The Devil Asked for Seconds

The man who ordered my execution sent back his dessert. He wanted more lemon.

I stood in the service corridor with the plate balanced on my palm and considered the many uses of a silver dessert fork. None of the interesting ones would get Pearl paid. She was behind me, trying to lift a tray of twelve custard cups while the Briar House steward explained that the family preferred dishes to arrive without fingerprints.

“They’ll arrive without dishes if you keep talking,” she said.

Mrs. Sleet took the tray from her. She had the rectangular shoulders of someone who had carried this household through several generations of men explaining their preferences.

“Go and fetch the second tray. And you, Quince—what is that expression?”

“Professional disappointment.”

“Then put it away. Lord Rook has been disappointed for years. We don’t require a matching set.”

She pushed through the baize door.

The tart on my plate was untouched except for one narrow bite. A crescent of filling shone under the corridor lamp. I’d made it with orchard lemons, salted butter, egg yolks strained twice. The crust hadn’t sagged. The curd was smooth. It was a good tart.

It could, if I were being honest with myself, have used more lemon.

That made me angrier.

Six years earlier, someone had held an order with Lucien Rook’s seal against the bars of my cell. I hadn’t seen his face then. I’d seen a black bird pressed into red wax, and beneath it my name, misspelled. Vespere. As though the extra letter had made me easier to kill.

The guard who let me out wanted an oven built for his sister. I built it. For months afterward I couldn’t hear boots on a stair without tasting the iron cup they had given me in the cell.

Tonight I had come to Briar House because I hadn’t known whose house it was.

The contract said private memorial supper, west road, twelve guests. Half the fee had arrived in advance. The address was delivered that morning, after the pastry was baked and Pearl had turned down another job. An inconvenience, I’d thought, caused by someone rich enough not to notice the inconvenience of others.

The west road ended at iron gates. Black birds perched along them, their metal beaks green with age.

By then I should have turned the cart around.

Instead I had told Pearl that if anyone asked, we were much too busy to be frightened.

Now someone laughed in the dining room. The sound was followed by a cough that didn’t stop.

I reached for the brass handle. A chair struck the floor on the other side.

Pearl came around the corner carrying the second tray.

“Vesper?”

“Put it down.”

I opened the door.

The dining room looked arranged for a painting about expensive grief: green walls, tall candles, a portrait of a young woman above an empty chair. Rain ticked against the windows. At the far end of the table, a white-haired man had folded sideways over his plate.

One of the guests was thumping his back. Another held a glass to a mouth that couldn’t accept it.

“Move the glass,” I said.

Nobody listened.

I set down the returned tart and walked to the fallen man. His lips had darkened. A thin thread of custard ran toward his collar. There was no visible piece of food blocking his mouth, no response when I called to him.

“Send for a physician. Now.”

Mrs. Sleet had already turned toward the door.

The man behind the overturned chair looked at me. Thirty-something, black hair damp at the temples, a nose that had healed crooked. His evening coat fitted beautifully. Its right sleeve was caught on a splinter in the chair.

Lucien Rook.

He tore the sleeve free.

“Dr. Vale is in the south cottage,” he told a footman. “Take the carriage. Tell her a guest has collapsed and is not responding.”

He knelt and, with another guest, eased the man onto the floor. Someone said the man’s name. Thaddeus. Someone else said not again, so softly I almost missed it.

On the fallen man’s plate sat a little black pastry with a glaze like polished coal. Half of it was gone.

I had made no black pastries.

I looked back toward the service door. Pearl stood there with both empty hands held against her apron.

“Did you serve that?” I asked.

“What?”

I pointed without touching the plate.

She shook her head.

A woman in amber silk rose from the table. “The caterer should stay where we can see her.”

“I’m standing in front of you.”

“Lucien.”

He didn’t look away from the man on the floor. “No one is leaving until the physician comes. That includes you, Adela.”

“I meant—”

“I know.”

Pearl edged toward me. Her curls had escaped their scarf; a flour mark lay across her cheek. She was twenty-eight and usually looked younger until she was angry. Now her face had a small, fixed stillness I hadn’t seen before.

I asked again, more quietly, “Did anyone bring food through the kitchen?”

“Not while I was there.”

“While you weren’t?”

“Mrs. Sleet sent me to the stillroom for the cream.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. The door stuck. A few minutes.”

I had been in this corridor, judging a tart and imagining a fork in a man’s beautiful coat.

Behind me a guest said, “She admitted there was something wrong with the dessert.”

I turned.

The speaker was a broad man wearing a pale blue sash beneath his coat. I’d seen that sash on commemorative coins. Chancellor Morcant, who had once promised that the trials would be brief and orderly. I remembered his face better than Rook’s.

“I said my tart needed more lemon.”

“You were dissatisfied with it.”

“That man did not eat my tart.”

Morcant glanced at the black pastry. “Your own assistant appears uncertain about what was served.”

Pearl drew in a breath.

“Don’t,” I told her. “Don’t guess because he’s asked in that voice.”

The room went quiet except for the rain and the terrible, patient work on the floor.

Lucien looked up at last.

He studied me for a moment. Then he looked at the plate on the sideboard, the one he’d sent back. There were twelve yellow tarts along its companions. One place at the table held a black one.

“Mrs. Sleet,” he said. “Keep the plates as they are. Ask everyone to step away from the table.”

She did it with such brisk authority that even the chancellor moved.

Dr. Vale arrived with her bag knocked crooked against her hip. I gave her room. She asked quick questions, worked without accepting anyone’s opinion of what had happened, and sent for something from the kitchen. Pearl fetched it.

I watched a drop of rain work down the outside of a window. It joined another drop, stopped at a flaw in the glass, then fell.

At length Dr. Vale straightened.

“I’m sorry.”

The woman in amber silk covered her mouth. The chancellor closed his eyes. Lucien stayed on his knees a moment longer, one hand lying uselessly beside the dead man’s sleeve.

Mrs. Sleet brought a clean sheet.

I remembered, abruptly, that we had used the last of the good butter. Pearl had insisted on it. A memorial supper deserved something lovely, she’d said, even if we didn’t know whom they were remembering.

“I need a constable,” Dr. Vale said. “And an account of what he ate and drank. Don’t wash anything.”

“I’ll send,” Lucien said.

When he rose, his knee left a dark mark on the carpet. The spilled wine had soaked through his trousers.

He walked toward me.

Up close he looked exhausted rather than grand. There was a white scar at one corner of his mouth. I noticed it, then his mouth itself, and resented both observations.

He stopped far enough away that I didn’t have to step back.

“Your name?”

“It’s on the contract.”

“I didn’t arrange the catering.”

“Apparently no one arranged quite a lot of things.”

He accepted that without a smile.

“Vesper Quince,” I said. “Without an e at the end.”

Nothing changed in his face.

That hurt. I hadn’t expected it to.

He had occupied a room in my head for six years, a room I went into whenever work failed or my brother didn’t write or boots sounded too loudly behind me. For him, my name was new.

“I need to ask you about the pastry,” he said.

“I’ll answer the physician. And the constable. Pearl will answer for herself.”

“All right.”

The uncomplicated agreement caught me off guard.

He looked toward her. “Would you prefer to wait in the kitchen?”

“With Vesper.”

“Yes.”

“Door open,” I said.

He glanced at me, then stepped aside.

In the kitchen the sugar pan was still soaking. A single custard cup sat beneath the lamp, forgotten in the rush. Someone had opened the back door, letting in the smell of wet gravel and crushed rosemary.

Pearl sat down too quickly.

I put a chair beside hers. I didn’t tell her it would be fine. We didn’t know that.

“Tell me exactly what you saw when you came back from the stillroom.”

She rubbed the flour from her cheek.

“The first tray was where we’d left it. Yours was by the lemon bowl. There was a little plate beside the stove. I thought they’d brought back a dish from the first course.”

“Was anything on it?”

“A folded napkin.”

We both looked at the stove.

The plate was gone.

I stood, then stopped myself from picking up the cloth lying nearby. Dr. Vale had said not to move anything.

Lucien stood in the open doorway. His torn sleeve exposed a small patch of wrist. He followed my gaze.

“What is it?”

“Something was left here while neither of us was in the room.”

He looked toward the back door. “Who opened that?”

“It was open when we came in.”

He took one step toward it, then stopped.

A folded piece of paper lay on the wet threshold, weighted with a silver teaspoon.

The spoon was one of mine. An ugly little thing with a handle I’d straightened after Pearl ran the cart wheel over it. We’d brought it in the basket of small tools, beneath the spare cloths.

Someone had been through our basket.

“Don’t touch it,” Lucien said.

“I can read it from here.”

The paper had opened slightly in the draft. Three lines showed beneath the spoon.

There were twelve at the table.

There should have been thirteen.

Ask your cook what happened to Jun Quince.

Pearl made a sound behind me.

My brother’s name was spelled correctly.

I looked at Lucien. This time, when I said Jun’s name, he did recognize it.