I watched as Tamsin deftly chopped up the butter and put it into the flour in pieces. “Let me try,” I offered.
“No, you’ll just mess it up. We all still remember what happened when you ‘blanched’ the asparagus.”
“Look, ‘bleached’ and ‘blanched’ sound very similar,” I said through gritted teeth.
Tamsin shook her head. “I just don’t want to screw up our first cooking test, especially after Clara’s group got such good marks yesterday. Go measure the currants. Mira, can you warm the cream instead?”
Mira slid the bowl of currants over, exchanging an amused glance with me. My roommates and I had also fallen into comfortable roles, not to mention a growing closeness. Despite Tamsin’s initial proclamations, I ended up being looked to as the unofficial leader—though we still usually let her dictate our actions. It was easier than going against her. We all wanted to succeed here, but her undisguised ambition and razor-sharp focus kept Mira and me working at a pace we might otherwise have missed. It was useful having her on my side, but her scrutiny made me nervous sometimes. She rarely missed anything.
“How did you ever survive in your lady’s home?” she asked, regarding her butter and flour with satisfaction. It wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. Along with being the unofficial leader, I suspected I also served as regular entertainment for them, thanks to both my wit and my mishaps.
I shrugged. “I never had to cook. There were others to do that.” That wasn’t a lie. Ada might have had to cook growing up in her mother’s household, but she’d never had to in mine. “I sewed and mended. Dressed my lady. Styled her hair.”
Both Mira and Tamsin raised an eyebrow at that. They’d seen my hair efforts.
I successfully deflected from that when I saw Tamsin take out a ceramic platter for plating our pastry. “No, use glass,” I told her.
“Why the hell—I mean, why would we do that?” Tamsin had made a lot of progress in her word choice this last month but still often slipped.
“It’s how they’re serving it now. On glass, decorated with sugar and extra currants.”
I might struggle with commonplace activities, but I knew these small, luxurious details—things our instructors often hadn’t gotten around to yet in our education. It was like the chemises. I saw Tamsin’s eyes narrow, immediately filing this away. It was why she often looked past my other inadequacies—both real and contrived. These small things gave us an edge, and it was proven later when the cooking instructor came by to survey our work.
“This is lovely,” she said, studying the artful swirls of sugar on the glass platter that I’d made. “None of the other girls have focused much on aesthetics, but they’re just as important as the quality of the food. Visual appeal is part of taste appeal, you know.”
We didn’t see what she wrote down on her paper, but her pleased look spoke volumes. Tamsin could barely contain her smugness.
“There’ll be no living with her now,” Mira told me when we walked to our dance lesson afterward. She nodded to where Tamsin was animatedly telling another girl about our excellent marks. “She’s doing that for spite. She knows it’ll get back to Clara.”
“You’re saying Clara doesn’t deserve a little spite?” Clara had continued to make life difficult for Mira, though she’d backed off a bit when she realized taking on Mira meant also taking on Tamsin and me.
“I’m just saying that we don’t need to further petty rivalries when there’s already so much evil in the world we need to stop.”
She might not have Tamsin’s frenetic energy, but Mira was an ally—and a friend—I’d long come to appreciate. There was a calmness and strength to her that soothed me and even neurotic Tamsin. Mira was the rock we could both lean on. She gave the impression that the politics and drama in the house were of no concern to her after witnessing the ravages of war and subsequent hardships of the Sirminican ghetto in Osfrid. Her comment about the world’s evils was a rare allusion to her past, but I didn’t push her when she didn’t elaborate.
Instead, I linked my arm through hers as we entered the ballroom. “You should have been a nun with that kind of diplomatic attitude. Hide away in some cloister and meditate.”
“You can’t fight evil with meditation,” she replied. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was quoting from one of her most prized possessions: an old book of heroic tales, smuggled out of Sirminica.
A dance mistress rotated among the different manors each week, and here was an area in which I had to consciously dumb down my abilities. I’d had formal dance lessons since childhood. The other girls had never had any, and most still struggled after only a month. It was one of those areas Cedric had warned I’d stand out in, so I was overly cautious about not attracting Miss Hayworth’s attention—to the point where I almost seemed hopelessly inept.
“Adelaide,” she said wearily. “Are you dancing the gentleman’s part?”
We were in the middle of a complicated line progression, in which it was common for us to alternate standing in for the opposite gender. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I thought we were supposed to take turns doing that?”
She threw up her hands. “Yes, but it’s your turn to dance the lady’s part—the part you’ll be doing in Adoria. You’re trampling all over poor Sylvia’s feet.”
“Oh. That explains it.” I gave her a sunny smile, and she moved on. Cedric might be able to sell salvation to a priest, but I could make my instructors find me endearing despite my frustrating progress.