Delicious (30 page)

A present from Mr. Somerset. Or was it an apology? Highly—no, hugely—improper. Not only in the present itself, but also in the manner of the giving—he had stepped inside her room while she was at the soup kitchen, her valise wide open, her washing drying on the chair.

She wished he hadn’t: Not because she was ashamed that he’d seen her old drawers and her not-so-new stockings, but because the too beautiful painting set her heart soaring, like Icarus high in the sky.

The world hadn’t changed, nor had their places in it. If they were to allow something beautiful to come to be, then it would only make the inevitable that much harder, that much more unbearable.

Don’t,
she thought.
He is to be married.

Don’t.

But she knew, as surely as Icarus had been doomed to plunge and tumble from the beginning, that she would ignore her own excellent advice. And that she, too, would risk flying as close to the sun as her wings of wax could lift her.

“Do you have anyone specific next to whom you wish to seat the Arlingtons?” asked Mr. Marsden.

Lizzy was sick of seating charts. Or rather, she had trouble concentrating on them. Instead, she couldn’t stop looking at him. He had on a real cravat in blue silk, beautifully knotted, such as she hadn’t seen in ages—most valets couldn’t manage anything more complicated than an octagon tie these days.

“Seat them next to whomever you please,” she said, reckless. “I want a reprieve from seating people. Tell me about music hall.”

He dropped his pen.

He picked it up and blotted the droplets of ink that had splattered onto the seating chart. “It’s an amusing way to spend an evening.”

“You know what I mean,” she insisted.

He flashed her a smile that was as bright as a theatrical footlight. “Music hall is an actionable offense in this country. I’ll need an inducement to expound upon it.”

She glanced at him from underneath her lashes. “What inducement?”

“Symphonic concerts.”

Her heart bounded high enough to knock against her palate. “I beg your pardon?”

He looked at her steadily and the air around her thickened into pudding. At last he said, “I want to hear about your experience at symphonic concerts. Did you like it?”

She dragged the
Debrett’s
from across the desk and opened it to a random page. They hadn’t had to use it. He seemed to know everyone’s pedigree and precedence by heart. “What would you say if I said I did?”

“I’ve been asking myself that very same thing,” he said. “I decided that I hoped you liked it.”

“Why?”

“Because you could have been ruined over it, you stupid woman. At least you should have enjoyed it while you were at it.”

No one had ever called her a stupid woman. But he said it with such resigned tenderness that she couldn’t even begin to protest. It was almost as if he’d called her his sweetheart.

He tilted his head. “Well, did you?”

“I thought I did,” she said, finally admitting her transgressions. “But the memories offend me now.”

“Henry Franklin is a remarkable ass,” he said firmly. “I’m glad you didn’t marry him.”

She smiled a little. It was, of course, very childish and unsophisticated of her that she should feel this deep sense of kinship upon his unsparing denouncement of Henry. Ah, but what a splendid feeling.

“Are you still displeased that I’m marrying Mr. Somerset?” she asked, not sure she wasn’t flirting at least a little.

He capped his fountain pen. “
Displeased
is not the right word.”

“What is, then?”

“Mr. Somerset regards you as a favorite young cousin, a dearly loved niece even. And as such he is apt to be very, very indulgent of you. While he’s busy working for the betterment of the common man, you’ll be free to do whatever you wish.”

“And that is a terrible thing?”

“Perhaps not. But we all could use someone to tell us, from time to time, that our action is ill-advised. Mr. Somerset is not that person for you, nor do I see you as that person for him—you are too grateful, too determined that he should never hear a harsh word or an adverse opinion from you.”

He startled her. How did he know? How had he sensed the little flutters of anxiety that had characterized her interaction with Stuart of late—the cost she must bear to maintain a false perfection?

“You seem to have thought more about my marriage than I have,” she murmured.

“Perhaps I have,” he said.

Her heart was once again in her throat. “Because you are a student of human nature?” she said, her voice full of forced levity.

“Because—” He stopped.

“Because?” She hoped she didn’t sound too curious, or breathless. She was both.

He pulled the
Debrett’s
toward himself, and turned the pages purposefully, as if looking for something. “You remember your question about music hall?” he asked, without glancing at her.

“Yes?”

“I have never been to music hall. All my life I’ve only ever been interested in symphonic concerts.”

She thought she heard distant artillery, but it was only the slow explosion of his words against her eardrums.

“That time in Paris, Madame Belleau was hoping to seduce me with a tableau of two entertwined women—I was to join you if everything went according to her plans.”

“But—”

He slid
Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage
toward her. It was open to the page on the Earldom of Wyden. The book was a slightly older edition, from before the passing of the seventh earl. Five sons were listed for the titleholder. Her attention immediately went to the fourth one: His given name was not William.

Do you remember that hushed-up scandal about Mr. Marsden, the late Lord Wyden’s second-youngest son?
Georgette’s answer had been correct. But Lizzy’s question had been wrong.

“You are thinking of my brother Matthew,” said Mr. Marsden. “He is the fourth; I’m the middle one. I left home because I disagreed with my father’s decision to disown Matthew, who was too young and too naïve to survive on his own.”

“Why did you not say so sooner?”

When she first brought it up, for instance. It would have been embarrassing then. It was ten times so now. She cringed to think how she’d tried to intimidate him with sins not his own.

“I thought perhaps you’d be less wary of me,” he said, “if you believed me to be inclined solely toward music hall.”

“You would tolerate this level of misconception for me to be less wary of you?”

He smiled, a weary smile. “I did, didn’t I?”

She rose, too agitated to remain sitting. “Why?”

He rose also. “Do you not know already?”

She said nothing. He collected his things. Then he came and kissed her just below her ear, an intimate and entirely inappropriate place. And while his kiss burned, he saw himself out.

Her Grace Sarah, the Dowager Duchess of Arlington.

Verity’s vision blurred. “We’ve a duchess coming to dine here?” she asked weakly.

“Oh, yes. The master calls at the Arlington house. He’s been a guest at Lyndhurst Hall—that’s the Arlingtons’ country seat, don’t you know—a good dozen times since I came to work for him,” said Mrs. Abercromby with staunch pride. The middle class might very well despise the aristocracy in this day and age. Those in service, however, preferred the old elite, who on the whole treated their staff much more liberally than did the suspicious and tight-fisted middle class. “But it’s the first time Her Grace will be dining here. The master is moving up in the world, I tell you, Madame Durant.”

The world was a small place. Verity had no idea Mr. Somerset was acquainted with the Arlingtons at all, let alone that the acquaintance was of such standing.

She did not dread cooking for dignitaries. Among the guests who had dined at Bertie’s table had been literary luminaries of the age, tycoons wealthier than entire cities, and even a former president of
la Troisième République.
But the thought of cooking for the Dowager Duchess of Arlington made her tremble: It would be like cooking for a stone statue of Hera.

She drove herself and everyone else hard, so much so that she was annoyed to realize that it was a half day again, the day before the dinner. It was on the tip of her tongue to inform the girls that they would remain and work. But as she looked about her, she realized that most of what could be done at this point had already been done, that her girls waited with bated breaths for luncheon to finish and their short-lived freedom to begin.

She let them go. Alone in the kitchen, she made her pâté, a mixture of goose breast and pork ground very fine, which must cook for three hours and be stirred nonstop. Normally, the stirring was split between several people, in half-hour shifts. She was forcefully reminded soon after she began why that was the case, but by then she had no choice except to go on.

At the end of the three hours, her arms felt only marginally attached to the rest of her. But the pâté had turned out quite well, so she could not be entirely unhappy. She set the pâté aside to cool and checked her watch: a minute past five o’clock. She would shape the batch of sugar paste she’d made the day before with the molds that had arrived from Fairleigh Park that morning.

She did not look up at the sound of horse hooves. But she did when a hack came to a stop in front of 26 Cambury Lane. A man’s black city pumps, his striped day trousers, and his walking stick emerged from the hack. The vehicle departed. The man disappeared from her view. And then she heard the opening and closing of the front door on the floor above.

Mr. Somerset had come home.

The bath was dark and empty.

Stuart had been saved from himself, or so it would seem. He’d expected her to be in his tub, waiting, veils of steam writhing about her.

He’d warned himself most severely that he was likely to do something he’d regret should he return home when no one else was there except her. He’d carried a photograph of Lizzy with him all day as a reminder. And he’d left his office at two o’clock in the afternoon and visited both the bathing pool
and
the gymnasium, in an attempt to replace concupiscence with exhaustion.

All for naught. He’d come home at this most dangerous hour and headed straight for the bath—only to stare into an empty tub that gleamed a cold white in the light of the gas lamp, a lamp that he’d turned on because the darkness and the lack of steam in the bath hadn’t been enough to convince him of her absence.