Delicious (The Marsdens #1)
Sherry Thomas
To my husband. Each day with you is a perfect beginning to the rest of my life.
Acknowledgments
To the extent that this book is any good, most of the credit goes to my editor, Caitlin Alexander, for refusing to accept anything less than my best work. It is not every editor who can send a sixteen-page, single-spaced revision letter without making the writer quit. And when she tells me to take my head out of my rear end, I laugh and actually listen. Kristin Nelson and Sara Megibow, for the best spa day ever. And that’s on top of the best professional support in the business.
Heidi, for bailing me out in my most desperate hour. Janine, for going over the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb and spotting problems that I’d missed. And Sybil, for doing an emergency read for me when Janine was out of the country.
My wonderful family, for rallying to my aid during the year I was both in school and writing Delicious. It melted my heart every time my husband answered to calls of “Mom!” with “I’m Mom.” Household chaos was kept down to a minimum thanks to my mother, who came every day to fight a valiant battle against entropy. And how fortunate to have a mom-in-law so lovely that kids always want to visit her for weeks on end!
My sisters at Austin RWA. A better group of friends I’ve never met.
All the bloggers, reviewers, authors, booksellers, and readers who got the buzz going on Private Arrangements, and the talented team at Bantam who launched the book so beautifully. I can never thank you enough.
And as always, if you are reading this now, thank you. Thank you for everything.
“When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.”
—M.F.K. Fisher
Chapter One
In retrospect people said it was a Cinderella story. Notably missing was the personage of the Fairy Godmother. But other than that, the narrative seemed to contain all the elements of the fairy tale.
There was something of a modern prince. He had no royal blood, but he was a powerful man—London’s foremost barrister, Mr. Gladstone’s right hand—a man who would very likely one day occupy 10 Downing Street.
There was a woman who spent much of her life in the kitchen. In the eyes of many, she was a nobody. To others, she was one of the greatest cooks of her generation, her food said to be so divine that old men dined with the gusto of adolescent boys, and so seductive that lovers forsook each other as long as a single crumb remained on the table.
There was a ball; not the usual sort of ball that made it into fairy tales or even ordinary tales, but a ball nevertheless. There was the requisite Evilish Female Relative. And mostly importantly for connoisseurs of fairy tales, there was footgear left behind in a hurry—nothing so frivolous or fancy as glass slippers, yet carefully kept and cherished, with a flickering flame of hope, for years upon years.
A Cinderella story indeed.
Or was it?
It all began—or resumed, depending on how one looked at it—the day Bertie Somerset died.
Yorkshire
November 1892
The kitchen at Fairleigh Park was palatial in dimension, as grand as anything to be found at Chatsworth or Blenheim, and certainly several times larger than what one would expect for a manor the size of Fairleigh Park. Bertie Somerset had the entire kitchen complex renovated in 1877—shortly after he inherited, two years before Verity Durant came to work for him. After the improvements, the complex boasted a dairy, a scullery, and a pantry, each the size of a small cottage; separate larders for meat, game, and fish; two smokehouses; and a mushroom house where a heap of composted manure provided edible mushrooms year-round.
The main kitchen, floored in cool rectangles of gray flagstone, with oak duckboards where the kitchen staff most often stood, had an old-fashioned open hearth and two modern, closed ranges. The ceiling rose twenty feet above the floor. Windows were set high and faced only north and east, so that not a single beam of sunlight would ever stray inside. But still it was sweaty work in winter; in summer the temperatures rose hot enough to immolate.