Chloe gives her father perhaps a quarter of an hour — their first meeting in longer than anyone in the house cares to count — and then she is in a carriage, going somewhere else.
The carriage rocks gently along. Outside the window the afternoon lies pale and bright across the rooftops of the city. Two people share the small space: Chloe, and a young man in a butler’s livery.
[Mistress…… are you certain this was all right? It has been a long while since you last saw the master.] (Erich)
He asks it carefully, the way a man asks a question he suspects isn’t his. Chloe doesn’t look away from the window.
[It’s fine.] (Chloe) [I had an appointment first. I can hardly be expected to sit and entertain Father because he’s decided to turn up out of nowhere.]
Erich has nothing to put against that, so he says nothing. Only then does she turn from the glass, find his face, and smile.
[Anyway. That uniform suits you beautifully, Erich.] (C)
The young man goes red to the ears and drops his gaze into his collar.
[……You do me too much honour.] (E)
Most days he goes about in black, Chloe’s faithful shadow. Once in a while, like today, he puts on a butler’s livery instead and walks a pace behind her where anyone can see him.
[It’s been a while since I saw your face out from under that mask, too. Still lovely.] (C)
Unmasked, Erich is quite startlingly handsome. His skin is a warm brown that belongs somewhere far from this country. His hair is black and has the sheen of silk, his eyes are clear as obsidian, and the livery does nothing to hide how he’s built. Call him the son of some noble house and nobody would laugh.
[Such words are wasted on a man of my birth, Mistress.] (E)
[Don’t be silly. Calling a beautiful thing beautiful is simply accurate.] (C)
Then she turns back to the window.
She has always done this. The habit is older than her memories of the other life and they haven’t touched it — and neither have they touched the way her eyes go elsewhere the instant the words are out.
Erich watches her profile, carefully, so that she won’t catch him. His mistress calls him beautiful. His mistress is far more beautiful than he is. He has never once got that sentence as far as his mouth.
They ride on like that, quietly, until the carriage slows and stops. Erich rises and puts a hand to the door.
[We have arrived, Mistress.] (E)
[So we have.] (C)
He steps down first. She follows, takes the hand he offers, and comes down slowly.
[Mind your step.] (E)
One pace from the carriage and there is the sign she knows: rusted iron cut in the shape of an ivy leaf, with a notice pasted across it.
“Closed for the day.”
It’s a small restaurant in its own quiet corner of the city. Leonardo comes here to meet his lover. Chloe owns it.
Erich opens the door for her. Inside, the proprietor and his wife straighten up to receive her.
[Welcome, Owner. We’ve been expecting you.] (Proprietor)
He is a formidable slab of a man and he bends nearly double; his wife follows him down.
[Sorry to descend on you.] (C) [And I’m sorry to have taken the whole place for a day. You’ll be compensated for it properly.]
[Oh, please, no!] (Wife) [The shop is yours, Owner. If you want it closed, then closed is what it ought to be.]
She waves the idea off entirely, then tells them to come through. The table she leads them to is a private one at the back, as far from Leonardo’s usual seat as the building allows.
Erich draws out Chloe’s chair. Once she’s seated he takes up his place behind her, and she turns her head towards him and says his name, quietly.
[Erich. Not there.] (C) [Sit down opposite me.]
[……I beg your pardon? No — to share a table with you is far beyond my place, Mistress.] (E)
[It’s beyond your place because I say it is, and today I say it isn’t.] (C) [There’s nobody here to see. Sit.]
There is no arguing with her voice when it does that. He stands frozen a moment longer, then says he understands, and sits.
—
[Sorry to have kept you.] (Wife)
The proprietor’s wife comes through with a silver tray. She bows low and sets a cup down in front of Chloe first: thin white porcelain, and inside it something jet-black, steaming.
An identical cup goes down in front of Erich. His eyebrow twitches at the smell of it.
Then come the milk pitcher and the sugar pot on their silver-rimmed dish. Sunlight catches the silver of the spoons and throws a pale flare across the table between them, just for a second.
Last of all, a small plate of apple pie, gleaming gold.
The wife sets down the last of it, bows again, tells them to take their time, and goes. Coffee and hot apple and cinnamon wind together in the air, and Chloe finds she is smiling before she has decided to.
[Let’s have it while it’s hot.] (C)
[Yes……. Then — if you will permit me.] (E)
They lift their cups and drink.
[……It is very good.] (E)
[Isn’t it? I’m glad.] (C) [The proprietor has a real gift for it. Far better than anything I’m given at home.]
Hardly anyone in this country drinks coffee yet, and the Calendula servants had no real notion of how it ought to be made. The Chloe of before had never tasted the stuff. She drank whatever her maid put in front of her and thought nothing about it at all.
‘I know better now. That was thin and muddy and crowded with off notes, and flattery couldn’t have called it good. If my memories had never come back I’d have written coffee off as foul and gone on hating it for the rest of my life. Two lifetimes, and I’d have missed it because a maid poured badly.’
‘I loved it, before. Bought my own beans, my own equipment, the whole ritual. So of course I want a decent cup in this life as well — except that if I walked into my own kitchens and started demonstrating, somebody would want to know where I’d learnt it. And I haven’t got an answer for that one.’
So she taught the proprietor of the restaurant she owns instead. She bought the beans and the equipment off the merchants herself and showed him the method, and he’s a serious, diligent man — he had it almost at once. Somewhere in all that practice he got a great deal better at it than she had ever been.
[One day, once everything’s finished, I thought I’d put it on as the house speciality.] (C) [The place where you can get a decent cup of coffee. That’s worth something. It ought to bring in rather more custom than we have now.]
Something is folded into the way she says it. She sets the cup down and picks up her fork, cuts through the edge of the pie and lifts it to her mouth. The apple goes soft and sharp-sweet on her tongue and her eyes narrow with pleasure.
[Lovely. Have some.] (C)
Erich picks up his own fork. The pastry gives with a light crisp sound and the fruit shows through. He takes a mouthful and the sweetness opens out, gentle, with the clean smell of apple behind it.
[……It is excellent. Truly.] (E)
[I told you.] (C) [His pies are exceptional. Every bit as good as our own cook at home.]
She lifts the coffee again, elegantly. Erich watches her for a while. Then he puts his fork down.
[Mistress…… may I ask you something?] (E)
[You may. What is it?] (C)
[Thank you. ……Then: why did you bring me here?] (E)
Chloe sets her cup back on its saucer, gently, and looks at him.
[……Coffee isn’t only bitter. Is it.] (C)
[I beg your pardon? ……No. No, it is not.] (E)
[There’s a little sweetness underneath it. And the roast changes both the taste and the scent.] (C) [But nobody drinks it here yet. So most people have never tasted it at all, and they go on believing it’s nothing but bitter.]
Erich can’t find the thing underneath her words, and it shows in his eyes. Chloe lets her gaze slide off him, out to the window.
[……I wanted to drink this with somebody who actually knows what it tastes like.] (C) [It’s your country’s, isn’t it.]
Erich’s breath stops.
[……You knew.] (E)
[Of course I knew. I’m the one who hired you.] (C) [Forgive me. I had you looked into.]
[No — please, Mistress, don’t speak of forgiveness.] (E) [To attend on a person of your standing and not be investigated would be the strange thing. I don’t reproach you for it. It is only…… to learn that you know where a mere shadow comes from. It made me glad.]
Colour comes up faintly in his cheeks, and Chloe watches it with open enjoyment, and says only that she sees.
Then his face changes — turns serious — and hers has followed it before she can stop it.
[Mistress. One more question, if I may.] (E)
[……Go on.] (C)
[Thank you. That is…… when did you learn coffee so well? And where? It has only been moving in this country these last few months. Not even the merchants importing it know the taste to that depth. And above all——] (E) [why should a nobleman’s daughter know the word roast?]
Tea is still the rule here. Most people couldn’t brew a cup of coffee if you put the beans in their hands, so it’s remarkable enough that anybody knows roasting as a technique at all. And Chloe was born high enough that she has never in her life had to boil her own water. It isn’t possible. That’s all.
He’s bewildered, and there’s something underneath the bewilderment, and it’s in his eyes. Chloe lets the smile go before she answers him.
[Goodness. Are you suspecting me, Erich?] (C) [That I’m not Chloe of House Calendula at all. That I’m a fake.]
[No. Never.] (E) [I do not for a moment believe you an impostor, Mistress. Only…… and I know the impertinence…… these last few months it has seemed to me that you have grown. Very suddenly. I cannot shake it.]
[Grown? I don’t think I’ve changed in appearance.] (C)
[Not the outside, Mistress. The inside.] (E) [……I can’t say it properly. As though a great deal of knowledge arrived all at once. As though you alone have come to know something nobody else knows……]
The words come apart in his mouth. One corner of Chloe’s lifts.
[Sharp of you.] (C) [My betrothed never noticed. My father never noticed. Not one of them — and you did, Erich.]
There is something almost wicked in the beauty of that smile, and it puts a shiver clean down Erich’s spine.
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