Private Arrangements (32 page)

The kitchen at Fairleigh Park was palatial in dimension, as grand as anything to be found at Chatsworth or Blenheim, and certainly several times larger than what one would expect for a manor the size of Fairleigh Park.

Bertie Somerset had the entire kitchen complex renovated in 1877—shortly after he inherited, and two years before Verity Durant came to work for him. After the improvements, the complex boasted of a dairy, a scullery, and a pantry each the size of a small cottage, separate larders for meat, game, and fish, two smokehouses, and a mushroom house where a heap of composted manure provided edible mushrooms year round.

The main kitchen, floored in cool rectangles of gray flagstone, with oak duckboards where the kitchen staff most often stood, had an old-fashioned open hearth and two modern closed ranges. The ceiling rose twenty feet above the floor. Windows were set high and faced only north and east, so that not a single beam of sunlight would ever stray inside. But still it was sweaty work in winter; in summer the temperatures inside rose hot enough to immolate.

Three maids toiled in the adjacent scullery, washing up all the plates, cups, and flatware from the servants' afternoon tea. One of Verity's apprentices stuffed tiny eggplants at the central work table, the other three stood at their respective stations about the room, attending to the rigors of dinner for the staff as well as for the master of the house.

The soup course had just been carried out, trailing behind a murmur of the sweetness of caramelized onion. From the stove billowed the steam of a white wine broth, in the last stages of reduction before being made into a sauce for a filet of brill that had been earlier poached in it. Over the great hearth a quartet of teals roasted on a spit turned by a second kitchen maid. She also looked after the
civet
of hare slowly stewing in the coals, which emitted a powerful, gamy smell every time it was stirred.

The odors of her kitchen were as beautiful to Verity as the sounds of an orchestra in the crescendo of a symphony. This kitchen was her fiefdom, her sanctuary. She cooked with an absolute, almost nerveless concentration, her awareness extending to the subtlest stimulation of the senses and the least movement on the part of her underlings.

The sound of her favorite apprentice not stirring the hazelnut butter made her turn her head slightly. “Mademoiselle Porter, the butter,” she said, her voice stern. Her voice was always stern in the kitchen.

“Yes, Madame. Sorry, Madame,” said Becky Porter. The girl would be purple with embarrassment now—she knew very well that it took only a few seconds of inattention before hazelnut butter became black butter.

Verity gave Tim Cartwright, the apprentice standing before the white wine reduction, a hard stare. The young man blanched. He cooked liked a dream, his sauces as velvety and breathtaking as a starry night, his soufflés taller than toques. But Verity would not hesitate to let him go without a letter of character if he made an improper advance toward Becky, Becky who'd been with Verity since she was a thirteen-year-old child.

Most of the hazelnut butter would be consumed at dinner. But a portion of it was to be saved for the midnight repast her employer had requested: one steak au poivre, a dozen oysters in Mornay sauce, potato croquettes à la Dauphine, a small lemon tart, still warm, and half a dozen dessert crepes spread with,
mais bien sûr,
hazelnut butter.

Crepes with hazelnut butter—Mrs. Danner tonight. Three days ago it had been Mrs. Childs. Bertie was becoming promiscuous in his middle age. Verity removed the cassoulet from the oven and grinned a little to herself, imagining the scene that would hopefully ensue should Mrs. Danner and Mrs. Childs find out that they shared Bertie's less-than-undying devotion.

The service hatch door burst open and slammed into a dresser, rattling the rows of copper lids hanging on pin-rails, startling one of them off its anchor. The lid hit the floor hard, bounced and wobbled, its metallic bangs and scrapes echoing in the steam and smolder of the kitchen. Verity looked up sharply. The footmen in this house knew better than to throw doors open like that.

“Madame!” Dickie, the first footman, gasped from the doorway, sweat dampening his hair despite the November chill. “Mr. Somerset—Mr. Somerset, he be not right!”

Something about Dickie's wild expression suggested that Bertie was far worse than “not right.” Verity motioned Edith Briggs, her lead apprentice, to take over her spot before the stove. She wiped her hands on a clean towel and went to the door.

“Carry on,” she instructed her crew before closing the door behind Dickie and herself. Dickie was already scrambling in the direction of the house.

“What's the matter?” she said, lengthening her strides to keep up with the footman.

“He be out cold, Madame.”

“Has someone sent for Dr. Sergeant?”

“Mick from the stables just rode out.”

She'd forgotten her shawl. The air in the unheated passage between kitchen and manor chilled the sheen of perspiration on her face and neck. Dickie pushed open doors: doors to the warming kitchen, doors to another passage, doors to the butler's pantry. Her heart thumped as they entered the dining room. But it was empty, save for an ominously overturned chair. On the floor by the chair were a puddle of water and, a little away, a miraculously unbroken crystal goblet, glinting in the light of the candelabra. A forlorn, half-finished bowl of onion soup still sat at the head of the table, waiting for dinner to resume.

Dickie led her to a drawing room deeper into the house. A gaggle of housemaids stood by the door, clutching each other's sleeves and peering in cautiously. They fell back at Verity's approach and bobbed unnecessary curtsies.

Her erstwhile lover reclined, supine, on a settee of dark blue. He wore a disconcertingly peaceful expression. Someone had loosened his necktie and opened his shirt at the collar. This state of undress contrasted sharply with his stiff positioning, his hands folded together above his breastbone like those of an effigy atop a stone sarcophagus.

Mr. Prior, the butler, stood guard over Bertie's inert body, more or less wringing his hands. At her entrance, he hurried to her side and whispered, “He's not breathing.”

Her own breath quite left her at that. “Since when?”

“Since before Dickie went to the kitchen, Madame,” said the butler, without quite his usual sangfroid.

Was that five minutes? Seven? She stood immobile a long moment, unable to think. It didn't make any sense. Bertie was a healthy man who experienced few physical maladies.

She crossed the room, dipping to one knee before the settee. “Bertie,” she called softly, addressing him more intimately than she had at any point in the past decade. “Can you hear me, Bertie?”

He did not respond. No dramatic fluttering of the eyelids. No looking at her as if he were Snow White freshly awakened from a poisoned sleep and she the prince who brought him back to life.

She touched him, something else she hadn't done in ten years. His palm was wet as was his starched cuff. He was still warm, but her finger pressed over his wrist could detect no pulse, only an obstinate stillness.

She dug the pad of her thumb into his veins. Could he possibly be dead? He was only thirty-eight years old. He hadn't even been ill. And he had an assignation with Mrs. Danner tonight. The oysters for his post-coital fortification were resting on a bed of ice in the cold larder and the hazelnut butter was ready for the dessert crepes beloved by Mrs. Danner.

But his pulse refused to beat.

She released his hand and rose, her mind numb. With the exception of the kitchen regiment, the staff had assembled in the drawing room, the men behind Mr. Prior, the women behind Mrs. Boyce the housekeeper, everyone pressed close to the walls, a sea of black uniforms with foam caps of white collars and white aprons.

To Mrs. Boyce's inquiring gaze, Verity shook her head. The man who was once to be her prince was dead. He had taken her up to his castle, but had not kept her there. In the end she had returned to the kitchen, dumped the shards of her delusion in the rubbish bin, and carried on as if she'd never believed that she stood to become the mistress of this esteemed house.

“We'd better cable his solicitors then,” said Mrs. Boyce. “They'll need to inform his brother that Fairleigh Park is now his.”

His
brother.
In all the drama of Bertie's abrupt passing, Verity had not even thought of the succession of Fairleigh Park. Now she shook somewhere deep inside, like a dish of aspic set down too hard.

She nodded vaguely. “I'll be in the kitchen should you need me.”

* * *

In her copy of Taillevent's
Le Viandier,
where the book opened to a recipe for gilded chicken with quenelles, Verity kept a brown envelope marked “List of Cheese Merchants in the 16th Arondissement.”

In the envelope was a news clipping from the county fish wrapper, about the Liberals' victory in the general election after six years in opposition. In a corner of the clipping, Verity had written the date: 16.08.1892. In the middle of the article, a grainy photograph of Stuart Somerset looked back at her— local boy made good.

She never touched his image, for fear that her strokes would blur it. Sometimes she looked at it very close, the clipping almost at her nose. Sometimes she put it as far as her lap, but never further, never beyond reach.

The man in the photograph seemed to have scarcely aged in ten years, perhaps because his was an old soul, that he'd always been mature beyond his years. He was handsome, dramatically handsome— the face of a Shakespearean actor in his prime, all sharp peak and deep angles. And in his eyes was everything she could possibly want in a man: kindness, warmth, honesty, audacity, and love—love that would tear down this world and build it anew.

From afar she'd watched his meteoric rise—one of London's most sought-after barristers, and now, with the Liberals back in power, Mr. Gladstone's Chief Whip in the House of Commons—quite something for a man who'd spent his first nine years in a Manchester slum.

He'd accomplished it all on his own merits, of course, but she'd played her small part. She'd walked away from him, from hopes and dreams enough to spawn a generation of poets, so that he could be the man he was meant to be, the man whose face on her newspaper clipping she could not touch.

Stuart Somerset lived, not in his constituency of South Hackney, but in the elegant enclaves of Belgravia. From his visit to the house of his fiancée, he returned directly home, and went for the decanter of whiskey that he kept in his study.

He took a large swallow of the liquor. He was a little more affected by the news of Bertie's death now than he had been an hour ago. There was a faint numbness in his head. It was the shock of it, he supposed. He hadn't expected Mortality, ever present though it was, to strike Bertie, of all people.

Two shelves up from the whiskey decanter was a framed photograph of Bertie and himself, taken when Bertie had been eighteen and he seventeen, shortly after he'd been legitimized.

What had Bertie said to him that day?

You may be legitimized, but you will never be one of us. You don't know how Father panicked when it looked as if your mother might live. Your people are laborers and drunks and petty criminals. Don't flatter yourself otherwise.

For years afterward, whenever he remembered Bertie, it was Bertie as he had been that precise moment in time, impeccably turned out, a cold smile on his face, satisfied to have at last ruined something wonderful for his bastard-born brother.

But the slim youth in the picture, his fine summer coat faded to rust, resembled no one's idea of a nemesis. His fair hair, ruthlessly parted and slicked back, would have looked gauche in more fashionable circles. His posture was not so much erect as rigid. The square placement of his feet and the hand thrust nonchalantly into the coat pocket meant to indicate great assurance. As it was, he looked like any other eighteen-year-old, trying to radiate a manly confidence he didn't possess.

Stuart frowned. How long had it been since he'd last
looked
at the photograph?

The answer came far more easily than he'd expected. Not since That Night. He'd last looked at it with
her,
who'd studied the image with a disturbing concentration.

Do you hate him?
she'd asked, giving the photograph back to him.

Sometimes,
he'd answered absently, distracted by the nearness of her blush-pink lips. She'd been all eyes and lips, eyes the color of a tropical ocean, lips as full and soft as feather pillows.

Then I don't like him either,
she'd said, smiling oddly.

Do you know him?
he'd asked, suddenly, and for absolutely no reason.

No,
she'd shaken her head with a grave finality, her beautiful eyes once again sad.
I don't know him at all.