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Dearest Lizzy,

 

My goodness me, what a long memory you have. All right, you naughty girl, here it is—though I really shouldn’t even mention any such thing to an unmarried young lady.

Mr. Marsden was caught with his professor.
In flagrante delicto.

Oh, dear, merely writing those words makes me a bit light-headed. I don’t know if you’ve met him—why are you interested all of a sudden?—but what a darling, beautiful boy he was in those days. I was a bit in love with him myself. Imagine my shock when I learned the truth!

There, now I’ve discharged my oath. You must write me back soon and tell me all about the engagement, or I shall never forgive you for making me find out in the papers first.

The twins won’t stop coshing each other with handy objects. I can only hope they’ll be able to tolerate as much pain when they grow up.

Love,
Georgette

Lizzy whistled.
In flagrante delicto.
With his
professor.
Oh, dear indeed. This was much worse—and much better—than anything she could have imagined.

Would people living in glass houses never stop throwing rocks? For him to try to endanger her engagement because he thought she had Sapphic inclinations! Truly, she’d have expected some solidarity instead.

But now she knew his dark little secret. A rich, delicious secret. She smiled and imagined how she would amuse herself when he arrived at her house on the morrow to help with her nuptial campaign. Imagined his surprise, dismay, and fear, because now she had the absolute upper hand.

No wonder he used to regard her with such dirty glee. She was quite in the mood to rake him over with that same knowing, salacious look.

But as she practiced the perfect arch sneer, she was aware of a different and more disturbing response. She felt let down. Disappointed. She supposed that she had implicitly assumed Mr. Marsden’s antagonism to be fueled at least in part by a frustrated attraction to
her.

Old habits died hard. Some part of her—the part that used to be able to ferry a man from across a ballroom with one look—still persisted in thinking of herself as irresistible, her glances and smiles as perilous as daggers and quicksands.

Oh, well. Oh, the vanity.

Stuart’s town house, like any other self-respecting urban domicile in Britain, did its very best not to smell of food, even though it did not have the luxury of separating the kitchen from the main dwelling, an advantage of the country house. Instead, the kitchen was relegated to the basement, with both the kitchen door and the green baize door that led to the basement shut tight at all times. Food served to the master was never carried about in the open, but only via the service stairs or the dumbwaiter that connected the kitchen with the dining room.

So it was impossible for Stuart, sitting in the tranquillity of his study, to smell anything other than the still-drying ink on his notes and the cup of cold coffee sitting on his desk. But he did, and had been for hours.

Fried sole, golden and perfect. Roasted venison, tender and gamy. A dish of potato, rich with butter and cream. And, of course, a tremendous dessert, something dramatic, bourbon flames over forbidden fruit.

He’d managed to work, but he’d been on the edge of outright restlessness. As the clock struck quarter past one, he capped his pen, blotted his notes one last time, and rose.

But instead of climbing up two stories to bed, he pushed open the heavy green baize door and went down into the basement. He made this trip often enough, a candlestick in hand, for a quick bite of something to eat when he worked late and the rest of the household was long abed.

Usually his kitchen smelled of dampness and inexpertly roasted joints. Tonight it smelled like a hungry beggar’s dream: yeast, herbs and aromatics, simmering meaty broth, and a curl of sweetness around the edge of the warm humidity.

He set down the candlestick and switched on the gas lamp. The small kitchen was more or less the same, yet altogether different. Someone had cracked a hard whip, for he’d never seen the place so spotless; even the narrow slats of usually blurry windows, set high in the wall and looking out to the surface of the road, glistened like a newborn’s eyes.

The disheveled collection of pots and pans on the dresser had been replaced by heavy cast-iron skillets and gleaming copper molds. The stoves, otherwise cold at this hour of the night, heated not one but two stockpots of broth. On the narrow worktable at the center of the kitchen rested a large round bowl, containing a spongy-looking piece of rising dough covered by a moist towel—Mrs. Abercromby, an admittedly weak baker, preferred to purchase bread from a nearby bakery.

In the holding cabinet where leftovers from the servants’ dinner were kept, there was no fried sole, no roasted venison, no gratinéed potatoes or flambéed fruit. His imagination had indeed been getting the better of him. Instead, there was a small beef pie baked in its own ramekin, stewed celery, and a modest portion of apple suet pudding—humble foods, and emphatically not French.

He broke off a piece of the beef pie’s crust. It melted in his mouth, crispy, flaky, its underside moist with flecks of a perfect gravy that made all the other gravies he’d ever had in his life seem either as heavy as macadam or as thin and listless as the heroine of a gothic novel.

He closed his eyes as the flavors rippled. Before Madame Durant, he couldn’t remember the last time sensual enjoyment so overtook him, and so powerfully focused his attention on the corporeal side of his existence.

Trying a piece of the stewed celery, he sighed again. She had a marvelous touch with vegetables.

He ate half of the beef pie, most of the stewed celery, and all of the suet pudding—it was simple, homey, and welcome, like the sight of a cottage with smoke rising from its chimney to a traveler who’d been lost days in the wilds.

And therein lay the danger of Madame Durant and her cooking—not that it was delectable, but that it was evocative, and made him think far beyond food. The rediscovery of taste was as perilous as he’d feared it would be, rousing other dormant, dangerous longings for everything he did not have, everything he’d hoped to hold dear and could not.

Her, of course; her always. His mother, who promised him that she would visit often and never did. His brother, who’d once been a brother, not an enemy. All loved, all lost, all gone, leaving only him to remember them in the dead of the night, hungry no matter how much he ate.

Chapter Eleven

A
s Lizzy’s afternoon would be taken up receiving calls of congratulations, Mr. Marsden came in the morning. She took great care with her toilette and selected an especially fetching gown. She told herself it was because she always felt more powerful when she looked more beautiful—only to be peeved when he sat down to business with scarcely a glance at her.

“I’d like for us to divide the tasks today,” said he. On the index finger of his right hand, he wore a heavy gold ring in the shape of a lion’s head. The lion had rubies for eyes. “I’m sure the last thing either of us wanted is to work in duplicate.”

“Certainly not,” Lizzy said.

No, the last thing either of them wanted was to be revealed for who they were beneath the facades they presented.

“I’ve made a preliminary list of items needing attention.” He pulled out a longish list. “I assume that you’ll wish to take in hand matters pertaining to your gown, your trousseau, and your personal ornamentation.”

“Quite so.”

“And I assume you’ll want to delegate the wedding breakfast to Madame Durant? There is no other cook to rival her in all of England, unless it is Monsieur Escoffier of the Savoy perhaps.”

Did she hear an odd inflection in his voice? The last time he’d mentioned Madame Durant, it had been in conjunction with the innuendo that Lizzy might like to bed the somewhat notorious woman.

“I’m amenable to the idea, but I will need to approve of the menu.”

“I will make your wishes known to Madame Durant. And ask whether she can take on the wedding cake too.” He uncapped a pen and jotted down a few words. The ruby eyes of the golden lion glittered as he scratched away. “St. George, Hanover Square for the wedding?”

“Yes.”

The church was just down St. George Street, a stone’s throw away. Her family had been in attendance for generations.

“I’ll have a date reserved. Banns or license?”

“License, of course.” Everyone who was anyone married by special license.

Mr. Marsden made further notations.

From the public gallery, she’d watched Stuart give speeches in the House of Commons—Stuart at work was very much the same man he was at leisure, thoughtful and measured. Mr. Marsden, however, was a different man altogether.

There was nothing here that would hint at either the dirty smiles of her antagonist or the charming chattiness of the young aristocrat so well embraced by her father. Even his awareness of her, otherwise a suffocating constant like a corset laced overtight, had been subsumed in his absolute concentration.

“I will take care of that,” he said. “You will prefer to choose the stationery and the flowers?”

His face was smooth, perfectly shaven, no missed patches, no nicks or cuts. He couldn’t possibly afford a gentleman’s gentleman on his wages, so he must have shaved himself, standing before a mirror in his under-shirt.

With something that was almost a shudder she realized that she had no problem at all imagining him in
dishabille.

“Miss Bessler?”

“I’m sorry. What did you say again?”

The glance he cast her was one of faint disapproval, much as a schoolmaster would look upon an absentminded pupil. “The flowers and—”

“Yes, I would. The flowers and the stationery, that is.”

And so they went down the list, Lizzy now fully alert and vigilant against any unruly caprices of her mind.

“That is everything I have,” he said, at the end of forty-five minutes.

They’d been extremely efficient. He was thorough and thoroughly organized. But she was not in the habit of ceding anything to him. “I’m surprised you’ve made no mention of the decorations. Surely something more than a few floral arrangements is required.”