“Or something.” After a pause he continued: “To show how open-minded they are. The inclusive and high-minded essence of Old Britishness. Merit only.”
His tone was so neutral that I could not be sure if he was being sarcastic. There were only two ways to proceed: back off and let him be mysterious, or push past the discomfort of whatever this was about. Like lancing a boil. Once I had put it to myself this way, my choice was obvious. “I’m sorry if I seemed nosy, but I don’t see what you have to—It’s not where you start but where you end up that counts, and you’re doing great, it seems to me.” He made no reply. “You wrote a wonderful book, you were picked for this mission, you have a beautiful girlfriend—” He stirred uneasily at this, and I transitioned into “You never told me how you and Sabina met. She’s not an academic, right? She’s something in an auction house?”
“Ages ago. In high school.”
“She’s Irish, too?” I resolved to show surprise at nothing.
“Of course not.” He paused, and I was about to jump in with another question, but he went on: “We were at Crofton together.” I knew this as one of the most elite boarding schools, a bastion of Old Britishness.
“So you were high school sweethearts? How nice.” I always wondered about people like that: had their personalities set, like concrete, at sixteen or seventeen?
“Oh, no! She would have nothing to do with me, those days.”
I thought this over. “That wasn’t very discerning of her then, was it?”
He made no reply. My words hung in the air, and it was not until the coachman called out to the horses and pulled on the reins that I realized we had reached Hill Street and home.
I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING WITH A SENSE OF URGENCY, ALREADY midthought, as if I had been working through all this in my sleep. I needed to pay a morning call on Mrs. Tilson. More important, I needed to plan a dinner, to reciprocate Henry Austen’s hospitality. And I didn’t have much time. But a dinner like he had offered, with its seven dishes in the first course and six in the second, was hard to imagine.
Though I usually met with Mrs. Smith after breakfast, today I could not wait that long. Straight from washing and dressing, I hurried the three flights down, to find her flour-dusted and at work on pies. “Do you want your coffee, miss? Why didn’t ye ring?”
It flustered the servants when I appeared belowstairs without warning, but I was always inventing reasons to go there. The kitchen fascinated me, hot and fragrant, site of mysterious, complicated projects.
“How much notice would you need to make a larger and more elegant dinner than usual? For, perhaps, three guests, in addition to my brother and myself?”
Mrs. Smith pursed her lips and looked into space. She had dark eyes, a large, mild face, and the sturdy but short frame of someone who had worked from an early age with inadequate protein. “How many dishes, were you thinking? And what?”
“They are big eaters. Well, one is. At least five dishes per course? I rely on you, Mrs. Smith. What is being served these days?”
She nodded. “Right.” She held up one hand, and then the other, extending a finger for each dish as she enumerated it. “A soup to start—mulligatawny, say. Duck with peas, mayhap. A rabbit, smothered with onion. Boiled beef with cabbage, everyone likes that. Beetroot. And for the next, a nice fish in white sauce. Some pudding. A ragout with mushrooms, that is very fashionable now. Salad. Smoked eel?”
“Those all sound good.”
Mrs. Smith, out of fingers, was staring into the middle distance, still holding up her floury hands. “Drowned baby! It will be just the thing for the pudding.”
“Excellent.” I wondered what morbid imagination came up with the name of this dish, a vile, suet-based thing. “How much time would you need to put together such a dinner?”
“Two or three weeks should be plenty.”
I looked at her in dismay. In two weeks, Henry Austen would already be getting sick; his sister would already have come to stay with him. “Can it really take so long?”
She drew herself up to full height and blinked a few times. “I am sure it was different in Jamaica. But here, ’tis just me and little Tom pitching in as he can. There’s a great deal of work involved, and time, and you can’t find everything in the market, of good quality, the first time you look. And the rabbit, you know, has to hang a few days to—”
“What about a week from now? Or eight or nine days? Grace can help, too.”
“Grace’ll be busy scouring things. And helping you dress.” She said it gently, but I felt a wash of shame. Since I had not yet hired a ladies’ maid, I’d drafted Grace to help me with my hair and clothes before the dinner with Henry. That she had proved adept did not surprise me: Grace was good at everything she turned her hand to. But I had not thought until now how keeping her busy for several hours on my grooming must have put her behind on everything else.
Mrs. Smith coughed. “Which brings me, miss, to my sister. She is between situations right now, but she is an experienced kitchen maid. She worked under a French man-cook in one of the finest houses in Kent. It would be just the thing, to help me out.”
“Your sister?” Between situations meant jobless, which no servant could afford to be for long. “If she is at all like you, I will hire her at once. Ask her to come here and talk to me.”
“Oh, thank you! I will send word.”
“But do you think we can have this dinner in sooner than two weeks?”
She was still beaming at the prospect of her sister’s joining her. “Oh, faith, I hope so. I will go a-shopping and see what can be managed.”
“Next week? Say, Tuesday? That gives us almost a week.”
She hesitated before answering that yes, it probably could be done. I walked back upstairs, fingering the spectronanometer on its chain around my neck and thinking of all I had to do. A footman. We needed a footman.
The breakfast parlor and dining room were both on the ground-level floor of this house, which was a textbook terraced Georgian, three windows wide, four stories high, in addition to the basement level, with the kitchen and other utility spaces. I walked into the dining room and examined it with the judging gaze of my potential guests. A large room, with a plastered ceiling and a long table, sixteen carved mahogany dining chairs. In our first days in Hill Street, Liam and I ate dinners here, but soon we were using the smaller breakfast parlor for all meals. That room’s table was better suited to the scale of two people, its location closer to the stairs from the kitchen and easier on the servants.