Delicious (13 page)

She’d giggled at this last. It had been a glorious day last summer. She’d made them a wonderful picnic, and they’d dined alfresco under a sky that was only a little less impossibly blue than her eyes—according to Bertie—and dotted with clouds of such pristine softness they could have been fluffs of eiderdown from God’s own duvet.

I think everybody is boring and dry and moralistic next to you,
her besotted self had told Bertie, Bertie with his generous capacity for pleasure, his golden good looks, and his assured handling of all the responsibilities that had been thrust upon him at such a young age.

But Bertie would turn out to be a horse’s behind; and Stuart Somerset, not at all boring, dry, or moralistic. No, he was heroic, modest, discerning, perfectly behaved, and—her cheeks warmed again—not half so prudish as Bertie would have her believe.

If we must.

Would you like to find out?

Why had she said the name of the inn so loudly, enough to carry three streets over?

Because she desired him. She recognized all the signs of impending infatuation: the awe, the yearning, the gathering of hopes.

As if her personal history hadn’t yet taught her enough about hanging all her hopes on one man, she began to—driven by her mounting hunger—systematically imagine Mr. Somerset’s arrival at her door, this very moment, an enormous tray floating magically before him.

On the tray—and because it was a magic tray after all—was everything that Verity could possibly want to eat. A plate of cold cuts. Vol-au-vent with a garniture of creamed seafood. Pâté baked in brioche. Fruits, both fresh from the orchard and incorporated into tarts, creams, and cakes.

Her mouth watered. Her stomach gnawed. From where she sat on the edge of the bed, her stockinged ankles crossed before her, she glanced at the door, unable to help herself.

Nothing.

She dropped her face into her hands and groaned at her hunger—she’d thought that by becoming a cook she’d at least never be hungry again—and at her untrammeled imagination—Mr. Somerset and the self-locomotive tray! What next, would he have a magic wand that made her clothes fly off too, so that she needn’t feel any responsibility for sleeping with him, since she really, really couldn’t help it?

Well, if her clothes had to fly off before a handsome stranger, tonight was not a bad time for it to happen: In her fluttered, disoriented state, she had yet to extract the sponge that she’d earlier lodged inside herself. She’d been mad to scheme on Mr. Somerset, but not so mad that she’d risk another pregnancy, no matter how remote the chance.

A knock came at her door. She looked up, almost sure it had been her mind playing tricks on her. The knock came again. This time every one of her muscles jumped at once.

“I’ve your tea, mum,” said a woman’s voice. The innkeeper’s wife.

She had not ordered tea. But now that tea was miraculously here, she certainly wasn’t about to turn it down. She scrambled off the bed, yanked her door open, and dropped her jaw in happy wonder.

It was a miracle indeed. The tray was huge and the tea service occupied only a third of it. The rest held roast beef, smoked salmon, toasted cheese, boiled eggs, bread and butter, and even a few slices of rich-smelling queen cake.

She followed the innkeeper’s wife to the table, where the latter set down the tray. “How—”
How did you know I would have given a whole crown for high tea at this hour, kind woman?

Then she noticed that the innkeeper’s wife had brought two teacups and two sets of cutlery.

Her head swung around. Stuart Somerset stood just inside the door, his hair and eyes very black, his shirt very white against skin bronzed from nearly a decade on the Subcontinent.

He took in her modest room—mullioned window, bare floor, dark wainscoting that came to her shoulder. His gaze skimmed over her old valise, her muddy galoshes, and her nightgown spread over the rather surprisingly spacious bed.

Their eyes met. There was such a singular purpose to his that she had to look away almost immediately.

The innkeeper’s wife curtsied to both of them—she hadn’t curtsied to Verity before. He stepped aside to let the woman and her empty tray pass. The door closed softly behind her.

Her wistful, hearts-and-flowers fantasy withered in the harshness of reality. She might be a woman of ghastly moral turpitude, but she still knew a grave insult when she encountered one. For him to intrude upon her without permission, at this resolutely indecent hour…She owed him much, but not this much.

But because she did owe him, she held her silence, to give him a chance to apologize. Perhaps he did not realize the magnitude of his breach of etiquette. Perhaps.

He gave her nothing of the sort. “Won’t you pour?” he said, inclining his head toward the tea service. She didn’t move. He walked past her to the table, and poured for them both. “Sugar? Milk?”

She shook her head, turning down his offer of tea altogether, but he brought the black tea to her instead. “I won’t make myself any more welcome than you’ll permit me,” he said.

She looked down at the cup and saucer that had somehow ended up between her hands—clutched in fingers prickling at the tips with a hot numbness. He returned to the table and began to load an empty plate.

“Why are you here?”

“I think we both know why I’m here.” He glanced at her. “The question is, rather, how long you’ll let me stay and what liberties you might allow me.”

“None. I should think that much is obvious,” she said stiffly. Had she sunk so low that a virtual stranger would assume that she was his for the asking—and a tray of tea? “I’m afraid you have wasted your time and your bribes.”

“This is not a bribe,” he said. He crossed what little distance separated them, took away her untouched tea, and pressed the laden plate into her hands. “I don’t like the way Wicked Stepmother has been feeding you. And I haven’t wasted my time. I wanted to see you again and now I have.”

There was a gravitas to him that made the most ridiculous declarations ring with truth and authority. “I’m not so easily persuaded by pretty words that you have likely scattered across the length and breadth of London.”

“I’m sure you will not believe me, but I lead a somewhat spartan existence, as far as glib womanizing is concerned. I’m usually far more interested in work than in the fairer sex.”

“Are you? And are you also a very convincing liar?” How else could he have achieved the innkeeper’s acquiescence—indeed, cooperation?

He looked full at her. “When required, yes.”

“I should like you to leave now.”

She used her kitchen voice, the one in which she spoke to her subordinates during working hours, the one that had held firm through both the jubilation of love and the despair of it.

It was obvious that he had not expected such unremitting firmness from her. He was surprised and disappointed—more than disappointed; the emotion that shadowed his eyes was deeper, rawer.

It shouldn’t matter to her that he was disappointed, or despondent even. But it did. Because of the swiftness with which he concealed it, the way one might hide a bruise that had been inflicted by a loved one.

“When you have eaten, I will leave,” he said evenly.

Again she couldn’t hold the weight of his gaze. “Do I have your word?” she managed.

“Of course.”

She began to eat. Her mouth was dry, her throat had closed. The food that she’d craved was hard to chew and even harder to swallow.

He broke off a piece of cake and studied it. “My mother worked in a mill when I was a child. We couldn’t always make ends meet. She was adamant that we must pay the rent and keep our room, so we forwent food sometimes—never for very long, never more than a day and a half for me, though I think sometimes she went for longer without.”

She stared at him. He did not look at her. “It was such a joy to eat then. The smells from pubs and chop shops would drive me into a frenzy. I would pass hours in a daze, dreaming of meat pies and a pudding bigger than my head.”

Is he a gastronome like yourself?

Who, Stuart? God, no. He hasn’t got a sense of taste any more than the Pygmies have a navy.

“Then I went to live with my father. From the day I entered his house, I never knew another moment of hunger. And never much cared for food again.”

“Never?” She couldn’t help her question, out of professional curiosity.

“Not once. The last time I had something good was the day my mother took me to my father. We got off at the village. She went into the general merchandiser’s and bought me a farthing of boiled sweet. I ate it all on the walk to my father’s estate—it was like sucking on God’s thumb.

“A few weeks later I went back to the same shop and bought a whole penny of the same thing. It was cloying, horrible—it tasted of anise. I couldn’t believe it. It had been so wonderful before.”

He shrugged. Something struck her in the chest, a blow, an arrow, a pain as lovely as a boiled sweet to a hungry child.

“I’m sure I sound ridiculous,” he said.

“When I was seventeen, I was at the end of my rope,” she said, her voice very distant, as if another person altogether was speaking, from miles away. “I had no money, no prospects, and no family, except a baby I loved desperately.

“One day, when he was four months old, I decided that I would take my baby to the zoo, because every child should have a trip to the zoo. And then I would take him to an orphanage and drown myself in the Thames.”

She’d never spoken to anyone else of that day, of her most desperate hour. Mostly she tried to shut away the memory—her escape had been too near, too much a thing of blind chance.

“I took him to every exhibit. He smiled and smiled, then he fell asleep. With my last bit of coin, I bought some treacle rock, determined to leave this world on a sweet note.

“It was the most awful thing I’d ever tasted. I started to cry outside the reptile house. I couldn’t face the thought of losing my baby. Or killing myself. Or becoming a common prostitute.”

The memory was all too clear now. The cold stone at her back. The taste in her mouth, as if she’d been chewing tar. Michael’s soft warmness against her chest. The blurred feet of the passersby. The children’s whispers. The governesses’ stern admonitions against staring—
Come along. Nothing to see here
—reducing her life’s tragedy to little more than a minor blight on the landscape. The bobby’s gruff voice, telling her to take her moaning elsewhere. And then, the voice of the girl, clear and cool as the water of an oasis.
Leave her be,
the girl said.

“A girl came to me. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. She took off her necklace—it was a gold-and-pearl necklace—and gave it to me.”

Verity’s amazement had not dimmed with the passing years—the weight of the necklace in her bare palm, the warmth it still retained of the girl’s skin, the strong squeeze of the girl’s gloved hand. She’d reminded Verity not to sell the necklace for less than ten pounds. Then she’d left, rejoining a disapproving-looking woman standing some distance away.

The necklace, Verity sold for ten pounds twelve shillings two pence. The money bought her time to think, time to get over her shame and squeamishness about work, time to locate Monsieur David and ask for his help. It bought the uniforms she needed to enter service and the beautiful baby clothes she’d sent along with Michael when Monsieur David found a good family for him on the estate where he’d last worked.

“The next morning, after I’d come out of the pawnshop, I bought a whole shilling’s worth of treacle rock to give to the children in the tenement house. There was a tiny bit of it left at the end and I put it into my mouth without thinking. It was the most marvelous thing I’d ever had. It tasted…” How did one describe the taste of a simple piece of confection that had been imbued with all the giddiness, incredulity, and gratitude that had made her soles elevate a little off the curb? “It tasted like hope.”

A smile slowly spread over his face, a smile of astonishing warmth for a man of his coolness. As if he, too, tasted hope. Her heart fluttered anew.

“I like your story,” he said softly. “What happened to your baby?”

“He was adopted by wonderful people, but I still see him every day.”

She’d worked hard to become expert enough to cook for the master of Fairleigh Park. And it had been worth it. On the fine May day she first set foot in Fairleigh Park, Michael had been running outside the gamekeeper’s cottage, a sturdy, beautiful child of three-and-a-half, enthusiastically dragging a half-torn kite through his adoptive mother’s much-abused flower bed. He’d stopped when he saw Verity watching him, and then, just as she’d hoped and been afraid to let herself hope, he’d come running toward her and hurled himself into her arms.

Three years had passed since she’d kissed him good-bye, weeping uncontrollably. He didn’t remember her name, or anything else about her. But he’d known instantly that she loved him.

“Lucky boy,” said Stuart Somerset.

He selected a boiled egg and rolled it against the plate, making spiderweb cracks in the shell with hardly a sound. His hands, she suddenly realized, very much resembled Bertie’s—fine, long-fingered hands meant for holding engraved fountain pens and a few cards after dinner.