Hunger rarely bothered him, as it merely signaled that mealtime was near. What he experienced now, however, was a different beast altogether. He didn’t need food; he craved it.
It had been almost two hours since dinner had been removed from the library. He could still smell traces of it, fresh and voluptuous. Could still taste the miserly bites he’d allowed himself.
He’d made hardly a dent in the financial records before him. His mind, disciplined and focused otherwise, swam in images of food, luscious, pornographic images of the courses he’d ruthlessly sent away at dinner and the courses he’d forbidden from even arriving at the table.
“Yes. I’d like a sandwich.”
At home he’d have gone to the kitchen himself, rather than summoning someone else. But on his first day as the new lord of the manor, he must be more lordly in his conduct, for as he judged his servants for their efficacy and character, they judged him too, for his worthiness.
“Certainly, sir,” said Prior. “I will send someone to speak to Madame Durant.”
The name was familiar. In another moment it all came back to Stuart.
The gossip had first reached him when he was on the march into Afghanistan to take part in one of the more stupid wars in history. What a laugh that had provided against the bleakness of the Khyber Pass: the image of Bertie shagging his cook—his cook, who was probably three times his girth and as ugly as the bottom of her favorite sauté pan. How the mighty had fallen.
“Madame Durant is still here?” The talebearers had been quiet on the matter a good many years. He’d assumed that Bertie had long ago come to his senses and sent Madame Durant packing.
“Yes, sir. We are pleased that she has stayed with us. Her skills are unparalleled.”
Stuart paid little mind to the implicit rebuke in the butler’s words. Madame Durant had to be one of the most infamous domestic servants in all of Britain, Bertie’s insatiable lover who—some said—had introduced him to depravities involving pastry cream and rolling pins.
She cooked as if it were a prelude to a seduction, as if she’d bartered her soul to Lucifer to turn the humblest turnip to pure arousal for the tongue. Little wonder Bertie had not been able to resist her, Bertie who had loved the pleasures of the table since he was a boy, with a seriousness and a passion others reserved for hunting and horse racing—or law and politics.
“Is it quite necessary to disturb Madame Durant for a mere sandwich?”
“Once Madame Durant dismisses her staff for the night, all requests for the kitchen go directly to her, sir.”
Stuart had meant to imply that Prior or one of the footmen could take care of the sandwich. Clearly the thought hadn’t even occurred to Prior. It had been decades since Stuart was part of a household of such size; he’d forgotten the strict division of labor that marked the belowstairs hierarchy. A footman would be insulted and scandalized to be asked to perform the work of the kitchen, much as Madame Durant would be if she were asked to accompany the next Mrs. Somerset around town and carry the latter’s purchases.
“Very well, then,” he said, acquiescing, his tone marked by something that resembled anticipation far too much for his comfort.
Verity lived, as did most of the servants, in the higher reaches of the manor. As befitting an upper servant in a position of authority, her dwelling consisted of a parlor and a bedchamber. The rooms were small, but her sheets were not on display the moment she opened her door, and the parlor allowed her to accommodate the other upper servants for tea and an occasional game of cards.
In her thirteen years at Fairleigh Park, she’d made these rooms, spare and dowdy when she first arrived, into a comfortable, pretty home for herself. The rose silk-upholstered divan on which she sat, listening to Dickie relay Mr. Somerset’s request, had come to her when Bertie had changed the decor in the solarium. His offer of the divan, along with two dainty end tables and a walnut escritoire, had flattered and fluttered her, presaging the day he would suddenly kiss her as they discussed the relative merits of sauce soubise and sauce béarnaise.
The rest of her parlor matched the furniture in gentility. The wallpaper, silver fleurs-de-lis on an expanse of azure, was good enough to grace the drawing room of a prosperous London merchant. Her carpet, a more profound blue than the wallpaper, had been weaved by Turkish girls who must now be in their dotage. On the console table by the door, beneath an oval antique mirror just big enough for her face, bloomed a vase of snowdrops that the head gardener had brought her in exchange for a batch of her madeleines, whispered to be as delicious as the first day of spring and twice as seductive.
She wanted Dickie to leave, so she could pluck all the petals from the flowers and crush everything to a black pulp with her bare hands.