“Nothing to see here,” Cook told her, bolting the door so the camera crew couldn’t get in.
Chloe col apsed into a chair at the pine table. In her wet stockinged feet, the stone floor felt cold.
Cook grimaced at her. Her face looked as ruddy as a new tomato, and Chloe knew she was about to get gril ed but good.
“I should blow the whistle on you right now.” Cook yanked the glasses off Chloe’s face. “You stole my spectacles. Do you know how much spectacles cost an underpaid cook like me?” Chloe’s eyes slowly readjusted to being without the glasses. “Do you know how long it takes to have spectacles made? I’m sure you don’t. And I’m sure you don’t care. You’re just an uppity Yank without a thought in the world—”
“I am not!” Chloe interrupted, sinking in her chair. “I’m sorry about the glasses. Real y. It’s just—”
“You don’t fool me for a minute.” Cook popped up and, with her bare hands, pul ed the steaming kettle from the range and set it on the table. The rising steam helped clear Chloe’s head. Cook reached up to retrieve a wooden box of used tea leaves from a shelf, which she had to do because only Grace held the key to the caddy with the fresh tea leaves. Servants had to use sloppy seconds. She darted a blue eye at Chloe. “You don’t fool me, dressed up as a footman either.” She mixed the tea leaves, set them in a perforated spoon atop a ceramic teapot, and poured the boiling water over them. “And you don’t fool me when you’re upstairs dressed in your gowns and gloves and baubles.”
Chloe bowed her head. Cook was right, she was a total fake and could never be an heiress, not even an industrial heiress, from America.
Cook plopped a teacup on the table in front of her. “You’re just un upstart Yank with lots of sil y ideas and no right. No right to an English blue-blood fiance.”
Why was this woman talking to her like this? she wondered as Cook took down another locked wooden box from the shelf. With another key hanging from her apron she opened this box to reveal a large, cone-shaped loaf of light brown sugar. Dartworth Hal had highly refined white sugar, the most expensive of the times, while here, at Bridesbridge Place, it was light brown. She took the sugar nippers and clipped off two lumps, dropped them into the cup, poured the tea in, and stirred. “Do you know how long the kitchen staff and I slaved over those confections you and Lady Grace bandied about the drawing room like so many tennis bal s?”
“It wasn’t exactly like that. And, yes, I do know how much effort goes into the cooking here. I made the strawberry tart and the syl abub, remember?”
Chloe sank lower in her chair. Even the used tea and not-so-refined sugar smel ed fabulous. “I didn’t think —”
“No, you didn’t think, did you, now? If you were my charge, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Slowly, guiltily, Chloe stretched out to cup her hands around the warm tea but Cook suddenly whisked the cup away.
“What makes you believe I made this tea for you?” She plunked the teacup down on her side of the table. Her icy blue eyes scanned Chloe’s face for a response. “You used to help us servants out, but now you’ve gotten used to being waited on hand and foot. You feel entitled.”
“That’s not true.”
Cook slammed a cloth bag of flour onto the table and a puff of it rose like a storm cloud. “Do you know that I prepare the dough at this hour for your breakfast toast?”
“I didn’t realize—”
“You don’t realize plenty of things. More than eight thousand proper English applicants. And he turned them away for the likes of you.”
Chloe needed to get out of the frying pan here. “I real y am sorry about the trouble I’ve caused. I blew it by dressing up like this. I just wanted to clear everything up with—Henry.” She looked at the tea caddy and sugar box as if for the last time.
Cook plunked a big ceramic mixing bowl on the table and sent a puff of yeast into the air. “What do you care about Henry?”
“I don’t understand why everyone keeps treating him like a second-class citizen. He’s a great guy. There, I said it. I was rude to him earlier and I just wanted to apologize, so I dressed up in footman’s clothes, because women aren’t al owed out after eleven, and I couldn’t write a note—or cal , e-mail, text, tweet, or send a Facebook message! If wanting to apologize is a crime, then I’m guilty, so turn me in.” She held her wrists out to Cook, as if Cook would handcuff her.
Cook poured some flour and water into the bowl and mixed with a big wooden spoon. “I should turn you in, but I won’t. I, too, have a soft spot for Henry.”
Chloe stumbled toward the door and looked away from her disheveled reflection in a row of copper pots and pans. She’d said too much.
“You’d best go to bed,” Cook told her, taking a tin of salt down from the shelf above the washbasin and prying the lid open with her thumbnail.
“Just do me a favor.”
“You name it.”
“Remember the cook.”
Like she could forget.
“And remember one more thing. I’m on your side.”
She was?
For a long time, Chloe lay in her canopied bed and tossed in her nightgown, unable to sleep. She thought she heard a mouse scuttle from the floor mirror to the writing desk, but there couldn’t possibly be mice running around her bedchamber, could there?
