Godfrey Toy had been exceedingly busy since breakfast, on the track of a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century cookery book. Somebody from the BBC–actually the BBC!–had written to Quire House to ask about availability and cost of authentic recipe books. It seemed a television programme of eating habits down the ages was being envisaged, and they wanted bona fide recipes for it. There was no guarantee the programme would actually be made, they explained politely; this was just preliminary and very tentative research.
But Godfrey, reading this letter, had instantly renounced his plan for a scholarly best-seller about Bernard Shaw, and thought he might instead make his mark on television. (‘And now here is our resident specialist, Dr Godfrey Toy, who is going to tell us how people lived and ate in the eighteenth century…’)
He abandoned the tedious task he had assigned to the morning (cataloguing some early editions of Byron’s poetry which he himself had bought because he had liked the binding, but which Oliver said would never sell), and scuttled hither and yon to see what Quire’s current stock had in the way of cookery books. It was not something they would normally deal in, but Godfrey had a feeling there was just the thing somewhere, and it turned out he was right. There, neatly reposing on a back shelf, was the exact book, published in 1725 and beautifully divided into different dishes for the seasons of the year, according to your standing in life.
There was a recipe for Lenten Pottage which Godfrey thought sounded shockingly dreary, but then there was a really lavish one for lobster, although it was unnecessarily explicit, telling how to prevent the live lobster from trying to climb out of the vat of boiling water while you were cooking it. Godfrey, who normally enjoyed lobster, shuddered, and turned the page to an entry for Sod Eggs, which would probably cause some ribaldry if it were to be included in the programme. But on closer inspection Sod was a corruption of the word seethed or boiled, and the dish itself was a tarted-up version of boiled eggs.
It was at this point that Antonia Weston arrived, apparently to apologize for the fracas of yesterday. This threw Godfrey completely, partly because he had not expected to see her, but also because it was a touch difficult to know what to say to someone who seemed to have suffered such a bizarre hallucination. It was even more difficult to adhere to Oliver’s edict about not letting Miss Weston get her hands on any more of Quire’s archive material. Godfrey thought he would not actually mention this, in fact he thought he would give her the cardboard folder of stuff on Latchkill, and be blowed to Oliver.
It was worth risking Oliver’s annoyance, because when he handed the folder to her, she smiled and it was the genuine smile that Godfrey had hoped to see. Because he loved seeing her smile like that, he told her about the TV request for the cookbook, and read out a recipe for Mumbled Rabbit, which explained that in order to properly mumble your rabbit, you had first to chop it very finely, and then stir in a bundle of sweet herbs.
She enjoyed the recipe; she said he had cheered up her morning, and promised to let him know how the Latchkill papers turned out. After she left, Godfrey happily wrote to the BBC about the cookbook, describing it in sufficient detail to whet their appetites, but not actually giving away any of the recipes. This done, he felt that he could tackle Lord Byron after all, so he summoned Greg Foster to help him, because he could never remember how you found files on the computer.
Carrying the folder back to Charity Cottage, Antonia was aware that she was smiling inwardly at the prospect of entering Daniel Glass’s world again. It was like travelling to the comfortable house of an old and dear friend, and realizing you were almost there.