The Silver Lord

Swiftly she washed, dressed, and braided her hair while she sipped at her tea, then took the candlestick to light her way and hurried down the back stairs to begin the kitchen fire. A single, mournful bong from the tall clock echoed her footsteps: half past four.

Early, yes, but not as early as Fan had believed. Even on the stairs she could hear the sounds of pans crashing together and a man’s off-key singing and swearing, one blending seamlessly into the other. She could also smell the scent of roasting meat, and see the bright, flickering light from the fire, a large and wasteful fire, too, from the brightness of it. She frowned, determined to stop such blatant disregard for the cost of wood, and marched sternly into the kitchen.

And stopped abruptly at the sight before her. What her poor, dear aunt would have made of this in her kitchen!

Looming over the hearth was a stout older man with one leg missing below the knee, the stump supported by an elaborately carved wooden peg turned like a newel post at the base of a staircase. The man had no hair left on the top of his head, but from the nape he still could grow the gray queue that hung down the middle of his back, nearly to the strings of the leather apron tied around his barrel-shaped waist. In his hand he brandished a long-handled meat-fork like a kitchen-king’s scepter, and beneath his bristling white brows was no welcome for Fan at all.

“What d’ye be gawkin’ at, missy?” he demanded.

“And what are you doing in my kitchen?” she demanded back, settling her hands on her hips. Not only was the man making free with the hearth and larder, but he’d also changed things that hadn’t been changed in Fan’s lifetime: the woodbin had been shifted from one side of the room to the other, the ancient black iron kettle with the mended handle had been replaced by one of new copper, and twin rows of new blue-and-white chalkware plates now filled the shelves of the Welsh dresser in place of the familiar battered pewter chargers. “What is your name?”

“I be John Small, His Lord Cap’n’s cook and warrant officer of His Majesty’s frigate Nimble, and twice the man as any you’ll ever know,” said the man, jabbing his fork at a chicken roasting on a spit over the fire. “Who the devil be you?”

“I am Mistress Winslow, the keeper of this house,” she said warmly, giving an irritable little shove at a packing-barrel filled with wood shavings and more new dishes, “and I have no love for ill-mannered old men, whomever they pretend to be. Why are you here at this hour, meddling where you don’t belong and waking the house with your blasphemy and caterwauling?”

“I be makin’ His Lordship’s breakfast, as even a fool in black petticoats could see if she used her eyes for seein’.” With the long-handled fork, he turned the strips of bacon sizzling in the iron spider, one deft twist of his wrist that kept the fat from splattering into the coals.

“As for this hour or that hour,” he continued, without deigning to look her way, “why, it be smack in the middle o’ morning watch, and if His Lordship’s not to go begging for his eggs and bacon, but to have them proper, when he wakes, then this be the hour when they gets made.”

Fan flushed, for this was not how the morning was to have begun. Here she’d contrived a pleasing dream of surprising George with a fine-made breakfast, while this dreadful old man had already done so and better, and in her own kitchen, too, making her feel like a lazy, worthless slug-a-bed in the bargain.

“Now if you wish to make yourself useful, missy,” continued Small, cracking four eggs in quick succession into the glossy sheen of melted butter waiting in another pan over the coals, “then there’s His Lordship’s chocolate still waiting.”

“I am not here to take orders from you,” said Fan tartly, but still she looked to where he was pointing with his fork. On the table sat a tall, cone-shaped contraption like a pewter coffeepot without a spout or handle, but with a long wooden paddle that protruded through a hole in the lid. Beside it on a trivet sat a pan of steaming milk, and a dish of grated chocolate.

“Get along with it, missy,” he said impatiently. “Put the chocolate into the mill, then the milk, slow and easy, to keep out the lumps. His Lordship don’t care for lumps in his chocolate, not at all.”

Fan studied the chocolate mill warily. No one she knew drank chocolate, not with tea so readily available, and she’d never seen a chocolate mill before this one. Not that she wished to admit that to John Small.

“I don’t take orders from the kitchen staff,” she said defensively. “As Feversham’s housekeeper, I give them.”

The man’s eyes gleamed. “That don’t be it at all,” he said, his contempt palpable. “Do it now? Nay, it be that you don’t know how to make chocolate, do you?”

“Of course I do,” she said swiftly, though of course she didn’t. She lifted the lid on the mill and poured the milk inside, around the wooden paddle, and then the chocolate, before she snapped the lid down tight. She reasoned that somehow the chocolate must be blended with the milk, and taking the mill in both hands, she gave it a tentative shake.

“Do you be daft, missy, or only pretending to make a righteous idiot of yourself?” Small yanked the mill from her hands and set it on the table. He centered the handle of the paddle between his palms and rolled it briskly back and forth until the milk and chocolate became a frothy, fragrant mixture. “There now, that be how fine London gentlemen drink their chocolate.”

“But this isn’t London,” she protested. “This is Kent.”

“Oh, aye, and I be needing you to explain the differences?” He snorted as he deftly flipped the sizzling bacon in the skillet. “I’ve seen cockle-shell galleys with better kitchens than this. Where’s your proper stove, I ask you? Cookin’ over a fire like this be well and fine for grannies and cottagers and such, but if His Lordship expects grand dinners for his mates, then a proper Robinson range we must have.”

“Perhaps you should be making do with what you have rather than pining after what you don’t,” said Fan defensively, striving to keep her voice from turning shrill with frustration. She’d no more knowledge of what “a proper Robinson range” might be than of how to operate a chocolate mill, and the more John Small ranted and railed, the more ignorant she felt.

She couldn’t deny that Feversham had grown shabby under the Trelawneys, but the kitchen had always been sufficient for her aunt and her mother and a score of other cooks before them, and to hear it attacked now by this one-legged old sailor—why, it seemed disrespectful and wrong.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking to change everything just for the sake of changing,” she said, “not when—here now, where are you going with that?”

A beardless young sailor with a calico kerchief tied around his head and his arms full of firewood stared blankly at her.

“There’s plenty of wood in the woodbin already without you traipsing in here with more,” she said. “Besides, dry wood like that costs good money, and we’ll not be wasting it keeping a great roaring fire all the day long in the kitchen. Take it back to—”

“Stow it here in the woodbin, Danny,” said Small as easily as he’d arranged the breakfast tray. “No use runnin’ short o’ twigs, is there?”

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