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Verity lived, as did most of the servants, in the higher reaches of the manor. As befitting an upper servant in a position of authority, her dwelling consisted of a parlor and a bedchamber. The rooms were small, but her sheets were not on display the moment she opened her door, and the parlor allowed her to accommodate the other upper servants for tea and an occasional game of cards.

In her thirteen years at Fairleigh Park, she’d made these rooms, spare and dowdy when she first arrived, into a comfortable, pretty home for herself. The rose silk-upholstered divan on which she sat, listening to Dickie relay Mr. Somerset’s request, had come to her when Bertie had changed the decor in the solarium. His offer of the divan, along with two dainty end tables and a walnut escritoire, had flattered and fluttered her, presaging the day he would suddenly kiss her as they discussed the relative merits of sauce soubise and sauce béarnaise.

The rest of her parlor matched the furniture in gentility. The wallpaper, silver fleurs-de-lis on an expanse of azure, was good enough to grace the drawing room of a prosperous London merchant. Her carpet, a more profound blue than the wallpaper, had been weaved by Turkish girls who must now be in their dotage. On the console table by the door, beneath an oval antique mirror just big enough for her face, bloomed a vase of snowdrops that the head gardener had brought her in exchange for a batch of her madeleines, whispered to be as delicious as the first day of spring and twice as seductive.

She wanted Dickie to leave, so she could pluck all the petals from the flowers and crush everything to a black pulp with her bare hands.

She hadn’t been so livid in years. She’d certainly never imagined it possible for her to be angry at
him,
she who’d only ever thought of him with the fervent devotion laid at the feet of a beautiful saint.

Perhaps she was more enraged at herself, for her abysmal failure, for believing that she’d achieved sorcery and enchantment enough to release him from the spell that bound him, and made him taste only in shades of gray.

She tried to take refuge in rationality. If he didn’t like her food, then he didn’t like it. It wasn’t personal. None of this was personal. And of course he hadn’t meant to saddle her with the making of a sandwich; the request only came to her because of her own long-standing insistence that she, and not her subordinates—many of whose working day started at half past six in the morning—took care of Bertie’s late-night whims.

But
he
was not allowed to have human faults. Not when she’d held him in such esteem, such perfection of memory. Not when she’d lived chastely and reverently in deference to that memory. Not when she still—

She rose, went to the escritoire, and pulled out a piece of writing paper.

“Be so kind as to wait a minute,” she said to Dickie as she unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen.

The footman who came into the library bore not a tray of foodstuff, but a folded note and a look on his face reminiscent of Prior’s silent dismay earlier in the evening. Why was it that anything having to do with dining or the cook sent everyone in the house scrambling for their smelling salts?

The note, written in French, went a long way toward answering Stuart’s question.

Dear Sir,

 

Dinnertime in this house is half past seven. When I have all my forces marshaled at Waterloo, I cannot be expected to wage a campaign in Leipzig at the drop of a hat.

The venue for dinner is the dining room. Generations of effort have gone into building, maintaining, and bettering the passage between the kitchen and the house. Years of training and practice are necessary before the house staff and the kitchen staff achieve such coordination that food arrives on the table piping hot and cooked to perfection. You may not, at will, decide that the library, at the opposite end of the house, serves your purpose better. It disrupts the entire process for everyone else involved.

My responsibilities in this house extend to producing breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. If you wish to dine at other times, your request must be made in advance. Mr. Bertram Somerset understood this. I’m surprised that you, sir, reputed to be a man of the people, have so little grasp of the consideration due those who labor on your behalf.

Yours humbly,
Verity Durant

P.S. The larder in the warming kitchen has bread, butter, and a meat pie, enough to hold you until breakfast.

Stuart was not unaccustomed to receiving irate letters. An MP never pleased all his constituents. And a barrister who won more cases than he ought to occasionally heard from incensed members of the opposing counsel.

This note, however, went beyond irate, evidenced by the violence of its writing. At several places on the page the nib of the fountain pen had torn through the paper, the letters not so much jotted down as slapped onto the page, the
t
’s and
i
’s barely crossed and dotted in the wrath of the one who wielded the pen.

He very seldom allowed himself anything other than a measured response. But he couldn’t seem to think clearly. He was hungry. He was hungry because she’d served him food that had been the culinary equivalent of a siren song—he could no more eat it than a sailor of antiquity could relax and enjoy the music as he sailed into the rocky cliffs of Anthemusa. And now she would throw a tantrum because he wanted something as undemanding as a sandwich?

He pulled out a piece of his own stationery, and replied in French.

Dear Madame,

 

Are you trying to lose your position?

Your servant,
Stuart Somerset

Her return message came a few minutes later.

Dear Sir,

 

Are you hoping to be rid of me?

Yours humbly,
Verity Durant

No one would blame him if he did rid himself of her. Quite the contrary. He’d be applauded for his high standards and his gentlemanly consideration for his wife-to-be’s delicate sensibilities.

Not to mention he’d never again be subject to the unwanted provocation of her cooking, the sybaritic beguilement of it. Never again covet her food with such inconvenient, hypocritical hunger.

Dear Madame,

 

Not yet. But I could easily change my mind.

Your servant,
Stuart Somerset

She watched him from just beyond the reach of the dim light, through the narrow opening of the door—her archangel come to earth, his halo dented, his wings less than immaculate.

He stood over a loaf of bread, a knife in hand. On the chopping board there lay three, now four, rather beautifully sliced pieces of bread, each a precise quarter-inch in thickness. A kettle hissed, shrill and loud in the still air. He wrapped his hand in a towel, disappeared from her view for a moment, brought back the kettle, and poured the boiling water into a teapot that she also couldn’t see.

The upper-crust gentlemen of this country were valiant in battle, decent to their inferiors, and passably competent in bed, but they were, almost without exception, helpless before the simplest of domestic tasks—and proud of it, taking it as a badge of their true gentility.

But he had been the illegitimate son of an impecunious woman. Had never stepped outside the slums of Ancoats before coming to Fairleigh Park. And had not forgotten how to take care of himself.

She’d come, teeth still gritted, to see to his sandwich, because it would have been a gross dereliction of duty otherwise: He had no obligation to appreciate her food; she, however, did have an obligation to feed him. But now she could no longer quite remember why she’d been so angry with him. She only wanted to gorge herself on the sight of him, the slash of shadow in the hollow of his cheek, the deep indentation of his philtrum, the slight part of his lips in concentration.

Mine,
some utterly barmy part of her howled.
Mine. Mine. Mine.

She remembered the marble-hard smoothness of his back. The way his hair had curled at his nape, the surprising softness of it against the inside of her wrist. The feel of his arm, wondrously heavy upon her as he slept, keeping her securely within the circle of his protection.

Suddenly he looked up, his eyes searching the crack of the door through which she spied on him. “Who’s there?”

Between the mad urge to step forward into the light and the panic that would have her break into a run, she did nothing. He set the butter knife down on the rim of the butter crock. “Madame Durant, is that you?”

It’s me. I’m here. Do you still love me?

She turned and walked away.

Stuart lost his mind somewhere around the stroke of midnight.

Shortly after his nonencounter with Madame Durant, he’d discovered, set aside in a special holding cabinet in the warming kitchen, a silver dome-covered dish. Under the silver dome had been a small ramekin. He’d known instantly what it was, the dessert course that he had not allowed Prior to serve, despite—or was it because of—the latter’s distressed protests that the chocolate custard was unique, sensational, and intolerably wonderful.

He’d had enough wherewithal then to cover the dish again and close the door of the holding cabinet. But now the chocolate custard was with him, alone, deep in the privacy of the master’s apartment.

He didn’t even have the excuse of hunger anymore. The bread and butter had been wholesome and filling. But he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the custard, its dark allure, its heady aroma that had made him want to stick his tongue inside then and there.

The chocolate custard sat on a small table, glossy, serene, entirely indifferent to his laughable internal struggle. He dug in the tip of a spoon, destroying its smooth surface—and released a coil of rich, dusky odor.