside William to clear the vent. The work was physical and urgent and entirely without the careful composure he wore in every other situation. He took orders from Margaret.
“Thomas, water on the back wall, and quickly.”
“Margaret, the flue is the source, you would do better to.”
“Do not ‘Margaret’ me in my own bakehouse. Water. The wall. Go.”
Thomas obeyed at once, reflexively, and Jane stood in the yard with Sam under one arm and watched her husband take orders from her sister and understood that this was what partnership looked like when there was no time left over for manners.
The circle of it was not lost on her. He had once pulled her out of a fire in his own kitchen, and here he was helping to put one out in hers, the rescuer turned willing hand, taking instruction without a flicker of complaint.
Eventually the fire had been extinguished and fortunately the bakehouse had not been destroyed.
The damage was serious as the walls had been blackened and the oven was in dire need of repair.
But the building stood, and the people inside it were unhurt, and the assembly order could still be filled if they used Aldermere’s kitchens as Margaret had planned.
They stood in the yard afterward, all of them, smoke-stained and exhausted.
William sat on the step with his head in his hands.
Jane’s mother stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder.
Lottie held Sam, whose eyes were wide but dry.
Margaret leaned against the wall and stared at the bakery with the expression of a woman calculating damage and planning recovery simultaneously.
Thomas was in the bakehouse. He had gone back inside after the fire was out, moving through the wreckage with methodical attention. When he emerged, he was holding something in his palm.
“Jane, come and look at this.”
She crossed the yard. He opened his hand. Upon his palm rested a small brass button, stamped with a stag’s head crest. Jane had seen the crest before. She had seen it on Piers Garrick’s coat.
“He was here,” Jane said.
“Someone was here. Someone blocked the vent, dampened the flour, took Margaret’s tool, and applied lamp oil to the wadding. The button places Piers, or someone wearing his coat, inside the bakehouse before the fire.”
Jane looked at the button. The brass was warm from Thomas’s hand. The stag’s head stared up with the blind expression of a heraldic animal that did not care what had been done in its name.
“This was not an accident,” Jane said.
“It was nothing of the kind, and we both know whose crest that is.”
“The destruction was done by design.”
“This was the third stage.” Thomas closed his hand around the button. His voice was quiet and certain and carried the weight of a man who had finished waiting. “And it is the last.”
***
“You are not dressed for this,” Margaret said.
Thomas looked at his coat. Margaret was right.
He was not dressed for cleaning ash from a bakehouse, which was what the morning required, because the bakehouse was still standing but the bakehouse was not usable, and the distance between standing and usable was measured in soot and water damage and the acrid smell of a building that had nearly burned and was reminding everyone of the nearly through every surface and every breath.
“I will manage,” Thomas said.
“You will ruin your coat.”
“The coat is not important.”
Margaret observed him with an eye of sharp appraisal, a look that characteristically marked her every interaction with society.
The look assessed his coat, his shoes, his composure, and his sincerity in approximately the same amount of time it took her to assess a batch of proving dough, and the assessment apparently found him acceptable, because she handed him a bucket and a brush without further comment.
“Back wall first. The soot is thickest there. Scrub downward, not in circles. Circles spread the residue.”
“Downward. Not circles.”
“If you need water, the pump is in the yard. Do not use the indoor pump until the pipes have been checked.”
Thomas took the bucket and the brush and went to the back wall, and Jane watched him go, the grey morning light on the Duke of Aldermere as he carried a bucket into a bakehouse to scrub the soot of Piers Garrick’s arson from the stone.
What mattered most was that no one had asked him to do so, but it was of his own accord.
He was quieter today, though it was a different quiet from the controlled, disciplined silence of the years before Jane.
It was the quiet of a man who had opened a door the night before and let years of grief out through it, and who was now resting in the space the grief had left behind, a space that felt empty and tender and new, and he moved through it carefully, the way a person moves through a room where the furniture has been shifted and the feet have not yet learned the new positions.
Jane’s family was already working. William had arrived before dawn and begun the assessment with the practical attention he brought to everything.
The oven needed rebricking on the left side and the back wall needed scrubbing and repainting.
The vent needed clearing and the flue needed replacing entirely, because the wadding and the lamp oil had damaged the interior lining beyond repair.
The assessment took two hours and produced a list that Margaret wrote on the back of a flour order in her precise, compressed hand.
The list was long but not devastating. The bakery could be restored in two weeks if the work began today, and the work was beginning today because Margaret had decided it was beginning today and Margaret’s decisions on matters of bakery operation were not subject to review.
Jane tied an apron over her dress and took her place beside her mother at the proving table.
Her mother was not cleaning. Her mother was baking, because the standing weekly orders did not stop for fires and the customers who depended on Rennet’s bread did not care whether the bakehouse had nearly burned. They cared whether the bread arrived.
“Your mother should rest,” Thomas said, appearing at the doorway with soot on his hands and concern on his face.
“You may suggest that to her directly, if you wish.”
“I do not wish. I value my continued existence.”
“A wise position.”
Thomas returned to the wall. Jane could hear the brush scrubbing, steady and rhythmic, the sound of a man applying physical effort to a problem he could not solve with money or silence or arrangement.
The sound was satisfying in a way she had not expected, because it was the sound of Thomas doing something he was not good at, in a place that was not his, for people who had not asked him to.