Banquet of Lies Read online

  “Thierry! You take over, and do not let me down. Every plate to be parfait, comprends?” He scowled at a thin, diminutive man in an apron, pointing a threatening finger at him.

  Then he took her arm and swept her into a room off the kitchen. Gigi didn’t think she imagined the sigh of relief from every person behind her just before Georges closed the door, leaving his staff to their own devices for a while.

  “What is it, Giselle?” Georges grasped her shoulders with both hands. “What has happened?”

  “My father was murdered.” Her voice wavered, but she had to leave again in a few short minutes to find a place to stay, so she mercilessly crushed the pain that threatened to rise up and consume her. She glanced around to compose herself. The small sitting room led into a study, and beyond, to a closed door. Georges’s bedroom, she guessed.

  Her body cried out for a safe bed to sleep in.

  The bone-shaking journey across Sweden to Gothenburg had taken a full twenty-four hours, and she knew without doubt that if her father hadn’t already arranged it, hadn’t already planned that they were to leave the party at Tessin Palace and get straight into the coach, already packed with their things, the shadow man would have run her to ground before she’d left Stockholm.

  “Murder?” Georges let his hands fall. “You are certain?”

  “I witnessed it.” She turned away and drew in a deep breath as she got herself and the threatening tears under control. “Georges, I’m afraid the people who killed my father will work out I’m in London if I send word to Pierre. He’s still in Stockholm, cooking for the Countess de Salisburg. Please, find some very discreet way of letting him know I’m safe.”

  “Of course.” Georges stroked her arm, soothing her like she was a small child. And no doubt to him she was. He and Pierre always thought of her as she’d been when she was ten, grieving for her mother, hungry for something to do and for the sound of French around her.

  “Thank you.” She drew in a deep breath. “I must go. Please don’t let anyone know I’m back. No one. It is dangerous for you, and for me.”

  Georges frowned, looking so fierce Gigi wished the shadow man was here now so that Georges could tear him apart. Or chop him with his cleaver.

  “You’re going home to Goldfern House?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “That is the first place the man who’s after me will look. I have to find somewhere else. Perhaps an inn.”

  He smoothed his mustache. “Would you want to be hidden but still be able to move about, or do you want to hunker down like a fox in a hole?”

  “Why?”

  “There is a job I hear about. I remember it because it is at a house three or four down from Goldfern. Too small a job for me, or most of the chefs in London. No prestige, you understand? Just cooking for one man, Lord Aldridge. He will pay well, but that is not the only reason to take a job. There will hardly be any parties—he is a young man, and has no other family. He will dine out, be invited out. It would be a waste of talent for me, and I am happy where I am, with my fine, high kitchen.” He gave a grin, transforming from a dark demon to a cheeky boy, despite the deep grooves in his face.

  “But for someone like you, who can cook like an angel, but wants time to herself and a place to hide—who would look for the daughter of Sir Barrington in the kitchens of a small town house, almost next door to her family home, eh?”

  To be right near Goldfern. To be able to keep watch on it, and see if the shadow man came to look for her there, invisible under her guise as cook? The rage that was both icy with hate and hot with vengeance rose up in her, and her hands became tight fists against her thighs. “That would be a very good place to hide.”

  “Bon.” Georges walked through into his study and pulled out a sheet of paper with the duke’s crest on the letterhead. He sat down at his desk. “I will write a reference for you so you will get the position. They will not turn you away after they read this, I promise you.”

  Georges’s brow was raised in an arrogant arch as he scribbled an almost unintelligible list of her virtues in the kitchen, and Gigi found herself wanting to smile.

  “Voilà!” He left it to dry and turned to her again. “Do you want to stay here until this job is settled?”

  She looked around her. “I don’t want anyone to know about me, or for there to be any talk.”

  “Bah.” He flicked the air as if she spoke nonsense. “You are my niece, we will say, no? The beloved daughter of my brother. It is not a word of a lie. In my heart, you are like my family, Gigi. You stay for a short while, no problem.”

  She felt the walls of her self-control crumbling, and gave a nod. “My things are in the coach outside. I have to pay the driver—”

  “You sit. Georges will make it right.” He stormed out, as if the coachman were somehow in league with the devil and he was going to bargain for her very soul. Gigi stumbled to a sofa and sank down on it. She closed her eyes, and let exhaustion drag her under.

  * * *

  Twilight had fallen as Gigi leaned against the tree four houses down from Goldfern House and wondered what she was doing.

  Her father had always said sleep was as vital as good intelligence.

  She hadn’t had enough, despite the four hours on Georges’s sofa this morning. But at least she’d had a bath and a change of clothes, food that was fit to grace a royal table, and the first glimmer that things would get better.

  A chill breeze rustled the leaves above her, and she could smell the wood smoke and the river in the cold, heavy air. The rough bark caught at her hair, pulling at the loose arrangement under her wide-brimmed hat.

  She had been too exhausted to avoid a puddle earlier, and her feet were wet and cold.

  She needed to get herself together. She was about to go to her first-ever job interview. Georges had sent a note around to Lord Aldridge’s butler this morning, and she was expected. She had to get this job, and go to ground.

  Her escape, her success in reaching London and her father’s death would be for nothing if she stumbled now.

  She shook her head to clear it and realized she had a headache.

  Goldfern House looked empty. As it should.

  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—”