The Marriage Test (9 page)

“A reasonable supper,” he observed.

“Which would have been greatly improved by the addition of some sage and parsley, and rosemary.” She looked pointedly at him, then away. “And perhaps some long pepper.”

He scowled.

“You’ll have your visit to the spice market tomorrow,” he said, laying down the challenge. “And then we’ll see what sort of a kitchen steward you truly are.”

Julia contained her smile of triumph until after His Lordship had stalked away. She turned, eager to engulf Regine in a hug, and found the cherub-faced sister contracted into a defensive knot.

“I don’t see what you’re so happy about,” the little nun declared with rising anxiety. “Fairs are noisy, smelly dens of mammon and iniquity.”

Sister Regine, as it happened, had it half right. The Hot Fair outside of Paris was a sprawling, noisy distillation of all that was worst and
best
about the great city. The gathering drew established merchants and itinerant peddlers, sly tavern keepers and gawking sheep herders, wool-clad burghers’ wives and ladies in fine damask … as well as an army of wardens, notaries, and fee collectors, and their opposites: cutpurses, moneychangers, and short-weighting merchants. From the highest to the lowest, every aspect of Paris society was represented.

It was the haze they noticed first as they descended into the valley. Before the dew dried that morning, hearths, ovens, and braziers had begun spewing streams of smoke as bakers, wafer makers, confectioners, sauce makers, roasters, and food vendors prepared their wares for the day ahead. Shortly afterward the lanes of stalls, tents, and carts began to bustle with people and ring with the calls of merchants hawking wares. At the base of a growing din lay a hum of hammers, cart wheels, and grindstones, and over its top skimmed the laughter floating from taverns and jugglers’ audiences and the squeals of racing children.

Sister Regine had chosen to stay behind and pray for her success, so Julia arrived at the fair with a cordon of escorts headed by Sir Axel and Sir Greeve. Her heart beat like a caged bird in her chest, both from the excitement of seeing something she’d heard stories about and from anxiety that in this foreign milieu, her judgment and ability would be put to the test.

Her first few impressions alone were worth whatever price she had to pay to gain them. She halted the party to watch two jugglers traversing a narrow plank while balancing balls on their noses, then went on to watch a banner maker at work, investigate a number of cooking tools at a tinsmith’s stall, and laugh delightedly at a mummers’ performance of a henpecked husband who finally evened the score. Sir Axel and Sir Greeve quietly pointed out the trick in a sleight-of-hand shell game and then closed ranks around her to usher her past a tavern fight turned ugly.

There was color, noise, and activity all around … things to attract the eye and extract coin from the purse. Not that she actually had a purse. His Lordship had decided to entrust his coin to the care of Sir Greeve and Sir Axel … who, she strongly suspected, had also been given the authority to override any purchases that seemed unwise. Annoying as such oversight was, it was not exactly fatal to her hopes for the day.

“Look, demoiselle,” Axel whispered with awe, pointing to a series of carts draped with gaily colored trims and ribands, chaplets of flowers, and ladies’ caps of all shapes, colors, and sizes. “It’s like a rainbow.”

“Lovely indeed. But not on my list.” She turned away with a sigh.

“List? What list?” Greeve frowned as he thumped Axel’s arm to wake him from his trance and hurried after her.

“I’ve made a roster of the things I use most commonly and are probably needed in His Lordship’s kitchen. First on that list is bolting cloth.”

“Cloth?” Axel lurched along after them.

“For wrapping, pressing, draining, straining, and sieving. Really, Sir Axel, I should think you would know how frequently cloth is used in a kitchen.”

“Well, I …” Axel seemed a bit flustered. “But of course.
Bolting
cloth.” The moment she moved on, he looked to Greeve and shrugged in bewilderment.

As they entered the cloth merchant’s lane they slowed and perused the open tents filled with bolts of cloth. Sir Axel spotted some coarse bleached cotton and ducked inside a tent to hold a bit of the fabric up for her to see.

“You said you wanted a coarse, sturdy cloth.” He tugged on the weave to demonstrate. “This seems sturdy enough.”

Julia gave both merchant and merchandise an assessing glance.

“I’m afraid it won’t do,” she said distinctly, turning to leave.

The merchant rushed over to intercept her. “Oh, but look again, milady … it is excellent cloth … very sturdy … good for many uses.”

“I’m sure it is fine cloth, monsieur, but le Comte de Grandaise must have only the finest in his kitchens.” She smiled sweetly.

“Milady, this is the finest bolting cloth made.” Seeing her under the escort of two knights, the merchant apparently assumed she was a lady, despite her simple garments. He was torn between expressing outrage at her conclusion and pleading with her to reconsider it. “I carried it all the way from Florence myself, a month back. The finest cotton Italy has to offer … woven with care by Florence’s expert looms. Surely you have heard of Italian cotton.”

“I’ve
heard of it,” Axel put in earnestly. Then he looked again at the cloth and frowned. “But doesn’t it seem like it’s been stretched in places?”

Julia looked up to find the portly knight staring at the cloth with widened eyes. So artless. So sincere as he pronounced an opinion guaranteed to curl a cloth merchant’s beard. The first rule of good bargaining was to have more than one person in the negotiations, even if that other person was not a buyer himself. And so much the better if the third person didn’t know he was part of the process.

“So it does,” she agreed, rubbing the cloth between finger and thumb.

“That is the nature of the weave, milady,” the merchant declared.

“Are you sure it hasn’t been wet? Perhaps rained upon and dried?”

“Milady!” The merchant grew livid. “Never! My cloth is never wetted and stretched. A vile and deceitful practice employed by some of the ungodly heathens in my trade.” He spit on the ground to condemn those unworthy wretches and glared at his competitors in nearby stalls. “I am an honest man … long a resident of Paris … respected in my hall.”

“I did not mean to imply otherwise.” She gave an apologetic smile. “But now that I look closer, I believe it may be an unfortunate gauge for kitchen work. Too gross a weave for finer straining and too fine a weave for thicker work.”

“Can you not test it?” Axel proposed, drawing a gasp from the merchant.

“No need. I will just call on the other stalls,” Julia said, backing toward the entrance. “Someone will have cloth perfect for my lord’s kitchens.”

“No, please, milady … save yourself the steps. You will only be disappointed by the inferior offerings of the others. Perhaps”—he looked unhappily at Axel—“we
could
arrange a test.”

“I’ll find a sauce vendor,” Axel declared eagerly.

Half an hour of hard bargaining later, Julia exited the stall with seven bolts of excellent kitchen cloth and the knowledge that cloth merchants, at base, were no different than farmers with loads of cabbages, onions, and peas. Soon with the help of Sir Axel and Sir Greeve, who fell quite naturally into the role of the eternal skeptic and the overeager assistant, she added tinsmiths, waferers, basket weavers, dried fruit sellers, nut merchants, stone cutters, and oil merchants to the brotherhood of the susceptible.

Each bargain she struck added to her confidence and carried her that much closer to the stalls of the spice sellers, merchants who knew the worth of their precious wares and were renowned to be shrewd and difficult traders. But each bargain she struck also added to the bolts, baskets, earthen jugs, and bundles her escorts had to bear. By the time they paused, midday, to purchase some meat pasties and apples roasted on sticks, the three guardsmen who accompanied them were groaning under the burden of those bolts of cloth, heavy bags of nuts, wooden flats of dried fruits, earthen jugs of spiced oils, bundles of dried herbs, a large stone mortar and pestle, and sundry small tools from the tinsmith. And Sir Greeve was counting the coin that was left with no small alarm.

“Only a few livres left and we have yet to buy a single grain of pepper,” he said, paling.

Julia gave him a confident smile.

“I’m sure His Lordship has more.”

Griffin had removed his sun-heated tunic of mail and sat in his leather jerkin, studying the parchment containing the royal decree that he must marry the daughter of the Count of Verdun by Michaelmas. He raked a hand through his hair and wished he could just toss the offensive document into the fire and pretend it didn’t exist. But he couldn’t, and he was trying to sort out what kind of dower lands he would be forced to settle on his unwanted bride. He searched the loathsome document for her name. Dammit—his fate was linked to the chit and he couldn’t even remember what she was called!

A motion in the distance caught his eye and he looked up to find Greeve and three of his men struggling manfully up the path to their camp with arms full of all manner of bolts, boxes, bags, and bundles. Their burdens were so great that their legs fairly bowed from the weight they carried. He bounded up and directed them to the cart, where, to Sister Regine’s chagrin, they dumped their cargo onto the cart bed and when that was full, piled it up on the seats. Groaning with relief, they stretched their cramped fingers and aching backs and stumbled over to the fire to collapse on the well-trampled grass around it.

“What the devil is this?” Griffin demanded of Greeve as the knight stared with dismay at the deep red marks Julia’s purchases had left on his fingers. “Where is she … that cook of mine?”

“I came”—Greeve leaned against the cart, panting—“to bring these and get additional coin, milord. The demoiselle has begun to buy spices and I have only a few sous left. She bade me return and”—he swallowed hard—“get more.”

“More?” Griffin lashed a glance at the fair in progress in the distance. “She’s bought all of that and still wants
more?”

“If you’d seen her, milord—she’s a marvel. She can charm the chasuble off a bishop.” Greeve smiled as if hoping to appease his lord. “I left her with Axel in the lane of the spice merchants. She said to tell you that her very next purchase would be
pepper.”

Griffin felt as it he’d been punched. The nerve of the wench, taunting him with his own preferences. And the memory of how she had learned them.

“The hell it will.” He shoved the parchment he’d been reading into his courier pouch and strode for the path down the hill toward the fair.

“Milord—wait! Ohhh, I was afraid of this.” Greeve motioned irritably to the count’s squire to take their lord his mail and sword. “Milord, wait for your arms! The fair is full of knights and squires—”

Julia stood in the stall outside a rich spice merchant’s tent, listening to the yarn the merchant was spinning about the origin of the scrolls of cinnamon bark displayed in a long, narrow wooden box before her. With her were Sir Axel and a score of other folk who had heard her spirited bargaining and gravitated to the stall to witness her battle of wits with the canny spice seller.

“… grown in a faraway land on a tree that is surrounded and tended by mighty winged beasts … with claws like scythes and beaks as sharp as swords,” the merchant declared, each word more dramatic than the last. Murmurs went through the crowd. “They protect the trees so that they may use the bark and leaves to make their nests. The men who harvest the cinnamon must wait until the beasts are asleep before they can cut the branches. Very dangerous work. If the beasts should awaken …”

Julia stared pointedly at the voluble merchant.

“I don’t care if the beasts’ beaks are the size of long shields, monsieur. Two livres a pound is still too much to pay for cinnamon.”

The merchant grasped his chest and groaned.

“You will not find cinnamon as fresh and potent as mine anywhere else.” He could see his usual tactics failing and leaned closer to her. “But for you, lovely lady, I have something special.”

“It will have to be nothing short of miraculous if you think it will blind me to the robbery you would practice on me,” she said, rolling her eyes and drawing chuckles and calls of encouragement from the mixed crowd of men and women. While the merchant retreated to the interior of the tent to search his chests and spice boxes, she turned to Axel to whisper. “Not a denier more than a livre a pound. And we must have five pounds at least.”

Her eye caught a trio of knights standing not far away, watching her intently. Realizing that they had caught her eye, one gave her an openly admiring smile that made her keenly aware of her exposed hair. Color bloomed in her cheeks. What would happen if she smiled back?

She dropped her gaze to the box of cinnamon the merchant’s assistant was closing to protect it from the sun, and busied herself looking at the samples of other spices laid out for her consideration. She picked up a few of the peppercorns from the lot she had already agreed to purchase and tested them by rubbing them briskly between her palms and smelling them afterward. The friction produced a lovely true pepper scent, which she shared with Sir Axel. Then she picked up a sampling of cloves, smelled them, and put one clove in her mouth. The taste was pleasantly spicy and astringent.

From the corner of her eye she could see the knights moving closer and felt her heart beat faster. They couldn’t know who she was, so it might be a chance to practice being a woman as much as a cook. She was, after all, looking for a husband …

“Here, milady. You must try these.” The merchant returned with a box in which resided a bag of elongated brown seeds that looked somewhat familiar.

“What are they?” she said, frowning, then catching the scent of them in the warming sun. She lowered her head and breathed deeply. “They’re like cumin … only so much stronger. And with more anise.”