Betsy lifted her chin. “I’d like to be your assistant manager. Everybody knows the Fancy makes the most profit at Redcake’s, and that wasn’t true in Alys’s day. I make more profit than my father does in the bakery.”
“That’s partially due to our reputation in fashionable society, thanks to Lady Hatbrook owning the place.”
“If we didn’t put out a good product . . .” She had started strong, then trailed off. She put her hand on his arm. “Look, Ewan, I just want to help you.”
“How old are you now?”
“I’m twenty.” A look of defiance flared in her eyes.
“You don’t have enough experience. Men with university educations will be applying for that position.”
“You worked your way up and so did I. You know you can trust me. That’s more important than learning Greek or Latin.”
“It would help to have someone with aristocratic connections there, like Lady Hatbrook.”
Like me
. But he knew now that he’d never be the Redcake’s Kensington manager. This conversation was pointless chatter and nothing more.
Not only that, he couldn’t trust her. Was that not the real crux of the matter? He’d never have considered her, whatever her profit-making skills, because he could not understand her and had never been able to do so. She’d left him; she’d returned. Then he had rejected her right back.
He nodded to himself, completely ignoring whatever it was she was trying to say. “Whatever happens, I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing each other very much anymore. I sincerely wish you the best, Betsy. I hope you find happiness.”
Her face seemed much older as she reacted to his words. “So it’s a no, then?”
“It’s a no to anything you might ever ask of me, ever again,” he stated.
“I didn’t sleep with him,” she whispered. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand I was your lover, expecting to become your husband someday, and you betrayed me. For two months I did not exist to you. You cut me dead. No Ewan Hales in your life.”
“I had reasons.”
“If you did, you never shared them with me. It was long ago.” He lifted his hand to stop her from speaking. “I have a great deal of work to do because personal business kept me away from my duties.”
“Ewan.”
He spotted his clipboard under the morning’s mail and pulled it out, then stood. “If you will excuse me, Miss Popham. I need to make my rounds.”
She watched as he straightened his coat and tightened his tie. “Your hair is curling over your forehead. You never let it do that.”
He smoothed it back. “Thank you. Now, if you want to continue to make a profit for Lady Hatbrook, I suggest you stop wasting time and return to your duties.”
“Aren’t you going to drink your tea?”
He shook his head. “Not now. Good day.” He left the room and went down a flight of stairs to accounting, refusing to look back. She wasn’t even attractive to him anymore, but he wished when his brain had a quiet moment it didn’t flash to Matilda Redcake. He remembered the days when all his spare thoughts were of Betsy and those lush curves, so newly, perfectly ripened, as if just for him. Now, young as she still was, she looked tired, strained. Odd, when Matilda Redcake, twenty-four and burdened with far more cares than Betsy Popham, appeared so fresh, almost innocent, with those freckles and that carrot hair.
Late in the afternoon, when Matilda longed for a tea tray, she instead sat on the dusty storeroom floor in the Redcake’s administrative building and looked through ledgers, tracing the source of ingredients for the shilling cake. By careful perusal, she had been able to break down what exactly had been in those cakes, but it took a great deal of math and knowledge of recipes to figure out the precise details.
“Matilda?” The door opened and a tall figure stood in the doorway.
She recognized her cousin. “Yes, Greggory? I’m down here, doing some quite complex calculations.”
“A messenger just came from the shilling cake factory.”
She sneezed. This room desperately needed a good cleaning. She found her already dirty handkerchief. “News from Mr. Hay?”
“Yes. It was the flour, he said. They tested a bag of flour left from the last shipment and it had the powder in it. No new additives or adulterants around. Wants to know what they should do about this week’s cakes.”
“They baked yesterday, right? Tomorrow, they frost.” She swore.
“Matilda!” Greggory said.
“Outside the businesses you may be my older cousin, Greggory, but here I am your supervisor. No criticizing me on Redcake’s property, please.”
“Not very ladylike,” he muttered.
She bared her teeth at him. “If you don’t think this situation is worth swearing about, I can’t imagine what would be. Do you realize much money has been wasted? Cor.”
“I thought you went to finishing school.”
“Yes, I did. Years ago. Send a boy back over there. Find out if yesterday’s baking used the same flour. If they did, they need to give the product to the workhouse and start over. With good flour. Find out if we have any good flour.”
“Yes, Miss Redcake.”
Matilda glanced up at the saucy tone. Her cousin merely winked at her and wandered off. Even at twenty-six, he seemed superstretched, underfed, and not yet grown into his adult body. He had black hair, stick straight like hers, but the color came from his mother’s family. She had some Italian blood and it showed in Greggory’s skin tone and hair.
At times, Matilda would have happily traded her hair with him, or with her sister Rose. Now, she just kept it pulled back and under hats as much as possible. That kept her hands out of it. Unlike Ewan Hales, if she slicked her hands through her hair, it would simply come undone from its pins and stick out straight in a witchlike nightmare, like broom straw, rather than tumbling into attractive curls over her forehead, like his did. How appealing he was with mussed hair. She wondered why, for the first time, he’d looked so mussed yesterday. But she didn’t have time to puzzle it out.
She went back through her notes and discovered the offending cake flour had come from Douglas Flour. Pushing herself off the floor, she went to a filing cabinet and found the supplier records. Douglas Flour was owned by the Earl of Fitzwalter. He resided in London. She knew that from Alys’s prattling about making the wedding cake for his daughter not too long ago. Of course, the earl wouldn’t have anything to do with his own flour.
When she dug through the records, though, she found all paths led back to London. The flour had been shipped from Southwark, where the factory was, and her contact information was all there. No sign of a telephone number, either. Could Mr. Hales find someone to investigate on his end?
After she tidied herself, she had Greggory ring Ewan Hales. She explained the situation to him.
“Do you think you can get us any shilling cakes on Thursday?”
“I’m still waiting.” A boy appeared in the doorway of her office’s anteroom, where Greggory worked. Her cousin gestured him in and opened the note, then handed it to Matilda.
“Sorry, Mr. Hales. It looks like I can get you half of your regular order. We have a backup supplier locally, and we do have some flour in stock. It’s clean, though more expensive than Douglas Flour.”
“Douglas Flour?” His voice had gone tense.
She frowned. “Yes, out of Southwark.” She explained what she knew about it. “Can you get someone to investigate the situation on your end?”
“I think you had better come down to London tomorrow,” he said.
“Why? I need to go hat in hand to our backup supplier and beg twice as much flour from them as we usually take. I’m hoping to get you the rest of the week’s order a day late. I’m glad we have someone here locally instead of having to bother Alys just before her baby comes, and learn about these new Liverpool suppliers.” She turned to the boy. “Look sharp! Go back to Mr. Hay and tell him to take the good flour he has and start making new cakes immediately.”
The boy nodded and ran out the door. His trousers were too short for his spindly, bowed legs. She frowned. Not a healthy specimen, but she liked to hire out of the workhouses whenever possible, especially the youths. It might be their only chance of staying away from a life of crime.
“We need to have a conversation.” Mr. Hales sounded world-weary on the phone, a decade older than his true age, just a year older than Greggory.
“In person?”
“Yes, please. It’s important.”
“Is it about Douglas Flour?”
“Yes. In part.”
She sneezed again. The dust from the file-room floor must have covered her skirts. She needed to change. “Fine. I will come down tomorrow morning, assuming I can make a deal with our other flour supplier. You can give me lunch and then we shall deal with Douglas Flour together. Any word from Lord Judah?”
“No, I am not about to bother him. Yet. If you can get me a half shipment of good cakes on Thursday, and the rest on Friday, I hope we can put this behind us without too much loss of customers.”
Who was going to pay for the expense of the lost cakes and the more expensive flour? She’d like to know that. Her father would turn red with rage when he saw her reports. She didn’t look forward to writing those notes to him.
“Very good, Mr. Hales. Thank you for your forbearance, and I will see you tomorrow.” She set the earpiece back on the telephone and turned to Greggory. “Have we researched flour suppliers recently? Do you know who is reputable?”
Greggory scrunched his nose and said nothing. She waited. “We do that every autumn, so we have the information as of about eight months ago.”
“Start there. Get fresh prices from everyone. And I need a full report on Douglas Flour before I have to leave in the morning. How long have we worked with them, what our relationship has been, did we have any issues with price changes recently? Anything you think I ought to know before I call on them.”
“Yes, Miss Redcake.”
She grabbed his right ear and tweaked it gently in response. “Don’t get saucy with me, underling.”
He stood, grabbing her hand, and twirled her around. “I’m still taller and stronger than you, Matilda. Watch yourself.”
She laughed and let go of his hand, then went into her office, beating at her skirts to release the dust. At least Greggory didn’t seem the ambitious type, after her position. He was a lover instead of a businessman, wrapped up in his nuptial plans. His wedding was in early June. Her parents had decided to buy him a cottage as a wedding gift. Very generous, but he’d been a good employee, and they expected him to spend his entire career working for the family.
The news continued to be bad. All the flour from the Douglas factory was suspect. Alarm spread through the operation as baking was restarted while the flour was investigated. Their backup supplier was thrilled to have the extra business but didn’t have the resources to fill their entire order. Matilda needed to have Douglas fix the flour or find a new supplier a week ago. On the train to London, she drafted a memorandum of quality for Mr. Hales to type up. Hopefully, the Douglas manager would sign it. Even better, follow it.
At least she carried proof of a cake with good flour in a white and gold Redcake’s box. She’d taken one of the first cakes off the line and finished its preparation herself, supervised by an old woman who’d been employed in the business since Matilda’s grandfather’s day, back before there had been any such thing as a Redcake’s cake.
She’d always wondered if her father had arrived at the idea of becoming a cake manufacturer because of the family name. Or cake making might simply be in the family blood. Rumor had it that the family had gained its surname baking cakes for some medieval Irish king long ago, but she wasn’t certain if her father had made the story up or not. She made a mental note to ask him; the story might be useful in promotions.
She entered Redcake’s via the door by the loading dock in the back. Arriving earlier than her previous visit, she saw men returning from morning bread deliveries. At least bread flour and cake flour were separate and came from different suppliers.
Men with ink-stained fingers and ledgers under their arms passed her on the stairs as she went up to the offices. They nodded, smiled, and greeted her by name, such a change from a few years back, when her father never allowed her to set foot in the business and she had even less desire for that than he did. Now, she wished she knew every detail of each person’s business, because every grain of knowledge helped her to do her own job. There were never enough hours in the day, and there were times she missed her son dreadfully, wishing she could have a quiet morning in the nursery with him, a few childish games of patty-cake or tickles on the hearthrug, but her efforts kept the entire family afloat.
She’d become more important to the family than Alys had ever been, with her once obsessive love of wedding cakes. Now Alys had the life Matilda had expected to have herself. The rough factory girl had become a marchioness and the finished young lady was the mother of a bastard son and had a position in the family business.
Her pensiveness matched Ewan’s by the time she arrived behind him. Instead of being at his desk, his fingers running down columns of numbers, he stood at the window, staring at Oxford Street.
“Trying to gather your strength?” she asked.
He turned and blinked, as if he wasn’t quite sure she was there. “What do you mean?”
“There is so much energy down below. I thought you were trying to find some. You look exhausted.”
He put his hand to his hair, then pulled it away. “I didn’t sleep well.”
“Management harder than you thought?”
“Oh, it isn’t Redcake’s.”
Her eyebrows rose at that. What else could there be in the middle of a crisis, and his manager not in town? How could he be concerned with anything else? “What, then?”
“I have tea set up in the inner office,” he said, shuffling forward with nothing of his usual purposeful step. “Let’s sit down.”