“Poorly. Very weak.”
Ask about Mr. Hartwell, Henrietta willed her mother.
“And Oliver himself?” her mother said, right on cue.
“He’s—“ Her father wiped his mouth. “It’s hard to tell. He’s a private man.”
“But how does he look? Is he drawn? Is he sleeping and eating?”
Her father only shrugged. “He’ll weather this. He’s weathered worse.”
“Hssst,” her mother warned her father and cast a meaningful look around the table at the rest of the family.
Worse? What could be worse than having your wife die? Twice now for Mr. Hartwell. Henrietta’s heart ached for the poor man. She must think of something she could do from a distance to ease his grief.
The next day, an idea came to her during her morning ride, and when she came back into the house, she went down to the kitchens.
“Mrs. Blaire, would you teach me how to make custard?”
“Custard, my lady? Why would you want to know that?”
In the main, Mr. Hartwell ate very little, but Henrietta had noticed he loved Mrs. Blaire’s custard, often finishing two platefuls of it at a single meal. But she couldn’t possibly admit her real reason for wanting to learn how to make custard.
“Is it very difficult? Do you think I could manage it?”
Several days of instruction followed with Mrs. Blaire unfailingly producing a perfect custard, while Henrietta’s was either a curdy clump or a gritty soup. Mrs. Blaire’s custards were not wasted but sent up to grace the dinner table each night. Henrietta’s attempts weren’t wasted, either; they went to the pigs who would eat anything.
When a flustered, sweaty, covered-in-egg-yolk Henrietta finally produced a gorgeously yellow, thick, silky custard and Mrs. Blaire pronounced it as good as hers, she glowed with a deep satisfaction.
“Now,” she said, looking around the kitchen. “What kind of pot should I put it in to send it off?”
Mrs. Blaire frowned. “Send it off? Where, my lady?”
As always, when someone nudged close to Henrietta’s secret, she felt herself get hot.
“Oh.” The cook nodded knowingly. “To the neighbors. That strapping Ramsey boy. I see.”
Until that moment, Henrietta had not remembered Geoffrey also liked Mrs. Blaire’s custard and had even been known to pick up his plate and lick it when he was younger.
“What? No, no, no,” Henrietta said, horrified. “I want to send it . . . far away.”
“You can’t preserve custard and send it off like jam, my lady. It will spoil in a day. How far away did you want to send it?”
“No matter.” Henrietta fled the kitchen.
That night, her sister Ellen complained about having custard as a sweet for the fifth night in a row.
“Nothing beats Mrs. Blaire’s marvelous custard,” her father said and deposited a large spoonful in his mouth.
Henrietta almost blurted out she had been the one to make this particular custard, but that would almost certainly lead to questions about why she had and she didn’t have a ready excuse that didn’t include mention of Mr. Hartwell’s fondness for custard. Henrietta was a woefully bad liar, and, unlike Mrs. Blaire, her older brother Alexander would needle her until he got the embarrassingly true answer he was after.
So, she kept her mouth shut, only opening her lips to eat the rich custard as her mother began to regale the table with the fact that the wordsweetcame from the Old Englishsweteand the word was likely over five thousand years old.
It was a very good custard.
And it was unjust, Henrietta decided, that a word could last for five thousand years and a very good custard could only last a day.
Two
