Whatever opinion the deceased chef held of his employer, Bea would not discover, for Joseph broke off his speech abruptly and immediately apologized for indulging in vulgar gossip. “Marlow has a very strict rule against gossip, which he finds reprehensible and unbefitting a great house such as this one. It is unacceptable behavior, your grace, and I am very sorry to have forgotten myself so fully.”
Naturally, Bea found it noteworthy that the butler who had dismissed her as a brash and assertive schemer enforced an injunction against the very activity in which he himself indulged, but she was too interested in the information to broach the hypocrisy. That the most celebrated chef in Europe had lived around the bend in Berkeley Square was astounding. That he had been brutally murdered was heartbreaking.
“I never had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur Alphonse, as you called him,” Bea said now in response to Joseph’s question. “But he is discussed in several books I have read about a new style of cooking called la grande cuisine, and he wrote a memoir about his experiences cooking for Talleyrand, Napoleon and Czar Alexander of Russia.”
Clearly taken aback, Joseph stared at her as if she had announced that she was actually sitting on a tiger, not a settee. “He always said he was a shopkeeper. Something would happen that didn’t make sense to him and he would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘What do I know? I am just a shopkeeper.’ He never once said anything about cooking for Napoleon—at least not while I was around. I asked him once why he left France because he did not seem to like the English. He thought we were staid and predictable.”
Well, yes, that was true, Bea thought, recalling the chef had used a variation of that description in his memoir. In fact, the exact phrase was “staid, predictable, unimaginative and banal.”
“How did he respond?” she asked.
“Mr. Mayhew’s generosity was irresistible,” he replied, darting another glace at the butler as if to make sure this statement did not violate the prohibition.
“Was he satisfied with the bargain?” she asked.
Demurring, the footman insisted he could not say.
His tone was firm, but Bea suspected he could actually say quite a lot if allowed to speak freely. Instead, he refused to utter any word even vaguely scurrilous out of respect for the greatness of the house and the rules that governed its occupants. She wanted to applaud his scruples, but the truth was his integrity left her with a troublesome quandary. Given her own proclivities, it was entirely in her best interest to discourage gossip among the staff, and yet she would discover nothing about Mr. Réjane’s demise if none of the servants would provide her with information. Additionally, she did not want to undermine the butler’s authority by overturning his injunction against the practice but nor did she desire to weaken her own by deferring on a matter of some importance.
Thoughtfully, she settled on a collaborative approach. “Marlow, I am grateful you have remained in the room because I would appreciate your opinion on the matter. I wholeheartedly agree that gossip is something to be discouraged, and I would be terribly aggrieved to learn the servants were speculating about the duke or myself or exchanging stories about us. But as distasteful as gossip is, I wonder if perhaps something about it isn’t essential to the process of detection. If murderers spoke freely about their actions and motives, then there would be no need to investigate them. What are your thoughts on the matter?”
Marlow claimed to have no thoughts that did not mirror her own.
It was a decorous answer and the only one a butler in a ducal residence could give to his mistress, and while Bea appreciated his concurrence, she wondered if he thought she had been brash and assertive in attaining it.
Aware that the situation was not helped by nurturing the wound to her vanity, she returned her attention to Joseph and asked him what Monsieur Alphonse thought of his employer.
Cautiously, as if suspecting an invisible trap, Joseph replied, “He called him a petit bourgeois.”
Unfamiliar with the phrase, Bea could not believe it denoted anything positive, for even without the belittling adjective diminishing it further, the word bourgeois carried the negative connotations of mediocrity and excessive interest in material gain.
“And that is a bad thing to be?” she asked.
Joseph nodded solemnly. “It is the very worst.”
“How did this petit bourgeois aspect manifest itself?” Bea asked.
“Mr. Mayhew had what Monsieur Alphonse described as a small-minded palate,” Joseph said with another worrying glance at the butler. It was one thing to discuss the neighbor’s horribly butchered servant and quite another to talk about his inadequate sense of taste.
One did not have to be familiar with Mr. Réjane’s philosophy to recognize the phrase as the pejorative it clearly was. “Mr. Mayhew is averse to new flavors?”
“He wanted Monsieur Alphonse to make only the same dozen meals for him and Mrs. Mayhew,” Joseph promptly explained, “and when he had a dinner party, he always insisted on the same quail dish over and over again. Anytime Monsieur Alphonse tried to make something new, Mr. Mayhew complained that it was too foreign or too elaborate. He wanted only familiar foods.”
It was a staggering notion to Bea—hiring the most inventive chef in the world and leashing him to a narrow rotation of dishes—and she stared at Joseph for several long moments as she tried to digest the absurdity. If all Mr. Mayhew required was technical proficiency, he could have engaged any number of well-respected French chefs and quite a few English cooks.
But of course he had not employed the chef for his skills but rather his name, which carried with it the luster of emperors and czars.
“Was Monsieur Alphonse bored in his position?” Bea asked, unable to conceive how he could be anything else.
Joseph pursed his lips for a thoughtful moment and said, “If he abided by the
