Delicious (5 page)

The dining room at Fairleigh Park was cavernous and drafty. Stuart informed Prior that he’d have his meal in the bright, creamy library instead.

Prior’s reaction was a dismay nearly identical to that of Mrs. Boyce’s. For a second Stuart thought the butler would clutch his chest and fall over. But the head manservant’s training held. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “We will have a place set here for you.”

Prior and his minions arranged the place setting on the mahogany desk as Stuart annotated a stack of bills on a reading table. He’d already reviewed proposed legislations concerning fertilizers, barbed wires, and conveyance of mails when a footman marched past with a soup tureen.

“Dinner is served, sir,” said Prior.

Stuart settled himself at the desk and opened an ironed copy of the
Times
to an investigation of the recent anarchist bomb attack in Paris. Vaguely he was aware that Prior and the two footmen looked askance at one another, as if he were reading not the country’s newspaper of record, but a copy of
Fanny Hill.
Then Prior cleared his throat, and lifted the lid of the tureen.

Suddenly the library, which had smelled mainly of old books and old cigar smoke, was redolent of summer, of crisp cucumbers ripening overnight on the vine. Stuart lowered his paper a moment to see what had produced such a potently pleasant odor. Prior laid a bowl of pale, thick potage in front of him.

Stuart took a sip. The sip turned into an explosion of flavors on his tongue, rich, deep, pure, like eating the sunshine and verdure of a fine June afternoon. Startled, he did something he almost never did—putting down his newspaper when he dined alone—and stared into the soup.

Slowly, he lifted another spoonful to his mouth. No, the first sip had not been a deviation. The soup was indeed that good. He tried to taste each individual ingredient: cucumbers, onion, a hint of garlic, butter, broth, and cream. Nothing unusual, fancy, or particularly noble. Yet it was…it was sublime.

He cared nothing for food. Hadn’t in ages and ages. Food was sustenance, something to keep him alive and healthy, nothing more. A dinner at the Tour d’Argent was no different from a dinner at the lowliest fish-and-chip shop: just dinner.

This was not just dinner. This was as dangerous and unpredictable as the presence of a scantily clad woman in the cell of a monk who’d taken a vow of chastity.

He set down his spoon. Thirty years ago he’d have begged for one more sip. Twenty years ago he’d have been thrilled to discover that his sense of taste hadn’t permanently atrophied. Ten years ago he might have taken this sudden reawakening of his palate for an augury of wonderful things to come, things he’d wished for with the single-mindedness of a long-buried seed seeking the unbearable beauty of a world drenched in light.

Tonight he wished only to read his newspaper at dinner without being distracted—or profoundly disturbed—by a bowl of soup.

But his fingers had already gripped the spoon again and skimmed the surface of the soup. His hand rose, lifting the spoon to his lips. He felt himself leaning forward a fraction of an inch.

He forced the spoon to return to the soup. It was too late. He was too old for this, too accustomed to being indifferent to his meals.

He resumed his perusal of the newspaper, though he was no longer certain whether he was reading of French bombings or American elections.

After an uneasy pause, Prior took away the soup.

Dinner was a bloodbath of Romans-at-Carthage proportions.

Verity had been perplexed by Mr. Somerset’s strident demand for only three courses, but not overly alarmed—if she was as good as she believed herself to be, then one course was enough. One mouthful was enough.

She did not learn about the soup immediately, for items carried away from the dinner table were returned to the scullery, rather than the kitchen itself. For the second course she served prawns that had been caught off the coast at dawn, creamy pink and bathed in a velvety white wine sauce. Along with the prawns she sent half a dozen small plates: lightly fried oysters, mussels in a curried broth, glazed chestnut, buttered peas, gratinéed potato, and braised leek.

After her initial diaster-laden months as Monsieur David’s apprentice, in the Marquess of Londonderry’s household, Verity had realized, to her own and everyone else’s amazement, that she was talented before a stove. She had a sensitive nose, an unpolluted palate, and a manual dexterity rivaling that of a circus juggler’s.

But she’d always cooked from instructions handed down to her—Monsieur David, having worked under the great Monsieur Soyer as well as at the court of Napoleon III, had a wealth of recipes that most cooks would give their knife arm to possess. That was, until she’d met
him,
a man who could find no pleasure in food, who only watched her wistfully as she ate and ate and ate.

Only then did she start thinking about the desires, fears, joys, and pains so inextricably intertwined in something as simple as a meal. Only then did she begin to cook purposefully, not merely to earn her wages and keep a roof over her head, but to satisfy hungers that extended beyond the needs of the stomach.

And everything she’d done, she did with him in mind, sometimes with memories of him like a print of fire in her head, sometimes with only a faint trace of longing seeping through her thoughts. But always, hovering just above the threshold of consciousness, was the constant refrain: if one day she had a chance to cook for him…if one day she had a chance to cook for him…

Her food became sensual—the tenderness of a kiss, the abandon of rolling down a grassy knoll on a summer afternoon, the intensity of a lover’s gaze. She created new dishes—dishes both humble and extravagant—with but one goal in mind: to break through the barrier of the years and return him to a time before his losses had robbed him of this most primary of pleasures.

She wanted to give him happiness on a plate.

One bite, that was all she needed.

And one bite was apparently all she got. Mr. Prior himself came into the kitchen and took her aside to speak to her. The soup had been rejected after two sips, said Mr. Prior. And when the second course had been spread before Mr. Somerset, he’d sampled one of everything, chewed gravely, sat silent another minute, and risen from the table.

He was done with dinner. He did not even require the third course, the
petit pot de crème au chocolat
that the year before had had Monsieur du Gard, the Parisian industrialist, weep openly at the table because it made him remember his chocolate-loving sister, who’d given up school—and chocolate—so he could be educated.

Minutes passed before Verity realized that Mr. Prior was still speaking. She laid a hand on his sleeve to stop him from further apologies. “It’s all right, Mr. Prior,” she said, too numb to quite understand what had happened. “Gentlemen are what they are. Their preferences must prevail.”

She troweled on her French accent. Everyone belowstairs knew that when her English approximated the slurriness of wet cement, she was done speaking.

Mr. Prior nodded and left. Verity turned back to her apprentices. “Well done,” she said. “It was one of the best dinners we ever cooked.”

And so it had been, abbreviated though it was. She’d thought it would be enough—it and all the blessings her heart could bestow—but she was wrong.

She had been entirely mistaken.

At eleven o’clock at night, someone knocked on the library door. It was Prior.

“Would you be needing anything else, sir?” asked the butler.

As a matter of fact, Stuart would. Having had next to nothing at dinner, he was hungry.

Hunger rarely bothered him, as it merely signaled that mealtime was near. What he experienced now, however, was a different beast altogether. He didn’t need food; he craved it.

It had been almost two hours since dinner had been removed from the library. He could still smell traces of it, fresh and voluptuous. Could still taste the miserly bites he’d allowed himself.

He’d made hardly a dent in the financial records before him. His mind, disciplined and focused otherwise, swam in images of food, luscious, pornographic images of the courses he’d ruthlessly sent away at dinner and the courses he’d forbidden from even arriving at the table.

“Yes. I’d like a sandwich.”

At home he’d have gone to the kitchen himself, rather than summoning someone else. But on his first day as the new lord of the manor, he must be more lordly in his conduct, for as he judged his servants for their efficacy and character, they judged him too, for his worthiness.

“Certainly, sir,” said Prior. “I will send someone to speak to Madame Durant.”

The name was familiar. In another moment it all came back to Stuart.

The gossip had first reached him when he was on the march into Afghanistan to take part in one of the more stupid wars in history. What a laugh that had provided against the bleakness of the Khyber Pass: the image of Bertie shagging his cook—his
cook,
who was probably three times his girth and as ugly as the bottom of her favorite sauté pan. How the mighty had fallen.

“Madame Durant is still here?” The talebearers had been quiet on the matter a good many years. He’d assumed that Bertie had long ago come to his senses and sent Madame Durant packing.

“Yes, sir. We are pleased that she has stayed with us. Her skills are unparalleled.”

Stuart paid little mind to the implicit rebuke in the butler’s words. Madame Durant had to be one of the most infamous domestic servants in all of Britain, Bertie’s insatiable lover who—some said—had introduced him to depravities involving pastry cream and rolling pins.

She cooked as if it were a prelude to a seduction, as if she’d bartered her soul to Lucifer to turn the humblest turnip to pure arousal for the tongue. Little wonder Bertie had not been able to resist her, Bertie who had loved the pleasures of the table since he was a boy, with a seriousness and a passion others reserved for hunting and horse racing—or law and politics.

“Is it quite necessary to disturb Madame Durant for a mere sandwich?”

“Once Madame Durant dismisses her staff for the night, all requests for the kitchen go directly to her, sir.”

Stuart had meant to imply that Prior or one of the footmen could take care of the sandwich. Clearly the thought hadn’t even occurred to Prior. It had been decades since Stuart was part of a household of such size; he’d forgotten the strict division of labor that marked the belowstairs hierarchy. A footman would be insulted and scandalized to be asked to perform the work of the kitchen, much as Madame Durant would be if she were asked to accompany the next Mrs. Somerset around town and carry the latter’s purchases.

“Very well, then,” he said, acquiescing, his tone marked by something that resembled anticipation far too much for his comfort.