What I am doing is devilry and deceit.
I ought to . . .
Flee? Yes. I ought to leave, but it is too late for that now. I should have done it last night before I met Edmund. If I’d gone then, I could have returned as myself without the disguise, and no one would have recognized me as Clara Smith, the governess who disappeared in the night.
If they did recognize me, I could have explained the situation, and it would have become something to laugh at in future, how I’d been tricked by Emma and mistaken for the governess.
I’ve lost that chance. Perhaps I could flee now and return as myself, unrecognizable as the former Clara Smith. Is that fair to Edmund, though? He will think yet another governess abandoned him and on her first day, no less. If he recognizes me, I will have lost any modicum of trust I’ve gained thus far.
I’ve made a mess of this. Damn Emma. Damn William, too, for not returning to Thorne Manor before I grew impatient and left.
That’s silly. I know it. The fault is mine for being impatient. For not talking to William in the twenty-first century. For not waiting longer at Thorne Manor after I crossed. I might say I’m not impetuous, but I’ve been nothing but impetuous since I saw William and Bronwyn in York. Making bad choices and entrenching myself further in this mess.
Yet I look at Edmund, and there’s part of me that whispers it might not be a mess. I am getting to know my son. He is getting to know me. I will be honest with him as soon as I can. I will never pretend I was not Clara Smith. I will explain, and I will be honest with both him and August.
I was afraid. Afraid you’d remarried, August, and I would be an unwelcome intrusion. Afraid to admit the truth to others and be thrown in an asylum or prison. Afraid to reveal myself before you were here, August.
I may have made a mistake, but I did not do it to hurt anyone.
Expressing sympathy for Edmund’s loss would be wrong. Instead, I only ask whether his London cook is a better baker.
“Papa says she is ad-ad-adequate. Aunt Bronwyn is better, but she has gone away for a fortnight. She promised she will bake cookies when she returns.”
“Cookies?”
“That is what she calls them. She is Canadian and uses funny words.”
“Does she bake good cookies?”
He nods. “She says my mother’s would have been better. Papa agrees, but he says Aunt Bronwyn’s are very good. They have chocolate in them.” He lifts his eyes to mine, and a light twinkles in their depths. “Do you know what that is?”
“Chocolate? I believe I have tried it a time or two.”
That light turns to a mischievous gleam. “Would you like some? Aunt Bronwyn keeps a box in the pantry, and sometimes I sneak down for a piece.”
As a proper governess, I should refuse. I should also include a few stern words about pilfering from the kitchen. But I’m not a governess. I’m a mother who is catching the first glimpses of her son, of the real boy lurking within an overly polite and serious child.
“On one condition,” I say. “If we are caught, you must allow me to say it was entirely my fault, that I said I wished a taste of chocolate, and you were simply accommodating that wish.”
His shy smile breaks into a grin, and he’s on his feet and out the door before I can rise from the table.
Even before we open the kitchen door, the smell of baked ham makes my stomach growl. I really ought to have choked down a tartlet with tea. Perhaps I can grab an orange or banana from the kitchen.
I stifle a laugh even before the thought passes. There will be no bowls of tropical fruit in this kitchen. I might find apples, and only if they’ve been set aside for baking.
Edmund cautiously opens the door and peers through. Then he beckons me forward, and we creep in like thieves. I pause to let my gaze drift enviously over the kitchen as it always did when I came to Courtenay Hall. The sheer amount of space made my baker’s heart sigh with longing. Of course, coming back now, I do not fail to look at the coal-fueled stove and remember how much easier it’d been to cook on a gas one. Then there’d been the microwave for melting butter or chocolate at lightning speed. Also, the electric choppers and mixers and blenders . . .
There had been times, as I set my mixer to cream butter and sugar, that I marveled at the technology and the ease it brought to baking. But there were times, too, when I would put aside the gadgets and immerse myself in the experience of doing everything by hand, to revel in the connection and the control it brought to my craft. The only thing I will miss unreservedly is the breadth of ingredients, such as the one we’re here to pilfer.
We slip into the pantry, which again brings sighs of envy. Yes, I believe I would happily give up my microwave if it meant having a pantry like this with the space to arrange every instrument and ingredient just so.
I will certainly give the new cook credit here. She might not be able to bake bread, but she can certainly organize a pantry, and as Edmund scampers on ahead, I linger, tracing my fingers over gleaming pots and labeled canisters, sighing with satisfaction and envy, the way another woman might walk through a perfect shoe closet.
That’s when I see Edmund climbing up a shelf, and I dart over with a gasp. He answers my fear with a withering look, plucks a canister from the shelf and hops down.
“Cook keeps putting it higher,” he says. “As if I do not know how to climb.”
When he rolls his eyes, he looks so much like his father that I smile even as my heart twists.
“Perhaps she is only ensuring there is chocolate left when your aunt wishes to bake,” I say.
“I am careful,” he says. “I only take two pieces a day.”
He opens the top, and the smell of chocolate makes my stomach growl anew. I glance in, and I have to laugh. It doesn’t just contain chocolate. It contains chocolate chips. Clearly, someone is smuggling in goods from the twenty-first century.
He hands me one chip. I put it onto my tongue, expecting the overly sweet taste of cheap chocolate, but it seems William’s wife seeks out a higher quality, and I nod in satisfaction.
“Is it good?” Edmund asks.
“Very good.”
“Cook says it does not taste like proper chocolate. She says they make proper chocolate in York, but I prefer this.”
I smile. Yes, one day, York will be the chocolate capital of England, but for now, trade in the sweet treat is only just beginning, and it is not the chocolate enjoyed nearly two centuries later. It’s rough and grainy, and it’ll be another two decades before someone invents the machine that refines cocoa to create the creamy texture modern people enjoy.
“Do you know how to bake?” he asks as he puts the lid back on the canister.
I give a start at that, but only say, carefully, “I did a fair deal of it in my youth.”
“Were you good at it?”
“I . . . was told that I was.”
He scampers off into the kitchen. I follow to find him riffling through a drawer. He pulls out a handwritten page and hands it to me, and as I skim it, my lips twitch.
The page is labeled Bronwyn’s Biscuits, but it’s clearly the Toll House cookie recipe. It reminds me of modern bakers laughing about the number of people who “inherit” their grandmother’s prized chocolate-chip recipe only to discover it is, word for word, the Toll House recipe.
When I opened my shop, I’d attempted other variations, but the one that sold best by far—especially to North American tourists—was the original with only a few tweaks. The Toll House recipe is the taste of chocolate-chip cookies, the sensory experience of youth, and a baker messes with it at her peril.