TILDA CUT A THICK daub from the cloud of raw meringue and transferred the sweet foam grimly to the pastry bag beside the metal trays that waited on the counter.
A few weeks earlier, Clare’s mother had taken it into her head to cook something in Tilda’s kitchen. Commandeering the kitchen of their current residence had become one of her favorite pastimes over the last few years. When they first began, Clare had hoped these occasional flurries of domestic activity might indicate a buried longing for home, but so far they had resulted in nothing but an eclectic series of culinary experiments, all accomplished with her mother’s characteristic stubbornness and excess: sleepy errand boys sent out at midnight in search of saffron or white pepper, clouds of flour billowing from broken sacks, fine water glasses pressed into service as measuring cups or mixing bowls, and of course, all the kitchen’s finest ingredients devoted to a dish that up to that minute had been on no one’s menu but her own.
Maids on several continents had tolerated this behavior. Her mother had made cucumber sandwiches in Venice, cinnamon toast in the Antilles, and mint lemonade for two dozen guests of a visiting rajah she’d befriended in Greece. She had fried chicken in California, and spent an entire morning straining her own mozzarella to top half a dozen pizzas on the coast of Maine.
But when she’d swept into Tilda’s kitchen one morning with the blithe announcement that she just felt like whipping up a little something, Tilda had stopped her cold.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Tilda had said.
“Impossible?” Clare’s mother had repeated. This was the same word that had triggered the exodus from Clare’s childhood home, and when Clare, who had followed her mother into the kitchen, heard it, she retreated to the chair by the window, certain a storm would follow.
But Tilda’s rough-hewn features bore a resolution the servant girl at Clare’s childhood home had lacked. And Tilda hadn’t lost track of the fact that, despite any claims she might make to her own domain, she was still a servant. “This is hardly the kind of kitchen where you’d like to cook,” she said, to excuse her refusal. “I spent the last forty years working on that stove, and it still singed the lace off my best apron last winter. Just when you think you know all its tricks, it learns another one.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of anything too fancy,” Clare’s mother began, starting for the icebox. “I’m sure if I just look at what we have here, I can find—”
Tilda had planted herself between Clare’s mother and the white enamel cabinet. “There’s nothing in there but the beets and the butter beans for dinner,” she said. “I order it fresh every day.”
Clare knew the expression on her mother’s face: a bemusement that could turn, with the faintest provocation, into either laughter or a tantrum.
Tilda tipped the balance by phrasing her next salvo as a request. “Why don’t you just let me know what you’d like, and I’ll take care of it?” she suggested.
“Well, I wouldn’t expect you to know how to make anything quite like this,” Clare’s mother returned.
Tilda arched her eyebrows, which was almost as startling as watching the same expression cross the face of a stone figure who presided over the entrance to a hall of justice. “You might be surprised,” she said.
Outmatched, Clare’s mother still proved a tough negotiator on the terms of her surrender. “I was just remembering a crème brûlée I had this spring in Paris,” she said. “It’s just a simple custard, except that I believe it’s finished with a torch. Do you think you could come up with something like that?”
Tilda nodded, unflinching.
“The restaurant flavored it with lavender,” Clare’s mother had mused. “But I was thinking it might be delicious with rosewater. So perhaps you could just make us some of both.”
The next morning, an iron tank with a merry red hose had appeared in the corner of the kitchen, and that evening Tilda laid a pair of perfectly glazed crèmes brûlées at each of their places, one garnished with a sprig of lavender, one with the spiky oval leaf of a rose.
But Clare’s mother had not accepted a quiet defeat. Since then, every few days, she’d appeared in the kitchen, craving a catalog of sweets that veered quickly from actual memory to pure fabrication. Clare had, in fact, shared a lavender crème brûlée with her mother the day before they left Paris, but she had no recollection of the dozen-layer cake of jelly and lady fingers, sliced paper thin, that her mother ordered next. And Clare knew she’d never seen the flock of swan-shaped meringues her mother had opined about this morning, allegedly glimpsed through the window of a tiny bakery on a side street in Bruges, or was it Amsterdam, with anise seeds for eyes and a dust of peach sugar to color their bellies.
Tilda touched the metal tip of the pastry bag to the wax paper that lined the first cookie sheet. A bud of meringue blossomed into the solid body of a swan, the curve of its breast swept back to the point of a delicate tail. Then she placed the tip of the pastry bag against the half-formed creature’s breast and, in a single graceful motion, drew its long neck and drooping head. But it was only after she provided the new swan with a pair of neatly folded wings that she looked up at Clare and broke into a smile.
This was the first time Clare had seen Tilda smile. The effect was jarring, because it was beautiful. It was a child’s smile, with none of the self-consciousness of a woman who offered her smile as a weapon or gift, and none of the calculation of a man who smiled to win his point or seal a deal. Tilda’s smile was so innocent that Clare felt ashamed for her, and protective, the way she felt about younger children who hadn’t yet learned the things she already knew.
“What do you think?” Tilda demanded as the smile faded back into her face’s familiar lines. “Does it measure up to the Dutch?”
“Even better,” Clare said, despite the fact that the Dutch pastries, as far as she knew, had never existed.
Tilda wet her finger, selected an anise seed from a small bowl beside the cookie sheet, and gave her creation sight. She spun the sheet on the counter to apply the opposite eye. Then she picked up the pastry bag again and provided her original swan with a perfect mate.
Clare had just come down from the boy’s room, where she’d been on a hunt for any clue to Jack’s real name. She’d prowled through the empty closet, pushed aside the tin soldiers in his desk, checked the speller and notebooks for a signature, but found nothing more than a half-finished translation of a Greek naval campaign.
Even as she’d searched, she’d half known it was useless. She liked to make up stories based on the evidence earlier guests sometimes left in hotel rooms: a sequin, a cigarette burn, a phone number scrawled through the price of drinks on a menu. But they were only ever enough to dream, not to understand someone, or find them. Only somebody who had known them could tell you that.
“How did you learn to do that?” Clare asked Tilda now.
After her first pair of swans, Tilda had become sure-handed as she filled the wax paper with a small flock of frothy birds. Still, she was so occupied that she might not be on guard. And this question, Clare hoped, was vague enough not to raise an alarm but still draw Tilda back into the past.
“The same way I learned everything else,” Tilda said. She finished one bird’s wing and began to form the belly of another.
“Your mother?” Clare guessed, hoping to snare her in sentimental recollection.
Tilda gave a shard of something like laughter. “My mother had three before me and seven after,” she said. “She taught me to stay out of the way.”
“So you taught yourself?” Clare tried: an attempt at flattery.
Tilda wouldn’t be taken in by this, either. She gave her head a firm shake. “The young missus,” she said. But her eyes softened.
Every other time Clare had tried to probe a flash of feeling from Tilda, Tilda had clammed up. So this time Clare stayed silent, like a hunter waiting for an animal to forget the sound of his footstep in the woods.
Her ploy worked. A moment later, Tilda went on without a prompt. “She got tired of bread pudding,” she said. “I’d only been here a week. Bread pudding was all I knew to make.”
“She taught you,” Clare said, her voice low, so as not to break the spell.
When Tilda shook her head this time, the gesture was almost girlish. The trace of youth playing over her worn frame was spooky. It had never occurred to Clare before that Tilda must have been young once, too. Clare’s heart twisted at the thought, but she wasn’t sure if it was because Tilda had once been young like her, or because one day she would be old like Tilda.
“She said I should surprise her,” Tilda said. “And order anything I wanted from the farmers or from town. I thought I was a rich girl.”
“What did you make?” Clare asked.
“A lemon cake as heavy as a brick,” Tilda said. “Angel food cake without any sugar in it. Mack put butter on that and ate it for bread. He ate it all, everything we couldn’t send to the big table.”
Tilda’s manner was so free as she said this that Clare decided to risk a direct question.
“What about the boy who lived here?” she asked. “What did he like?”
All traces of youth vanished from Tilda’s face. She gave Clare a hard look.
“We don’t speak of the dead,” she said.
It was clear from her tone that she considered this the end of the conversation. But Clare quickly saw the advantage she’d just gained. Tilda hadn’t just admitted that a boy had lived in the house. She’d also admitted that he was dead.
“Dead?” Clare said. “Did something happen to him?”
“That hardly matters,” Tilda said. “You’re dead just the same.”
Clare swallowed, trying to calculate how she could have lost the upper hand so quickly, and what she could do to win it back.
“My father died three years ago,” she blurted.
This fact, she knew, virtually guaranteed unconditional surrender. Her mother’s friends murmured it to one another and bowls of strawberries appeared at her place or carousel gates swung open even though the ride had closed. But she had never used her father’s death to her advantage until now. The price was too high. His loss drained the pleasure from the berries and carousels and tangled them in weird shadows. She had never wanted those shadows to infect anything else. So when the words escaped her lips she froze, startled.
Tilda didn’t blink. “My father died before I could talk,” she said. “I used to play with some buttons of his, but then my brothers took them.”
Clare didn’t know if she had been neatly outplayed or if Tilda had just told her a genuine confidence. She stared into Tilda’s eyes as if they were windows to a room whose door Clare couldn’t find.
Tilda swept up the baking sheet, turned her back to Clare, and shut the birds inside the oven.