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Do you like flowers?
Bertie had asked. It had been a bright June morning, a few days after Stuart’s arrival.

Stuart had nodded. He’d never seen so many flowers in bloom. Roses, roses, and more roses. The garden had been a fairy tale.

I’m going to make new varietals of roses. Dozens of them. Do you want to have a rose named after you?

Stuart had smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled since his mother had left.
If you are sure it’s a boy rose.

Ever since his return to Fairleigh Park, old memories he didn’t even know he still retained had crowded just beneath the surface of his mind, waiting for only the slightest trigger to break into his consciousness.

He and Bertie had played hide-and-seek in this very church. Afterward, Bertie had taken Stuart to High Street and introduced him to old Mrs. Tate, whose dusty shop sold books and bizarre odds and ends, and whispered in his ear that he’d heard Mrs. Tate had been a naughty woman in her youth. On their way home it had rained. And Bertie had talked of his mother, because his face was already wet.

That boy would grow up to be jealous and fearful of him, Stuart reminded himself. He would tell Stuart that Sir Francis had prayed for Nelda Lamb to die, when it seemed she might recover from her illness. And whip an army of lawyers before him, driving Stuart to the brink of bankruptcy.

But
those
memories rang hollow before the lily-covered casket. They’d spurred Stuart for so long, their venomous potency had diminished to a fraction of their former power.

Stuart lifted the spray of lilies and set it aside. The lid of the casket was heavy, but it rose smoothly. Inside the elaborately padded coffin, Bertie lay in formal repose. He wore his hair swept back, in the same style Stuart remembered from his late adolescence. That hair, however, had thinned in the twenty intervening years. Where it was brushed away from his forehead, Stuart could see the edge of Bertie’s scalp, a congealed shade of bluish-white.

Until this moment, he had only understood Bertie’s death intellectually.

He stared at Bertie’s throat—surely the collar had been pulled too tight. A fresh boutonniere of red rose had been pinned to Bertie’s lapel. Bertie’s hands—so alike to his own, when the brothers otherwise bore little physical resemblance to each other—were folded together across his abdomen. And next to his hands, the envelope marked “To be buried with me.”

From outside came the sound of carriage wheels crunching on the gravel drive. Mourners were arriving in front of the church. Soon they would populate the pews. Stuart lowered the lid of the casket.

There were voices. The first mourners were already walking up the steps of the church. But they sounded very far away.

That photograph. It had been May, hadn’t it? And they’d been in a part of the gardens that had later been dug up and completely rearranged. It had been during Sir Francis’s brief passion for photography. And they’d had trouble holding still, lapsing again and again into giggles. And—

Stuart opened the casket, opened the envelope, and removed the photograph of Bertie and himself. He barely had time to slip it into his breast pocket and put back the lilies before the vicar returned.

The vicar smiled at him, brimming with incurious good nature. “All right, sir?”

Verity wept.

She had not expected to cry. She’d thought of Bertie only in passing since his death. But as the organist struck the last quivering notes of “End of the Road,” and six of Bertie’s Harrow classmates hoisted his casket onto their shoulders, the tears came, as if they’d been there all along.

He hadn’t loved her the way she’d hoped he would, but she’d been able to make a good life for herself here, under his aegis. In the ten years since the end of their affair, he’d never once made inappropriate advances toward her, never unleashed groundless criticism against her work, never withheld a raise when she’d earned one.

Around him, the estate—and her kitchen—had revolved with a steadfast, comforting regularity. His habits gave rhythm to her life. His palate guided her gifts. Her true North he hadn’t been, but he’d been a solid path that had not led into murky woods, nor shifted uncertainly underfoot.

And she’d scarcely realized how much she’d appreciated it, until this moment, when he would be packed under six feet of earth, when it was too late to tell him that she was grateful for his decency and consideration.

After the funeral, Michael located Verity in the kitchen. She was alone. Luncheon, a cold buffet, had been prepared in advance so that all the servants could attend the service.

He inhaled the air. “Madeleines?”

“Madeleines,” she answered. The first batch had already come out of the oven, little golden shells cooling on the rack.

“In memory of the late Mr. Somerset?”

She sighed softly. “A tribute.”

After the end of their affair, she’d never made madeleines again for Bertie, her one lone revenge. A petty gesture, now that she thought of it. She loved nothing more than that her food should bring people pleasure. And Bertie had adored her madeleines to bits.

“A farewell tribute?”

“I suppose you could say so.”

“No, I meant—is it a farewell to us? Are you leaving?”

She looked about her beloved kitchen. She would have to leave its familiar odors and textures behind too. And her rooms, her sweet home and shelter. The grounds of Fairleigh Park. The gardens that rivaled earthly Eden come the first month of summer.

“I saw you cry at the funeral,” said Michael. “You stayed because you loved him. And now he’s gone.”

No, I stayed because I love
you.

Love had once been such an easy subject. When he’d been a child, they’d made the expression of love a game of hyperbole.
My love for you is deeper than the tunnel to China. My love for you is enough to melt all the steel in Damascus. My love for you is more constant than p
(this after Michael had learned about the circle at school).

But somewhere along the way they’d lost that camaraderie, especially after she’d told him that no, she wasn’t his mother, and that she had no idea who his parents were.

“Mr. Bertram Somerset was once very dear to me,” said Verity. “But he is not the reason why I stayed. Nor the reason why I may leave.”

Part of her wanted to hand in her resignation that very afternoon, while a different part of her begged for another day, another dinner, another chance. She wasn’t ready to completely give up. She still thought she had magic enough.

“You’ll go work for Monsieur du Gard, then?”

Monsieur du Gard was one of the wealthiest members of Bertie’s gastronomic circle, the one who consistently offered her the highest wages to cook for him.

“Possibly,” she said. “Isn’t it what you’ve always wanted for me, fame and glory in Paris?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve always assured me you don’t want?” said Michael.

“People change, don’t they?”

He stood close enough that she smelled the toilette water she’d made for him last summer, with pine oil she’d purchased from an old Hungarian émigré in Manchester. Her room had smelled like a forest for days on end.

Michael gave her a chill look. “They certainly do.”

From the hothouse, Verity had her first look at Mr. Somerset in good light.

She’d avoided him, of course. But even without any measure of evasion, in the absence of a direct summons, the cook and the master of the house—one who wasn’t fanatically devoted to the art and science of gastronomy—could pass months without catching sight of each other.

At the church she’d mostly had a view of the back of his head, a view that had been further obstructed by an inconveniently placed pillar. He’d sat at the foot of the pulpit, while she’d stood at the very back, in a huddle with the other servants—the distance between them sixteen rows of pews and the whole structure of the British class system.

The hothouse was located behind the manor, in a cluster of other utilitarian structures—the kitchen complex, the brewery, the dovecote—and separated from the rear gardens by a boxwood hedge almost ten foot high. Not the sort of place where one expected to see the master of the house loitering.

But when she looked up from the spread of potted herbs set on propped-up planks, he was only a few feet away, on the other side of the glass panes, walking slowly, a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his left hand.

He came to a stop, his profile to her. He was thinner than she remembered, and older than he’d looked in the photograph that had been in the newspaper, which now she judged to have been taken at least half a decade ago. Faint shadows darkened the underside of his eye. His forehead was creased. A groove carved from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth.

Some lovers were fortunate enough to grow old together. They’d grown old apart. She did not think him any less handsome. She only wished that she’d been there when the first line on his face had appeared, so that she could have stroked and kissed and cherished it.

He was to depart Fairleigh Park within the hour, not to return until after the New Year. But she would not be here when he came again. She’d be settled down in Paris, on her way to gastronomic immortality.

She suddenly realized that she was exposed to his view, with nothing between them but clear glass panes that had been wiped down just two days ago. She sidled toward a tall trellis overgrown with cucumber leaves. Her movement caught his eye. He looked in her direction just as she slid behind the trellis.

Her heart pounded. Through the gaps in the leaves she could still see him. He stared at the spot where she stood behind the trellis. Then he took a step toward the greenhouse. Then another step. Then another.

She recognized the look on his face for what it was: desire, beneath all the outward paddings of respectability. Not quite the roiling desire she’d sensed when he’d come into her room that night at the inn, but desire all the same, fully formed and intent.

Her breath was in tatters. Her heart hurtled itself every which way, an occupant of Bedlam hell-bent on breaking out. The handles of the snippers dug into tender places between her fingers, so tightly did she clutch them.

She didn’t want it, she thought rebelliously, almost angrily. She didn’t want him to be the kind of man who fancied his cook. With Bertie it had been different—they’d had the love of food in common. But Stuart Somerset was indifferent to her food. And all
he
knew of Madame Durant was that she’d slept with his brother: an easy woman.