“Perhaps they don’t find me the confiding sort.”
She brushed this away with a wave of her hand. “Don’t be silly. All you have to do is stand there to inspire trust, unlike the rest of us. But I must keep to one thing at a time. Our servants first.”
“Yes, sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to lose the butler.”
She turned away from the drawings to give him her full attention.
“Edwards,” she said. “I meant to ask you—but the sight of the castle knocked everything else from my mind. Then I saw the servants, all looking so—so-”
“Suicidal,” he said. “One can’t blame them. They’ve had to camp out in the great hall, exactly as their predecessors would have done centuries ago. I’m amazed they haven’t all bolted.”
Her blue eyes lit with interest. “You think Edwards bolted?”
“So it would ap—”
A roar and a horrific crash cut him off.
The door to the kitchen passage flew open, and the kitchen staff irrupted into the great hall.
The roaring—human—continued, in spurts.
Olivia looked at the kitchen help cowering under the minstrel gallery, then at the door to the kitchen passage, then at Lisle.
“Must be Aillier,” he said, naming the London cook she’d sent to feed them. “He’s been a little sullen lately.”
“A little sullen?” she said.
“We’ve been living on cold meat and cheese,” Lisle said. “He won’t bake. He says the oven is an abomination. I wanted to pitch him out of the window, but he probably wouldn’t fit—and if he did, we’d be short a cook as well as a butler.”
Olivia’s chin went up. “I may help you pitch him out of the window,” she said, in the same coolly indignant tones Lady Hargate would have used. “Not bake bread, indeed. No wonder the staff are so dispirited.”
Head high, eyes blazing, she swept toward the kitchen.
Nichols, who’d been talking to one of the frightened kitchen servants, hurried into her path, to block the door. “I beg your pardon for standing in the way, Miss Carsington, but it isn’t safe. I’m told he’s threatening with the cleaver. I recommend you allow me to disarm him first.”
Olivia eyed Nichols up and down. He could probably don armor and still not weigh ten stone.
“He’s tougher than he looks,” Lisle said, reading her thoughts exactly. “And stronger,” he added in an undertone. “With remarkable stamina—or such at least is his reputation among the womenfolk of Egypt.”
His voice was too low and his mouth was too close to her ear. His breath was warm, tickling her ear and a sensitive place behind it.
She didn’t have time for this.
Men.
“Thank you, Nichols,” she said, “but we cannot allow you to precede us.” She turned to Lisle and added, in a voice as low as his had been, “We can’t let it seem that we’re intimidated by a temperamental French cook. The villagers will hear about it and laugh themselves sick.”
“Sorry, Nichols,” Lisle said more audibly. “We can’t let you have all the fun. Miss Carsington and I will sort this out.”
Olivia waved her hand imperiously.
Nichols stepped out of the way.
More roaring came from behind the door.
Olivia glared at Nichols. He opened the door.
She stormed into the dragon’s lair.
Olivia tried to get ahead of him in the short passage, but Lisle grasped her waist, picked her up, and put her down behind him. The last bit—setting her down again—wasn’t nearly as easy as it ought to be. She was lighter than she looked; the mountainous clothing deceived the eye. It rustled too alluringly, too like the sound of bedclothes being tossed about. It brought back to the front of his mind the slenderness and delicacy of her feet, the grace of her fingers, the silken feel of her skin under his hands.
All the dreams and fantasies he’d so rigorously suppressed rose up like ghosts. He beat them down again.
“You can do the talking,” he said. “But I’m going first in case of deadly missiles.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “You think I can’t handle menials?” She elbowed him sharply in the ribs and pushed past him into the kitchen proper. Cursing under his breath, Lisle followed close on her heels.
Over her shoulder he saw a red-faced Aillier brandishing a cleaver. Since he was nearly six feet tall and three feet wide and surrounded by extremely sharp blades, it required no prescience to understand why the kitchen staff had fled when he exploded.
Lisle had heard the tirade on the way in. Conducted in three languages, it boiled down to:
“This kitchen, to call it primitive is a gross flattery! It is like a cave, for animals. No one can expect me to cook in such a place!”
When Olivia sailed in, the cook paused, mouth open, the hand holding the weapon in midair.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” she said. “You were saying?”
Aillier quickly recovered from his surprise. “It is not to be borne, mademoiselle!” he cried. “This is a place of brutes. The peasants, they are savages of the most ignorant. How am I to tell them what is needed? They speak no English or French. No form of German or Italian. Their language, it is for animals, all grunts and ugly gargling of the mouth.”
“He’s a fine one to talk,” Lisle whispered.
“I see,” Olivia said. “The peasants are inferior. What else?”
Aillier waved his cleaver, first at the oven, then at the gigantic fireplace—which dwarfed even him—the stone basin and sink, the pans and cooking utensils heaped on the ancient trestle table.
“To expect me—Aillier—to cook in such a place is torture!” he roared, though with a degree more uncertainty than a moment ago. “It is inhuman to subject an artist to this—this cave. I will not endure it.”
Slowly and deliberately, Olivia looked about her.
The kitchen occupied the first floor of the castle’s north wing. Even allowing for the thickness of the walls and the size of the fireplace, a generous space remained. One of the three large windows had been converted to an oven. Still, even on rainy days, it was a brighter kitchen than many Lisle had seen. In some great English houses, the kitchens were deep underground.
“I think it’s rather impressive, myself,” Lisle muttered.
No one heeded him.
“This is not torture,” she told Aillier. “Torture must wait until the dungeon is properly fitted out. What we have here are challenging conditions. A great chef can cook anywhere. Remember the challenge Prince Talleyrand set the great chef Carême? A year of meals, never repeating a dish, using only ingredients in season, from the estate. But if you cannot rise to this challenge, it cannot be helped. It’s no use wishing you had skills of a higher order or possessed confidence in those you have. If you are inadequate to the task—”
“Inadequate!”
“Kindly remember that the fellow has a whacking great cleaver in his hand, with a deuced sharp edge,” Lisle murmured.
“If you’ve decided to give up, Monsieur Aillier,” she went on, “then stop fussing about it, and do so. One of the village women can see to our meals until I can send for a proper cook from London. A Roman this time. I’m told they’re dauntless in the face of adversity.”
Having delivered her broadside, she turned and sailed out, cool as you please.
Lisle didn’t move. For a moment he could only stand, staring. He saw Aillier watch her go, his mouth hanging open, his face an ugly shade of maroon.
Lisle braced himself. But the chef slowly lowered the hand with the cleaver in it.
Lisle backed out into the passage. No flying blades, but the silence in the kitchen was ominous.
Then he heard Aillier’s voice, grumbling about accursed Romans
and their inedible sauces. Then came the sound of pans being banged about.
Lisle got halfway to the door where she waited. Then the scene rushed into his mind, as vivid as an illumination: Aillier brandishing the great cleaver—and Olivia, a fraction of his size, in her gigantic sleeves and vast skirts, her curls pinned into silly corkscrews. Olivia, her chin in the air, coolly whittling the immense cook down to size. The look on Aillier’s face. The look on hers.
Ye gods. Ye gods. Olivia.
Olivia stopped short when she heard the sound—someone being strangled, she thought at first. Aillier. Had he sprung into the passage? Attacked Lisle? Heart surging into a gallop, she whipped around.
What she saw in the gloomy space was Lisle, leaning against a wall, bent over, clutching his stomach. . .
Laughing.
She marched back to him. “Not here, you idiot,” she said in a low voice. “He’ll hear!”
Aillier was still talking to himself, banging pans, but they were only a few feet away from the kitchen.
Lisle looked at her, his lips pressed together, but a whoop escaped.
She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door. He started to go with her, but after a few steps, he fell against the wall again, his hand over his mouth.
“Lisle,” she said.