The Devil's Feast Page 10

  “Of course,” I said, wondering how I might escape him. Then my savior appeared. “Monsieur Soyer!”

  Soyer was watching a man marching through the kitchen. He turned and revealed himself to be the secretary, Mr. Scott. Unaware that we could see him, he came and stood very close to a kitchen maid who was busily beating some concoction. He looked over her shoulder as if to examine her work but at the same time he pressed his palm hard into the back of her skirts. It was impossible that the girl did not notice, though her face gave nothing away. I hoped the volume of her skirts meant she did not feel it.

  “Mr. Scott! What brings you to our subterranean kingdom?” Soyer called out brightly.

  Mr. Scott took a startled step from his prey. She slipped quickly out of the kitchen.

  “I hear you have disposed of all the food, Mr. Soyer,” Mr. Scott said. He carried a large ledger, which he now opened. “A terrible waste. It will look appalling on the books.”

  Soyer shrugged. “What would you have me do, Mr. Scott? Our kitchens must be beyond reproach.”

  “But still, Captain Beare and the rest will not like it.”

  “If the committee wishes us to take all precautions . . . Moreover, Mr. Scott, as you know, I have made considerable savings in the last few months. If only the rest of the club was managed as carefully.”

  Mr. Scott’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

  “Have you met Captain Avery?” said Soyer. “Mr. Scott, Walter Scott—just like the great author.” Soyer paused in a way that seemed subtly denigrating. “The club secretary.”

  “We have met,” I said. I could not resist. “Are you any relation?”

  “To the writer? No, Captain Avery,” the secretary said with a stiff little smile. “But, as I said before, do not hesitate to come to me, should you have any questions. I oversee the entire club.”

  “Was there anything else, Mr. Scott?” said Soyer. “I am exceedingly busy.” He gave a small, dismissive wave that was meant to insult.

  “No, Mr. Soyer, I simply wished to see how the kitchen was conducting itself. I, too, am very busy.” Scott turned on his heel.

  “Incompétent,” Soyer muttered, smiling all the while. “I hope you are still going to allow me to entertain you tonight, Captain Avery? I plan to depart at nine.”

  I nodded. I had wondered why he was so keen to take me out. Now I believed it was to win me over to his side.

  The kitchen no longer seemed to me the charmed, delightful place it had the day before. There was much I needed to understand.

  “I wondered if you might spare me Matty—Matilda—for one hour?” I said.

  He did not ask why, but gave me a watchful look and said, “I believe she is working in the pastry kitchen. I shall need her in one hour or two for some clerking. My foolish secretary left yesterday.”

  I strolled over to the pastry kitchen. Matty was cleaning out a cupboard. Mr. Schmidt, the pâtissier, was, as I had seen him last, entirely preoccupied with a most elaborate cake decoration.

  “Mr. Schmidt, Captain Avery at your service. I must speak with your kitchen maid Matilda. A matter of Monsieur Soyer’s. Most urgent.”

  Schmidt barely looked up but, about him, the cooks’ and commis’s attention stirred. Matty’s face was deep in the cupboards. “If Mrs. Relph can spare her,” he said, his voice deep and foreign. “Ask of Mrs. Relph.”

  Mrs. Relph was the older pastry cook I had seen with Matty before. “Mrs. Relph,” I called across the whistling steam, “it is important.”

  Mrs. Relph gave me a most suspicious look and nodded, her lips tight with disapproval. Matty emerged from her cupboard. Without raising their heads, the young men about her seemed almost to twitch with awareness of her.

  “Follow me, Miss Horner,” I said.

  We walked out into the corridor, and as far from the kitchens as we could go. Her face lit up.

  “How are you?” I said. “Did you wash carefully after . . .”

  “Of course. I thought you had left,” she said.

  “I have been asked to stay.”

  “Something’s amiss?”

  “This is confidential. The committee are concerned about Rowlands’s death. A doctor came to examine the body.”

  “It wasn’t cholera?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea where to begin,” I said. “Unless you can help me. I am a soldier, not a private inquiry agent. I do not understand this place. I need a guide. I have you for an hour. We should speak outside.”

  She looked up from under her brows. “I can’t, don’t ask me. I’m finished with all that. I’m happy here.” When I had first met her, Matty had been a police informer.

  “Lord, Matty! I know nothing about this place. I am all at sea, and even you, my only friend here, will not help me.” I pressed my thumb into the place between my eyebrows where it ached. “Something is not as it should be. Please, help me. Explain this place to me. I’m sure you would not refuse if Blake asked you.” I knew this was unjust. “Or perhaps this place has secrets and you are frightened to speak of them.”

  “It has not,” she snapped. I had riled her. “Where is Blake?”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “Come on, Captain. I can keep a secret.”

  “I cannot. It is not my secret to tell. But I will tell you what the surgeon said.”

  • • •

  TRAFALGAR SQUARE is a peculiar spot: one of those rare places in the city where there was space to stop and contemplate the moving city without being deafened or jostled or crushed by successive waves of humanity. At the same time, it was quite bare of all vegetation. Not one tree marred its vistas. Perhaps its architects had thought the natural world would distract from its grand constructions. It was late November when I had last seen it, and the column that would eventually support Lord Nelson’s statue had grown another thirty feet above its vast square plinth.

  Matty stood on the steps of the church on the eastern side. She looked like a little starling in a brown cloak and a black-and-brown bonnet. It was pleasant to walk, and I felt it churlish to press her.

  “Matty—”

  “Look at me, in my warm cape and my proper bonnet. The club has given me so much, and I love my position. It is better than I could ever have hoped.” I knew she did not want to speak of it. I felt a brute for making her. I pulled her round to face me.

  “I am truly sorry, Matty, but I need you to tell me about the club. All of it.”

  “What did the surgeon say?”

  “Rowlands was poisoned—with arsenic.”

  “Bloody hell!” The news winded her. “What will happen? Will we be closed? Will there be jobs lost?”

  “I cannot tell. We do not know where it came from. It could have been the kitchen, or Rowlands might have dosed himself. It could even have been someone from outside trying to cause damage.”

  “Like that Francobaldi, or something to do with the Egyptian banquet?”

  “You are very quick. Tell me about Francobaldi.”

  “He’s always sniffing round Chef. I don’t like him. He pretends to be friendly, but I reckon he’d do anything to get one over on Chef.”

  “That is interesting.” I marked Francobaldi as someone to observe.

  She gathered herself. “Not that he’d kill a man, though, I’m not saying that, but . . . Why isn’t Blake here? He’s Soyer’s friend.”

  “I would tell you if I could, I swear it. I hope he will come. Heaven knows I need him to come. In the meantime, I must know about the kitchen. Yesterday, it seemed to me to be a beautiful mechanism that worked perfectly. Today, I saw a boy beaten senseless and one cook almost stab another. And at least one member of the committee is convinced that something is not well in the kitchen. And the committee told me they think another member of the club may have died of something similar some weeks ago
.”

  My words silenced her; quite the opposite effect to that I had hoped for.

  “Do you not see that the only way to return matters to where they were is to discover the source of the poison as quickly as possible?” I said pleadingly. “And even if nobody in the kitchen is directly responsible, then it is at least possible that it came from there.”

  We walked for a minute or so, I biting back my impatience. “For example,” I said at last, “is it usual for boys to be knocked insensible in the scullery?”

  “Sometimes. Gimbell does it there so no one but the kitchen boys and the scullery maids see. And he enjoys it.”

  “So Monsieur Soyer doesn’t know?”

  “Oh, he knows. They all know. Maybe not how bad he is, or how much he drinks. They just reckon it’s not their business to interfere. It’s how it works. They say a kitchen needs a porter who will frighten off the beggars and the thieves and train up the potboys and keep them in line. They need to learn obedience. Gimbell does it, so no one else has to. He’s reliable, to their way of seeing.”

  “I cannot like a man who allows such things on his watch.”

  “I don’t like it; I don’t say I do. But it’s part of it, the kitchen, good and bad. Mr. Percy says the kitchen’s like a ladder—or an army. You’d understand that. Chef at the top, then Monsieur Morel, the sous-chef, then the senior chefs who run the different stations: sauces, fish, roast, grill, vegetable, desserts—all that. Then the chefs de partie, their seconds-in-command, then under them the cooks and the junior chefs—the commis—and the apprentices, and then us, the kitchen maids. Mr. Percy says Chef must be concerned with the whole ladder. He cannot always look at what is happening on the rungs.”

  I understood it. I did not like it.

  “Do you know anything about the boy who kills vermin? And where they keep the arsenic?”

  “Not much. He’s a bit simple, does his job well enough. Very careful—had the fear of God put into him. All the poisons are locked in a special cupboard. We can’t get at it. Mr. Percy has the key.”

  “I have not asked you about Pen. Blake said he did not stay.”

  Her brother. Her face fell. A less happy subject. “You’d never recognize him—he’s grown like a weed. Found regular work hard to stick to.” She rubbed her mouth. “They still give him a little portering here, but . . .” She trailed off. “Couldn’t force him to stay. And I see him on my afternoon off.”

  “How does he live?”

  “On this and that. Costers give him a bit of work. Staying in some lodging house with his mates. Says he prefers it. I give him a bit of tin and food from the kitchen.” She gave an unhappy smile.

  “Did Gimbell beat Pen?”

  “Yes. Said he smelled disobedience on him. Pen’s a rum one, I know that, but Gimbell went for him. One day, after he’d had a few, he took Pen into the scullery and beat the living daylights out of him. Mr. Percy himself caught hold of me, or I would have killed him. He said this is how it is in a big kitchen. To be perfect every day, we must do exactly what we’re told or we fall short and then we fail. You have to take it from those above you, even from Gimbell. You have to learn how to get around him. Them as”—she corrected herself—“those who keep their heads down and stick it, they’ll do and they’ll rise. Those who can’t, they lose their chance.”

  “So Pen left.”

  “He says he prefers the streets. Can’t stay indoors. Maybe he’ll learn.” She rubbed her eyes.

  “And you and Gimbell?”

  “I’ve had clouts off him, but I kept my head down and I’m out of there now.”

  “And the small man with a gray mustache in the roasting kitchen? He nearly stabbed a man today.”

  She knew him. “Monsieur Benoît. An artist with meat and fish, Chef says. Maybe he is, but he’s a bastard—sorry for my language,” she said, “but he is. And there’s that cook, Albert. Dark hair. Troublemaker, likes to make the other cooks look bad.”

  “I saw him.”

  “He’s a bastard, too—sorry, but he is. I wouldn’t work on meat if you paid me. One time, Monsieur Benoît pressed an apprentice’s hand on a hotplate till he screamed. Two weeks the boy couldn’t work.”

  “Did Soyer know?

  “He kept his job for him.”

  “And the boy came back?” I said, horrified.

  “Of course. You don’t get a chance in a kitchen like Soyer’s twice. Besides, he was French, where else would he go?”

  “Could you imagine someone in the kitchen who felt mistreated taking a bribe, perhaps in return for adding something they shouldn’t to a dish?”

  “No! No one would do that! Everyone wants to work for Chef. Everyone loves Chef. This is the best kitchen in England.”

  “Where apprentices have their hands burned and it takes two weeks for their wound to heal and boys are beaten insensible?” I said angrily.

  “You don’t understand!” she said, just as angry.

  I collected myself. “Could someone steal into the kitchens without being seen and add something to a dish?” I asked, more calmly.

  “I cannot see how. We all know each other. Well, perhaps it is possible,” she said thoughtfully. “People come in new sometimes, a potboy, an apprentice. But they stay. Or they usually do. And there are the carters and carriers and errand boys that hang around the doors. Some of them I recognize, but not all of them.”

  “Any more kitchen tyrants and monsters to apprise me of?”

  She scowled. “The kitchen is full of stresses and strains. When service is on, and there are three hundred for dinner and everything must happen at the right moment, and everything must be perfect, and the kitchen is all steam and pistons and heat, it’s like bedlam, and it’s true, chefs become angry, cooks and commis play jokes, or plot against each other, or torment the apprentices. It’s just how it is. The chefs are hard taskmasters, the cooks want approval and promotion. If they don’t get it, there’ll be someone snapping at their heels. And there’s always dinner to be made.”

  “It sounds to me as if the bullies and bruisers thrive.”

  “That’s not true. The best cook in the kitchen is Monsieur Perrin, the sauce chef. Did you see him? He’s in charge of all the sauces and soups, over men twice his age. He never loses his temper, even when there’s a rush. Everything he does comes out right. Everyone likes him.” She smiled fondly. I recalled the golden-haired prodigy.

  “And handsome, too.”

  “The kitchen maids say he has lovely soft eyes”—she blushed a little—“and they love his accent. They’re all in love with him, but he hardly notices. Everyone likes him. ’Cept maybe Mr. Morel.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve heard it said he’s jealous.”

  “Jealous of what?”

  “Perrin—he does everything well. And everyone likes him.”

  “And they don’t like Morel?”

  “No. He’s different, Morel.”

  “How?”

  “He’s quiet, keeps to himself. But he’s able, always busy. And sad.”

  “Sad?”

  She shrugged. “What’s the word? Melancholy.” She pronounced it carefully, but with a certain satisfaction. “And sometimes he’ll lose his temper suddenly when the kitchen is very stretched and it seems as if everything is going to come crashing about our ears. But it never does.”

  “Are there no English cooks?”

  “Everyone knows the English can’t cook! There are a few apprentices and junior chefs, and most of the potboys and kitchen maids are English. It’s not what I expected—all the foreigners—but I like it.”

  “So Mr. Percy is the most senior Englishman.”

  “Been here since the club opened. He’s cool-headed, that’s the thing. He’s been kind to me, likes hard workers. Doing two jobs now, since the butler lef
t.”

  “The butler left?”

  “A few months back. Mr. Percy does the ordering and oversees the dining room. He likes it that way. He’s got lots of staff—footmen and underbutlers and clerks and all.”

  She took my arm and led me down toward the scaffoldings of the Houses of the Parliament.

  “So,” I ventured at last, “Monsieur Soyer.”

  “I have never met anyone like him.”

  “I, too, have never met anyone like him,” I said. “I think one of him is probably enough.”

  She gave me a sharp look. “I know he seems a bit . . . with his clothes and his airs and all, but he’s a good man, a genius I reckon, and he gave me a chance I could never have hoped for. He insists on the best, and we make brilliant things. He works harder than anyone. He’ll sit sketching an idea for hours. Just thinking. Or standing over a sauce, tasting, adding, starting again. On and on. He never sleeps.”

  “I understand that he gave you a chance, Matty, but he let Gimbell beat Pen.”

  “He’s not perfect, but every kitchen maid and apprentice knows how lucky they are to be at the Reform.”

  “A man on the committee told me there might be foul play in the kitchen and that he did not trust Soyer.”

  “I can’t speak for upstairs, but I’d say that’s nonsense.”

  “But you have heard things?” I coaxed.

  “I’ve heard they’re fools. Percy says they are jealous of Chef’s success and think he outshines the club. Who is it who says this?”

  “Red-faced creature, Captain Beare.”

  She nodded. “Fancies himself as chairman after milord steps down. Has it in for Chef. He says Chef’s got above himself, that he’s a servant and should remember it. Says the food bill is too high. Wants everything cheaper.”

  “Do the others think this?”

  “No. No. Some of them want things cheaper, but Chef has champions, like the chairman, Milord Whatshisname—”

  “Lord Marcus Hill.”

  “That’s him.” She smiled wickedly. “Likes his dinner and his comforts. Just married. Forty-three he is, and his blushing bride is twenty-one and very rich.”