Delicious (2 page)

“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 inside the house. A gaggle of housemaids stood by the door, clutching one another’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 against 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. 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. His hands trembled very slightly.

Was that five minutes? Seven? Verity 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 and dipped 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 postcoital 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.

His pulse refused to beat.

She released his hand and rose, her mind numb. The kitchen crew had stayed put at her command. But the rest of the indoor 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 aprons.

In response 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.

The envelope contained, among other things, a news clipping from the county fish wrapper, about the Liberals’ recent victory in the general election after six years in opposition. Verity had written the date in a corner: 16.08.1892. In the middle of the article, a grainy photograph of Stuart Somerset gazed back at her.

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

The man in the photograph was dramatically hand—some—the face of a Shakespearean actor in his prime, all sharp peaks and deep angles. 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 clipping she dared not touch.

Chapter Two

London

W
e’ve known each other a long time, Miss Bessler,” said Stuart Somerset.

At the Besslers’ Hanover Square house, the drawing room had once been a rather ghastly green. But Miss Bessler, taking the reins of the household after her mother’s passing, had papered the walls in a shade of carmine that was almost sensual, yet still solemn enough for the home of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Miss Bessler raised a severe eyebrow at Stuart. She looked very fine tonight: Her eyes were bright, her cheeks held a tinge of becoming blush, her Prussian blue gown was pure drama against the crimson chaise longue on which they sat nearly knee to knee.

“We’ve been
friends
a long time, Mr. Somerset,” she corrected him.

They’d met years before she’d made her official debut, when both Stuart and the Besslers had been guests at a weeklong house party at Lyndhurst Hall. He’d been alone in the garden, smoking a cigarette, thinking of someone else. And she’d escaped from the nursery to watch the dancing in the ballroom, indignant that a mature, clever girl such as herself wasn’t allowed to join the fun.

“Yes, we have indeed been friends a long time,” he said.

And it had been with pride and affection that he’d watched the lovely child—though she’d always insisted that at only a few weeks short of fifteen, she’d been no child—grow into an even lovelier young woman.

“That’s much better,” said Miss Bessler. “Now, won’t you please hurry and ask the question so I may tell you how delighted and honored I will be to be your wife?”

Stuart chuckled. It was as he’d thought. Mr. Bessler hadn’t been able to keep the news to himself. He took her hands in his. “In that case, would you make me very happy by consenting to become my wife?”

“Yes, I would,” she said firmly. She looked happy—and relieved, as if she hadn’t quite believed until this moment that he really would offer for her. Her hands squeezed his. “Thank you. We both know that I’m not getting any younger.”

He still thought her a young woman, because of the twelve-year difference in their ages. But there was some unfortunate truth to her words. At twenty-five, with eight seasons under her belt, she was far older than the usual adolescents on display in London’s ballrooms and drawing rooms.

“Not that it would change my answer, because I’m too practical and selfish to give you up,” she said, “but I do hope you haven’t proposed entirely out of pity, my dear Stuart—may I at last call you Stuart?”

“Pity is the last of my motives, Lizzy,” he said. “There is no one else in all of Society with whom I’d rather spend my life.”

He’d delayed looking for a wife until he was old enough to have sired the current crop of debutantes. He didn’t want a seventeen-year-old, either on his arm or in his bed. He needed a more seasoned spouse who would not be flustered by the demands of an MP’s household. Lizzy was a descendant of an old and highly regarded family, a statesman’s daughter, and a gracious and competent hostess. And she was beautiful. She was everything Stuart could sensibly hope for in a wife at this stage in his life.

There were, of course, his more insensible hopes—but he’d had to accept that some dreams were stillborn and some memories mirages.

“I don’t understand why you haven’t been whisked off to the altar years ago,” he continued. “And part of me still feels that I’m asking you to settle for an old man of somewhat dubious ancestry—”

“No. I only wish that it hadn’t taken you so long,” she said. One of her hands tightened over his, and she looked down for a second. “I only wish we’d been married years already.”

Her sentiment surprised him. True enough that there had been a time, near the beginning of their acquaintance, when she’d been a little infatuated with him. But by her first Season, when she’d become the belle of the ball, her sights had been set firmly and ambitiously above a mere lawyer and MP.

“In that case, you’ll forgive me for asking that the wedding take place before the opening of Parliament?”

The opening of Parliament was at the end of January. She regarded him again with mock severity. “I don’t know if I’ll forgive you entirely for handing a wedding of such magnitude to me with only two months to prepare—and for robbing me of a proper wedding trip.”

“I apologize in advance for the rush. When Parliament closes, we’ll go anywhere you wish. And as to the preparations, I’ll put Marsden at your disposal.”

She frowned. “Must we involve your secretary in this matter?”

“Only so that you may have time to sleep and dine and bathe once in a while.”

“But Mr. Marsden grates on my nerves.”

Women usually adored Marsden. Stuart lifted one of her hands and lightly kissed the back of it. “Let him help. I do not wish you to run yourself to the ground.”

She grimaced, then sighed. “All right, I will tolerate Mr. Marsden, but only to save you the worrying.”

He rose. “Shall we find your father and inform him that he will soon have me for a son-in-law?”

She tilted her head and batted her eyelashes. “Aren’t you forgetting something, sir?”

She expected him to kiss her. He sat down on the chaise longue again and pulled her toward him. She lifted her chin and obligingly closed her eyes.

He placed his hands on either side of her face. Her cheeks were as smooth as the finest powder. And when he leaned in closer, he smelled the fragrance of lily of the valley, the same perfume she’d worn ever since she turned sixteen.

His lips almost touched hers. He held still for a moment, then kissed her on the forehead instead. Strange that they should end up engaged, a middle-aged man too late to the Marriage Mart and a young woman who should have been out of it long ago.

“We are to be married now,” she chided him. “You must stop being so brotherly.”

Brotherly. Avuncular was more like it.

A knock sounded at the door. They glanced at each other. Stuart rose, expecting that it was Mr. Bessler, impatient for the good news. But it was the butler.