Banquet of Lies (3 page)

But was it?

If she were ahead of the man who killed her father then it was only by a small margin.

He wouldn’t have had a plan in place to get to London, as she had, but her disappearance would have tipped him off that her father had most likely lied. That she had the document for which he was prepared to kill.

So it made sense that he would come looking for her here. With her father dead, where else would she go other than her family home?

A light came on in Goldfern’s hall, illuminating the fan light above the door. She held her breath.

No one came out, and the light moved on into another room.

A servant, checking the locks?

There should be at least three servants in residence, but she couldn’t be sure. And she didn’t know them, anyway. She couldn’t trust them.

If she could give the document to the right person, the shadow man would have one less reason to look for her. And she would not let her father’s sacrifice be for nothing. Thornton had wanted it delivered fast and in secret.

She’d asked Georges if the man he worked for, the Duke of Wittaker, would do something with it—could take it to the right person. But Georges had told her his employer would
most likely toss it in the fire, given his long-standing fight with the Crown over taxes.

She couldn’t take that risk. She had to find someone else.

The bells of a nearby church began to chime five o’clock, and she turned and started toward Lord Aldridge’s town house. She had spent too long watching Goldfern, and now she would be late.

Some of the houses on the street were truly magnificent. Goldfern was solid and large, a sort of portly uncle, she’d always thought, but some were sleek, elegant rakes or serene beauties.

Aldridge House was beautifully proportioned, and something about it tugged at her memory. She had been here before, perhaps, when she was younger and her mother had still been alive. Her eyes were on the windows, not on the street, and her foot turned suddenly on a rock in the road.

She gave a hop and went straight into two girls coming out of the narrow service alley toward which she was headed.

With a cry, all three of them tumbled to the ground.

“
Je suis désolé! Pardon mille fois.
” Gigi tried to struggle to her feet and went down again with a cry on her sore foot.

One of the girls, her face rough-hewn and florid, hauled herself up and put her hands on her hips. “You the French cook, then?”

Gigi was glad she was on the ground and in pain. It hid the blood draining from her face as she realized how she could so easily have spoken English. She had been speaking French quietly with Georges since this morning, so it was the language
foremost in her head, and she could only thank the stars for that.

“Of course she’s the French cook, Babs, you lump.” The other girl got her feet under her and stood. “I’m Iris, miss, and Babs ’n’ me’ll get you in the house. Fancy you coming for the job interview and getting mown down by us two on yer way in.”

Iris was strong, athletically so, and her face was quite beautiful. She also had a very impressive bosom under her wool coat. She lifted Gigi in the same way she probably hauled the coal buckets in the morning.

“Yes, I come for the cook position.” Gigi ladled on a French accent as thick as a glass of chilled Chartreuse.

Iris tucked an arm under Gigi’s, and Babs did the same; then they began moving her toward the service alley.

“I ’ope you get the job ’n’ all. We’re desperate belowstairs, taking it in turns to cook for ourselves while the master eats at his club. It can’t go on,” Iris said cheerfully.

“His Edginess will have something to say about our mowing her down,” Babs muttered under her breath.

Gigi glanced at her, but so did Iris, and Babs shut her mouth with a snap. Her cheeks flushed a dull red and Gigi didn’t think it was from the exertion of half carrying her to the kitchen entrance.

She tested her foot and found she could put more weight on it.

She had a strange sense, as they helped her along, that her plight was like that of a girl in one of the folktales her father
collected. The heroine loses her home and her family, fears for her life and finds a position as a servant. How many hapless girls had taken this path, in how many fairy tales?

She was the Goose Girl of London Town. All she needed was the happy ending.

Gigi smiled at her ridiculous notions. She was more tired, more distressed, than she’d realized.

The kitchen door was slightly open and Babs pushed on it, nearly tumbling them down the kitchen stairs.

Ah.

Georges had not mentioned the subterranean kitchen. To be fair, there were large windows high up along two walls, but they were ominously closed and dirty.

“Iris? What is it?” A clipped voice came from the shadowed entrance to a dark room as they hobbled down the stairs three abreast, and a man stepped out.

“Us and the French lady cook had a little collision, Mr. Edgars, just as we were leavin’. Nothing serious, I don’t think, she just turned her ankle or summat. Babs ’n’ me’ll be off again, now she’s safe ’n’ sound.” In a smooth movement, Iris swung her into a wooden chair near the table, and was quickly at the kitchen door again. “Come on, Babs me girl, we only got three hours off.”

Babs gave Gigi a grin and Edgars a cheeky look, and scrambled out into the gloom after her.

For a moment there was no sound but the snap and crack of a large fire in the hearth, and the beginnings of the rattle of water boiling in a pot with its lid on.

Edgars ignored her. He walked to the fire and pulled the pot off the trivet, setting it on a narrow brick ledge that ran along the wall on either side of the fireplace. He was tall and thin, with gleaming chestnut hair, and she guessed him to be in his early thirties, with an earnest, edgy look about him, as if he took his duties very seriously.

His Edginess.

She smiled, realizing what Babs and Iris’s exchanged look had been about earlier.

“I expect a candidate to be on time for her interview.” He turned as he spoke, his manner cool and intimidating.

Gigi’s smile died, and she raised a brow. Unfortunately for Edgars, she’d been her father’s hostess at parties where men far more powerful than he had tried the same trick. “There was a collision, as Iris just told you. Is the position filled?” She spoke quite calmly, almost bored.

Edgars frowned. “No.”

“I’m not surprised.” She rolled her
r
’s with a delicious sense of playing the fool. Her mother, born and raised in the heart of Brittany, would have roared with laughter at her accent.

Gigi knew how a chef behaved, and she would be one to the hilt.

She had Edgars’ attention now. He drew himself up stiffly. “And why is that, miss?”

“This kitchen, it is . . .” Gigi looked around the kitchen for the first time, seeking something objectionable. Unfortunately, she did not have to look very hard or very long. “Extremely ill-equipped. And not properly clean.” She grabbed
the table, pulled herself up and tested her foot on the tiled floor. “And there is no air.”

“We haven’t had a cook for a month.” Edgars spoke as if the words were being tortured out of him at knifepoint.

“And why not?” She put the full force of French disdain into the question. “Is the master of this house so unreasonable?”

Edgars gasped, his outrage absolutely genuine, and Gigi fought to hide her smile.

“Lord Aldridge is not unreasonable in the least. Except”—Edgars looked distressed—“he can no longer tolerate English cooking. He only has a taste for French and Spanish fare.”

The poor man looked as if it were not possible for both assertions to be true—for his master to be reasonable and yet not like English food—but he was clearly too loyal to say so, and Gigi allowed herself a laugh, the first in at least five days.

“You are quite right. It is good to hear of a man as reasonable as this. Who is Lord Aldridge? What family does he have?”

Edgars went a deep, dark red. “See here, miss, I don’t know who you are, but your questions are quite impertinent.”

Gigi shrugged. “I am a woman on her own, considering taking on a job in the house of a man I don’t know. It is quite reasonable for me to ask what kind of man he is. What he does.
N’est-ce pas?
”

“Well!” Edgars’ cheeks blew up as if he’d stuffed them with lemons, and then he exhaled sharply.

Gigi shrugged again and, testing her foot a last time, began to limp to the back door.

“He’s a good man.” Edgars finally spoke like a proper person, rather than a Butler with a capital
B
. “He attends diligently to his duties to his estates and in the House of Lords. He was an officer in the Peninsula Campaign until his brother, the former Lord Aldridge, died unexpectedly, and he has an impeccable war record. It was while fighting in Portugal, Spain and France that he came to love the food there, and says he can’t abide overboiled anything anymore. He is unmarried, but he does not bring his title into disrepute, and he has never abused his power with his female staff in my fifteen years here, first under his brother, and now under him.”

Gigi came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, her back still to Edgars. Something he’d said rang a bell in her head. Her father talking to her about someone dying unexpectedly. A neighbor. And his brother having to leave the army and return to take up the title.

She’d met them once, she suddenly remembered, when she was ten and they were much older, around twenty and seventeen. Her mother had brought her here for tea. She had no recollection of the details of the occasion, or even what the brothers looked like, and she had no fear the new Lord Aldridge would remember, either.

He was an army man, a man of action, whose life even her father followed from a distance. If only the document she carried wasn’t so very secret, so sensitive that only those requesting
it could ever see it, she could give it to him to see into the right hands.

It was a tempting thought, but one she couldn’t afford to indulge in.

“You have convinced me, Monsieur Edgars.” She turned slowly, her face a courteous mask. “I will accept the position.”

Edgars started opening his mouth and she shook her finger at him.

“No, no, no. Just wait. There will be two conditions. One, my salary will be the same as a male chef’s. I am better than most of them, but I will accept the average salary. And two, I will not be paraded to his lordship’s guests when they insist on congratulating me for the meal. There is nothing I hate more than that.”

The thought had occurred to her because her father often asked Pierre to come take his praise for whichever masterpiece he’d created. Being recognized by someone in Lord Aldridge’s circle wasn’t out of the bounds of probability, so best to make it a condition now.

“Miss . . .” Edgars took a step toward her and then stopped. “What is your name? I’m afraid I couldn’t read Mr. Bisset’s handwriting very well.”

She had considered giving Pierre’s name—but the shadow man would surely know it, since Pierre was someone who could have helped her if she hadn’t left him behind in Stockholm. “Madame Levéel.”

Her mother’s mother’s name. She was sure no one could know that.

“You are married?”

Gigi’s head snapped up, and she used her fear as a masquerade for outrage. She didn’t want to lie more than she had to, and inventing a husband—even if she pretended to be a widow—was more than she was prepared to do.

Edgars actually took a step back in the face of her fury.

“That is none of your business.”

He wrung his hands. “I meant, do you require to live in, Madame Levéel? It would be most difficult if you did not—”

“Oh.” Gigi waved a hand. “Yes, of course I will live in. How could I do otherwise?”

Edgars seemed to rally; he drew himself up. “What I have to ask, madam, is do you have references?”

Gigi blinked. He wanted more than one? She dug in her reticule and brought out Georges’s letter. “References?” The glittering courts of Vienna, the grass-roofed wooden houses of Lapland, the elegant, colorful cottages of Sweden rose in reminder of who she was, and she pulled herself straight, narrowing her eyes.

“I do.” She handed Georges’s letter to him as if the whole transaction were offensive. “However”—she drew a sharp breath in through her nose—“the only reference of any use is my cooking,
monsieur.
And that you will become acquainted with tomorrow evening, after I have moved in and prepared
le dîner
.”

She turned on her heel and hobbled to the stairs, pulling herself up with the handrail. At the top, she turned back and stood poised above him. “Until tomorrow.” She gave a firm nod, and Edgars had no choice but to nod back.

Outside it was almost completely dark, and she walked slowly back to the main road to catch a hansom cab.

She took a last look at Goldfern, sitting squat and large just four houses down, and felt a shiver of trepidation.

The shadow man would come looking for her here.

Then she straightened and, despite her foot, walked briskly away. He wanted to find her, but she wanted just as badly to find him.