The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear Page B

the cook placed the weekly order, to be delivered on a Friday. Kezia admitted to herself that it was company she sought. It wasn’t that her days weren’t full enough—there was the laundry, which took the better part of a day, and more if it was raining; there was cleaning and polishing, and the blacking of the stove, which kept her and Ada busy until the girl left at half past three to care for her siblings after school. Kezia found that she looked forward to the girl’s company. She discovered that Ada had been required to leave the village school earlier than most to look after her mother, who had been sickly after the birth of her eighth child. Only four had survived past the age of five, a fact that the girl took in her stride, as if such wounds were only to be expected. Most of the children in the village had lost at least one sibling—an infant stillborn, a little one taken by fever, an older child suffering an accident. Ada therefore could not read at a level that Kezia—who was discovering that relinquishing her role as a teacher was harder than she had anticipated—thought appropriate. Each day after Tom left to return to the fields following dinner—which Kezia still considered to be “lunch”—she would sit down with Ada at the table and tutor the girl in her numbers and letters. If she delved a little more into her heart, Kezia might admit she was trying to create an avid reader, another Cammie with whom to talk of novels and poetry. She used the books to hand, and began in the kitchen, so Ada might develop two skills at the same time.
    “Now, this is what I plan to cook for Mr. Brissenden this evening, and I must start now. So, Ada, would you read to me from here.” Kezia had taken down her mother-in-law’s recipe book from the shelf above the stove, its yellowed pages dry and cracking as she pressed the spine, and set the open book before Ada, who leaned forward, placed her finger by the first word, and began.
    “Cuh . . . cuh . . . a-a-a . . . b-b-b—cabbage. Cabbage w-w-w, i-i-i, th-th—with a wh-y-t.” She sighed. “Cabbage with a white sss-sauce. Cabbage with a white sauce.” Ada looked up at Kezia. “You go and put a sauce on the cabbage? I bet Mr. Brissenden never had that before.”
    “No, I bet he hasn’t, and I’ve never cooked it. So we can get into trouble together, can’t we, Ada? Now then, carry on.”
    And so they stumbled through. And by the time Ada’s work was done and she had returned home to the end cottage in the village, she knew that cabbage could be cooked with a sauce of water, salt, butter, the tiniest pinch of soda, and some flour. She also knew that Kezia hummed while she cooked, and that she strained lumps out of sauces with the sieve, and still managed to make the sauce lumpy again when she returned it to the stove. She knew that Kezia threw away all the goodness of the cabbage with the water—which Ada would have made a gravy with, if she’d had the browning and a bit of corn flour—and that this dish alone would have been a whole meal for her family. But Kezia had also bought fish, which she put on to bake a good hour before Ada thought she should have—fresh fish never took that long, and she knew the shop only ever had fish when it had come up straight from the boats at Hastings, or when they sold it round the back because it had been caught at the Hawkes’ lake without the gamekeeper knowing. But she also knew something else, an impression garnered while she watched her employer prepare food or stand at the stove, contemplating the sauce as it came to the boil—contemplating, mind, not stirring, which is what she should have been doing. Ada noticed that when Kezia cooked, it was as if she were blessing the food. Her brow knitted when things did not go smoothly, but she smiled again when a problem was solved. She lifted pots and pans with a gentle flourish, as if carrying something very precious. And though Ada could never have articulated