The shop was bustling, as it usually was now, with much noise of patrons’ conversation and rustling of skirts.
The Bickering sisters wove among them with baskets of bread, careful plates of cake, and whispered messages to each other.
The sisters still had plenty to say. Things that could not wait till the bakery might be empty.
“Why don’t you go home?” Anna whispered to Rose as she whisked away empty cake plates.
Rose could not find ears to whisper in, nor was she tall enough to reach them, so she was left to call out odd things and hope no one would notice. “Thank you, I feel very loved!” she told Anna’s departing skirt-rustle.
“Well, I should hope so!” The lady before her smiled. “You must be enjoying your new married life! I so want to hear about it all.”
“No!” chorused eight other women in the shop who just wanted to buy bread and go home.
Rose bowed her head to hide her smile. “Tell me how many pounds to cut for you, Mrs. Lacey, and we’ll have that chat another day.”
In truth she had no intention of having that chat, today or any other day. Mrs. Lacy already doubtless knew whatever wives were supposed to know, perhaps from some school Rose could not attend.
All Rose knew for certain was that she herself had no idea how to be a wife, except in the ways to which Mr. Russell had finally persuaded her.
Thinking of that made her blush so hotly that Rose worried someone would think she had a fever, and Anna would send her out.
“I’ll take two pounds.” Mrs. Lacy leaned in conspiratorially over the new counter, already pocked with the grooves of the knife despite the sisters’ best efforts. Rose needed one groove to help her line up the cuts she made through the bread, but she tried not to make it too much deeper.
Mrs. Lacy said under her breath, “Makes me worry for some of them, if they don’t want to hear a new wife sing her husband’s praises.”
Rose showed her smile, adjusting the big heavy loaf. The toothy foot-long knife nestled against her left knuckles so that it was impossible for her to cut herself, and she began to saw through the crust to the soft white body of the bread itself. “Mr. Russell is a lovely husband,” was all she said.
Mrs. Lacy sighed. “I’ll just bet. With those big square shoulders and those big strong hands? I bet he--”
“Mrs. Lacy. Will you have any cake today?” Emery interrupted from behind Rose as she slid fresh gâteaux Bretons to the shelf.
The shock of Emery trying to sell anyone any cake straightened Rose’s back and startled Mrs. Lacy out of her daydreams. “No thank you, Miss Emery, not today.”
Rose wondered if she ought to be grateful for the interruption, or wave her long knife at Mrs. Lacy. How dare the woman think about Mr. Russell’s hands?
It all led to Rose to thinking about Mr. Russell’s hands too, and she felt herself blush again.
“If you’ll step over here, Mrs. Lacy, I will take your payment.” Jane, at the cash box, insisted on being closer to the door. She’d become convinced that she’d seen customers come in then just leave after staring at Lady Arnold’s vase stuffed with bread. Jane wanted to herd them
closer to the counter.
Once Jane had Mrs. Lacy’s coins firmly in hand and the lady had left, Jane still kept both hands on the cash box as she leaned and whispered, “If you don’t like him, Rose, you don’t need to go home.”
“Of course I like him!” Rose’s outburst made her drop the knife, its metallic rattle on the wood causing the chatter among the patrons to lull.
“Hope so,” Mrs. Grogan gruffed, pushing her way to the counter next. “You’ve married him now. Pound of the white, please.”
This was unsupportable. Rose hadn’t wanted to talk to her sisters; she came to the shop so she wouldn’t have to talk. It was so busy there was no time to talk, much less fret.
But now she felt moved to speak. She didn’t want to tell them anything about the astonishing things married people could do once they were alone; she didn’t want to tell them Mr. Russell was both endlessly patient yet still expected her to do all the housework in his little rooms on Castle Street. She didn’t want to tell them she had never once thought what married life would be like before she embarked on it.
And she didn’t at all want to tell them she missed them.
“I’m coming to supper.” She slid Mrs. Grogan’s bread toward Jane, who asked for the money with an authority that reminded Rose of a simpler life.
“I’m shocked,” murmured a re-appearing Anna. “Mrs. Billings, do come this way. You want a quartern loaf, don’t you?”
Now Rose’s face felt hot in a different way. None of her sisters ever said anything to make her feel like their home wasn’t her home.
But it wasn’t.
***
“We must do something about the number of customers,” Jane announced that night over their cabbage soup.
It was a very different room now, with a table and chairs enough for all to sit and eat. The fare was different too, with the Talbourne dishes; they had bowls for things like soup.
Jane felt it elegant, to sit on a chair with one’s feet on the floor. Such a simple thing had never seemed elegant when she’d worn pretty dresses to parties every night, using Aunt Eden’s money to try to attract a husband.
Jane would never take chairs for granted again.
“I miss sharing a plate with Emery,” Rose sighed.
“I don’t.” Emery felt strongly enough about this to say it with her mouth still partly full of buttered bread. But she swallowed before she went on. “What do you want to do about the customers, Jane? Shove them out? We worked ourselves to nubs to get them.”
“This isn’t the way Mother made cabbage soup.” Anna stirred her bowl decorously, never touching the porcelain sides, but with a little frown between her brows. Jane could see the frown’s little pucker past their mother’s candlesticks, which sat atop their very own table.
Soon the nights would be longer, and they would need to light a candle to see their suppers. Already the days were colder, with a nip that said the winter would be icy.
“Just once,” sighed Jane, “I’d like to finish my thought before you all leap on it to argue.”
“Once we’re all dead,” shrugged Emery.
Emery’s assumption that their future must be exactly like their past pricked Jane’s temper.
“That’s just what I mean. We are ladies of business. Established. It’s childish simply to do the same thing over and over again just because it’s brought us success so far.”
“Success?” Anna’s jaw dropped. “We still count every penny!”
Jane remained firm. “We have pennies to count. We have food to eat. We have chairs on which to sit.”
“Exactly. What else do we need?” demanded Emery around her next bite of bread.
“You are developing some unpleasant habits,” Anna observed, pointedly staring at Emery until the bread disappeared entirely.
Jane wanted to smash a damn bowl if it would get their attention. “Listen, all of you. We cannot serve quickly enough. Our patrons stand waiting in the store. We need help.”
“We do have Tilly,” Anna reminded Jane with the diffidence of a person who knew Tilly was very little actual help.
Jane conceded with a nod. “We have Tilly, and her cousin’s patronage, and the attention of Tilly’s hand-selected cabbage vendor. I concede her value. But in the shop, our patrons need more help. And Emery, I think you should hire more bakers.”
That idea plopped in the middle of the table like an unwelcome muddy boot.
“I don’t need any bakers.” Emery chased peas around her plate, clearly signaling where her attention lay in the battle between dinner and this conversation.
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“It wasn’t a question, Emery.”
“I’ve told you my answer, Jane.”
“All right now.” Anna’s older-sister tone bustled into the stalemate without her ever leaving her seat. “Jane, you must have a reason behind the idea.”
Jane tried to catch Emery’s gaze across the table, but Emery pointedly looked only
to Anna. She’d sat back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest, green eyes blazing the way the rest of theirs never did.
How should Jane put this? In front of Anna? She didn’t want to mention Emery’s work at the tailor’s, or any of Emery’s secret... socializing.
But Jane wasn’t stupid. Lady Arnold hadn’t just hosted Rose’s wedding due to a sudden burst of civic pride. Her ladyship supported the bakery, clearly because she liked Emery. Jane had no idea how much she liked Emery, but she didn’t want Emery to have to say anything about it she wasn’t ready to say.
Well, she’d tried to pull Emery aside and have this conversation for most of the last two weeks. Emery had brushed her away each time. So here they were.
“Emery.” Jane could try to be delicate. “You simply cannot bake day and night, all day, every day. You must want to do something besides be locked up in the bakery. You’ve been sleeping on the flour sacks.”
That made Emery meet her eyes.
Jane wanted to reach out her hand. But Emery looked so... so bricked away. They used to know what each other was thinking. They were the unpleasant ones, the difficult ones, different from Rose and Anna.
And Jane wouldn’t gain Emery’s confidence by blurting out any of her secrets.
“Don’t you want an hour or two to yourself?” she asked Emery softly.
“No.” Emery’s eyes warned Jane off the topic.
Rose shattered the tension between them. “I don’t want to live in Mr. Russell’s room.”
Whether Rose had captured center stage to forestall further conflict between Jane and Emery, or merely because she couldn’t hold it in any longer, her revelation effectively gained control of the conversational battlefield.
Anna’s spoon clattered in her bowl, and she winced. Anna was clearly working hard to recapture the habits of their younger years, when such things as eating from porcelain bowls were commonplace. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, muffin, but you know... you married him.”
Rose threw up her hands. “I know! And I like him fine. I love him. I do love him. But you can’t imagine what it’s like! Alone there in that little room
all day, with no one to talk to, and it’s not as though Emery is washing his collars while I iron and Jane takes the money. There’s no swirl. It’s too quiet.”
Anna’s own hands clasped her cheeks. She simply stared at her littlest sister. “You married him, muffin.”
“I didn’t bury myself,” Rose said with rising exasperation.
“Doesn’t he mind all your time in the shop?” Jane was truly curious. “Lord Boislegrand mentions every time he visits that soon Anna won’t need to come at all.”
“This isn’t about Lord Boislegrand,” Anna shook that alternative conversation away with a flittering hand.
“Mr. Russell doesn’t mind, so to speak. He knows what this shop means to me. And all of you, of course. I just think he also thought perhaps his collars would be clean and his supper cooked.”
“Good Lord.” Jane immediately clapped a hand over her mouth.
Now Emery and Anna both stared, and Rose’s jaw dropped open. Such an imprecation had never been uttered at the Bickering table, not even by Aunt Eden, whose insults could wither ivy.
If Jane weren’t careful, her sisters might start to wonder where she spent all those hours she claimed she needed to do the shopping.
“My apologies. I only mean, Rose, I--I suppose it makes sense, but... what are you to do?”
“We have the most intense conversations about it, he and I.” Rose’s shoulders slumped. “Long into the night, and he reads me long sections of Wealth of Nations and Sir Hale’s treatise on the poor. I even brought it up at the women’s meeting, but they just sound confused.”
“They must have thought you wanted to be married when you said you wanted to be married.” This Emery seemed to find very amusing. Forsaking her soup, she leaned back in her chair till its front feet left the floor, but her eyes twinkled.
“None of the ladies in the meeting ever started a bakery,” Anna observed with a sharpness that Jane suspected was more about Lord Boislegrand’s attitude than the attitudes of the Quaker ladies.
“But what do I do?
“Rose, you haven’t whined like this since you were eight.” Straight and sharp, it was clear Anna was disinclined to baby their baby sister.
“I’m not whining. I am concerned. I have a concern.” Sitting straighter herself, Rose tried to look very tall and married at the table.
“Easy enough. Rent the rooms upstairs.” Emery went back to conveying her soup into her mouth as fast as possible.
Her sisters were forced to pause in astonished silence.
“Can Mr. Russell afford it?” Jane pounced on the question of money. It wasn’t a room, it was an entire apartment of rooms, between them and Lord Zachary’s painting garret.
But all Anna’s crispness melted into puddles of smiles. “Oh, Rose! Wouldn’t that be lovely? Right upstairs! You’d be back here with the shop! And all of us!”
Rose, however, seemed less delighted. “How does that help anything? It’s still a question of what I do all day!”
“No, it isn’t.” Emery sounded disgusted. “You’ve lost all your sense. We’ll do his laundry with all of ours. Cook the meals with all of ours. It’s five people instead of four, that’s all, and you do your share like you always did.”
“It’s a lovely dream,” Jane said slowly, weighing each word, “but men like things of their own. And my point remains. There is too much work here for the four of us to do.”
“Plus Tilly,” put in Anna, re-addressing herself to her soup.
“Plus Tilly. Bread to bake, four times a day now, cakes from the wee hours, and all the customers all day, besides the chores here that we must do to live. With or without you, Rose, there is simply too much work.”
“Jordan and Sal work like demons all day.” Emery, folding her arms again, looked back at Jane like a firing line of soldiers.
“And we can’t have that. Sal should be in school. And even if Jordan only aspires to be a journeyman baker,” Jane cut off the argument all the sisters had repeated many times before, “he must know his history, and well enough to read and do arithmetic that he can’t be cheated. Just think of all the bakeries that opened and closed in this spot.”
“I think Mrs. Scrope had something to do with that,” muttered Anna more darkly than she ever did, and Jane considered her oldest sister’s ability to hold a grudge against their landlord.
“Well, we’ve done what they said we could not do. We are making the bakery pay.” Just barely, Jane wanted to add, but didn’t. There was a world of difference between where they had started and where they
were now, and she knew they all felt they had climbed a cliff and reached the top. She wouldn’t take that away from them, any of them. They only had to see what the road looked like from here. “We need more help for that, or we will pay, in exhaustion. Emery, if you could only see the circles under your eyes.”
Jane didn’t expect an appeal to Emery about her looks would carry any weight with her sister. Emery had decided when she was still small that if she didn’t intend to marry, she didn’t have to look ladylike, and Jane didn’t remember ever seeing her look in a mirror.
So it took Jane aback when Emery muttered, “I’ll sleep more.”
“I don’t wish to be ungracious to the concession, but we still need more help.”
“Jane, you’re overlooking something. We are not of the Baker’s Guild. They haven’t concerned themselves with us because they haven’t seen us.” Anna’s soft brown eyes were deadly serious now. “If we do too much business, they will have to notice us.”
“I thought we followed all the rules.” Was it always to be some new horror?
“We are not members of the guild,” Anna said quietly, as if reluctant to admit it aloud.
Jane was tired. If none of the rest of them were, she would admit it. She was tired. When she snuck out of the bakery for some time to herself, she spent too much of it doing things she could not tell her sisters about, and that made coming home tiring too.
If only Rose would be more forthcoming about being married. There were things Jane really needed to know.
Her paving man had a wicked way with a kiss and chuckled things into her ears that he must think Jane understood. Jane didn’t. If Rose didn’t explain them, who would?
Emery finally slowed her chewing, only to lean her elbows on the table. “All I know about the guild rules is what I could get from Mr. Gruninger when I visited his shop. None of us even knew then if we could do this.”
“I remember.” It had been a whirlwind of speculation, of what ifs and maybes, and they’d all pictured survival as the end of the race.
Well, now they’d arrived at survival; what happened next?
“We should reach out to the Guild before they summon us.” Jane believed the best
defense was always charging forward.
“Should we talk to the Captain?” Rose sounded even less sure about this than about being married.
“No!”
When Jane’s violently quick answer made even Rose’s mouth fall open, Jane took a deep breath.
“We can’t simply run to the Captain every time we have a problem, Rose. He’s not our guardian. He’s not our father.”
He wasn’t their anything. Jane was painfully aware of that.
“He’s our friend, and he’s been terribly helpful.” Staunch in her defense of Captain Brice, on that Rose would not be moved.
“All right, all right.” Anna tried to rap her big-sister voice against the table without doing anything so unladylike as actually using knuckles. “Nothing drastic need happen today. We really should look into more help, Emery. You may not wish to hire more bakers, but I do. Let me inquire whether any other women in the neighborhood could be good at helping with the cakes. I, at least, don’t enjoy waking in the small hours every day to bake cakes, and the Hotel requires them to look perfect. We must think more about what to do regarding the Guild. And Rose. You know we will always be here for you. Of course, it’s between you and your husband.” Every time Anna mentioned Rose’s husband it seemed to get a little easier for her; it still wasn’t easy. “But we would love to have you as a neighbor. Wouldn’t we all?”
Jane chimed in her of course as Emery took Rose’s hand and squeezed it, and Rose, at least, looked a little calmer.
“At least until you marry, yourself.” Jane couldn’t stop the words. They’d run away from her.
Why couldn’t she be glad for Anna, as long as Anna was determined to go through with what Jane knew was a terrible mistake?
Anna’s fingers just fluttered that idea away too. “Who knows when that will be?” she shrugged, looking down into her soup. ...
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