The Lost Spoon
• ACT II •
Zenobia would have said something, but maybe it was a girl after all. Zenobia was an old woman, she knew, and it sometimes seemed to her that the weak mind she started life out with had grown weaker every year. What had she ever known about young people, anyway? It was only food she ever knew anything about. But she did know that if it hadn’t been for the Baroness, nobody would have suspected she could do anything useful. As a young girl, the Baroness had watched Zenobia chop vegetables for a soup and seen how she used her eyes and hands and nose, too, to do the job. The Baroness might not be clever in the kitchen, but everywhere else she was smart, and strong, and bold. She always had been, from girlhood, and from that same time, Zenobia had clung to her mistress, like someone shipwrecked in the wide ocean with only one broken spar to keep her afloat. To Zenobia, the world beyond the kitchen was as treacherous and unpredictable and stormy as any ocean.
Zenobia had felt, at times, as if she might be sinking into that stormy world. She couldn’t, now, remember precisely what troubles had happened during those times, but it was absolutely clear in her mind that the Baroness had always been there to keep Zenobia safe. She would never protest any decision her mistress made. If the Baroness decided to hire a new scullery maid, Zenobia would train her as the Baroness wished. Luckily for Zenobia, who had never been good at remembering names, this girl was named Martha. They were all named Martha, in fact, all the maids in the castle, as if there were a conspiracy of mothers, all of whom wished their daughters to go into service for the Baroness.
This Martha was plump as a partridge, tall and clumsy as a turkey, and wore a red bandanna to cover her hair. Her eyes made the cook think of saucepans forgotten on the flame, burned a browny black-gray. She was not particularly pretty, but Zenobia knew from experience that it was not the prettiest girls who made the best pastries. There had been cakes tasting of strawberry or lemon, chocolate or vanilla, oh, and raspberry, too. Where had that Martha gone?
Zenobia wished she could remember all the things she’d forgotten, as she watched this Martha wrap an apron around her thick waist and prepare to be told what to do. Loose-cut they might be, but the cook would have sworn the girl was wearing trousers. But Zenobia never commented on the styles young people chose. The young wanted their own style, and if an old woman didn’t like it, who cared? “Martha,” she asked, “do you know how to polish silver?”
“I can learn,” Martha said. “Just tell me how to do it.”
Zenobia couldn’t explain anything to anybody. She just knew how, so she seated the girl at the far end of the long wooden worktable and mixed a large bowl of the white paste for her. She put a pile of soft cloths to one side and spread a wide strip of cotton over the tabletop. She didn’t speak as she did this, and having done it she wiped her hands on her apron and stood back.
Max waited. The cook had a short, square body and a squished-in square face, which gave her a worried expression. This was not at all what he’d thought someone would look like after a lifetime spent in command of a baroness’s kitchen. Her white hair was covered with a yellow-and-blue-striped kerchief tied at the nape of her neck; arthritis had thickened the knuckles of her strong fingers. Over a black dress Zenobia wore a long, bibbed apron, already stained with what was probably jam, coffee grounds, and perhaps an egg yolk. The apron had two deep pockets, from which several spoons stuck out, some wooden, some metal. After a long minute of staring at him, Zenobia nodded, as if satisfied with how things were going, and went back to her own end of the table, which ran almost the whole length of the cellar room. There she sat, paying him no further attention.
For a while, Max watched her and considered the scene and situation. He had dressed in the costume his father wore to play the title role in The Caliph’s Doctor: loose-fitting blue silk trousers with a loose long-sleeved yellow silk shirt. To conceal his boy’s haircut, he had covered his head with the red bandanna. While he waited for whatever would happen next, he unbuttoned the cuffs of the shirt and rolled up his sleeves. When Zenobia began to talk, however, it wasn’t to tell him how to polish silver or where to find the silver he was supposed to be polishing. She seemed to be speaking to herself. “Lamb,” she said, “but she never liked lamb, not that I remember. How long has it been, Martha,” she asked Max, “since that last dinner the Baroness ordered?”
“Years,” Max answered.
“A sad dinner, I think. Do you remember?”
“No,” Max said. “What do you remember?” While he sat waiting to be shown how to polish silver, he might as well do a little detecting.
“Beef Wellington,” she told him. “A whole tenderloin sent down from our farms in the hills, wrapped in pastry, the tenderest, flakiest pastry—you can’t imagine it. The Baroness was unusually pleased with us that night. It was a good party. There were three great men at the table—a scholar, a senator, a doctor—the nephew, too. I think that was the night the senator dined here, but it might have been the poet. The poet was a favorite guest, he talked so well, but I never could remember names. Why was it sad? Do you remember?” She took a pad of paper out of her apron pocket, and a pencil. Her fingers wrapped around the pencil in a child’s grip.
As she talked, Max looked around, detecting. This kitchen was the last place the Cellini Spoon had been seen. The dark table where he sat filled the center space of a brick-walled, stone-floored room, which had only small, high windows to let daylight in, and those only along one wall. The castle kitchen was in its cellar, as if this room was the foundation on which everything else stood. A large range was set into the fireplace, eight burners and three ovens, and the wall nearby was hung with copper saucepans and copper molds and small buckets holding wooden spoons and metal spoons, ladles and spatulas of all sorts, long-handled cooking forks, tongs. One old woman couldn’t possibly eat enough to need all of these utensils, and even though it had probably been years since any of them had been used, they all gleamed. Shelves along the walls held Dutch ovens, roasting pans, soup pots, cake tins, baking sheets, cooling racks, and rows of mixing bowls in all sizes. He couldn’t imagine the dining room such a kitchen had been built to serve. Except, he corrected himself, to imagine that it would have dark wood and poor lighting. That seemed to be the style the Barons Barthold preferred.
This long, gloomy cellar was reached by a narrow, twisting staircase that Max had himself descended just before eight that morning. Food would have been carried on wide, heavy trays up along that staircase to the dining room, and dirty dishes brought down, unless there was a dumbwaiter. Max looked for the little shuttered window that would house a dumbwaiter but didn’t see one. A long soapstone sink with an even longer soapstone drainboard stood opposite the range. On the rough wall behind the sink were pipes that brought water to the long-necked faucets. He turned to look behind him. The three closed doors must lead to pantries and iceboxes.
This kitchen was entirely too large for any one old woman, whether she was upstairs being served or downstairs preparing meals.
“Today I make the broth,” Zenobia said, “and the Bavarian cream, to chill. Tomorrow the lake-fish mousse.” She wrote as slowly as she spoke. “Martha must go to the butcher today, greengrocer tomorrow.” Then she looked up and saw Max. “What are you sitting there for, Martha? You have work to do.”
Max rose to his feet to show how obedient and cooperative he was, then said, “I don’t know where the silver is, Missus Cook.” He had never played a scullery maid, so he didn’t know exactly how he was supposed to address Zenobia.
“Stupid,” she said, but it seemed she was talking about herself, not her assistant. “It’s been so many years, how could anyone remember?” She pointed to one of the doors behind Max and said, “In the pantry there, in the cupboards, you’ll see glassware and china.” She looked back down to her list. “Asparagus?” she asked herself. “Courgettes?”
Max went to the door, then turned back to ask, “The silver will be …?”
“In the drawers, where it’s always been.”
“Yes, Missus,” Max said.
The pantry was another dark, narrow room, lit by a single bare bulb at the center of the ceiling. Max pulled on its string and saw a row of glass-fronted cupboards. Some held stacks of plates and bowls of all sizes, dinner and lunch, dessert and salad and butter plates, soup and fruit and finger bowls; others held glassware of many different sorts, water goblets and champagne flutes, wine glasses and brandy snifters. Wide drawers lined one side, and when he pulled the top one open he saw that it was filled with silverware, stacked up neatly in small racks, dinner forks and salad forks and lunch forks and dessert forks and fish forks, all in a row. The drawer beneath held the spoons, dozens and dozens of teaspoons, as well as round bouillon spoons and oval dessert spoons, long-handled iced tea spoons and doll-sized demitasse spoons. He opened a knife drawer, where some blades sharp enough to cut meat with and some only sharp enough for fowl lined up beside butter knives and lunch knives and fish knives. The lowest drawer was a jumble of serving utensils—large spoons and big forks, carving knives, ladles of all sizes for everything from soups to sauces, fish servers and stuffing spoons and sugar tongs, berry spoons, delicate little forks for which he couldn’t imagine the use, and an array of spoons with which to put small servings of jams and marmalades onto a plate. If the Cellini Spoon was lost among the silver, it would be in here. Loading his apron with as many pieces as it could hold, Max went back out to the kitchen and let it clatter out onto the table.
Zenobia looked up, nodded, and looked down again. Painstakingly, she finished what she was writing, then said, “I’ll get the bowl for you,” and rose from the table to make her way over to the shelves. She chose a large bread bowl, which she filled with water at the sink and then set down in front of Max. “Rinse off the dirt before you apply the polish. I need to ask my Baroness to approve the menu,” she said, and took off her stained apron, dropping it with a rattling of the utensils still in its pockets at an open door behind Max, to put on a clean one. She saw Max watching and smiled at him, perfectly friendly. “We have a laundress, and my Baroness is particular. After you have the tarnish off the silver, wash it all in soap and warm water in the sink. You must polish it dry, Martha. To bring up the shine, the way we always do in this house.”
Alone in the dim, cavernous kitchen, Max thought: The cook hadn’t emptied her apron pockets before she dropped the soiled garment on the floor; might a laundress have found the Cellini Spoon and kept it? He got up from the table and went to see what the laundry looked like. There, a mangle occupied one wall, and two round machines with wringers stood opposite, while clotheslines hung across the ceiling. Anyone putting the kitchen laundry through the wringer would certainly have noticed the Cellini Spoon, but would she steal it? If Zenobia had absent-mindedly dropped it into her apron pocket, it would certainly have turned up in the laundry. But the laundry would not have been done that same night, would it?
The Baroness, moreover, had sworn by every servant in the castle, except the Martha who had fallen in love with her great-nephew. Also, Max didn’t think the Baroness would have failed to look everywhere, including the laundry room, for her lost treasure. Max was still betting on the drawer of serving utensils—unless of course the spoon had been somehow removed from the kitchen. Up to a bedroom? Down into a wine cellar?
In the meantime, he had his disguise to maintain. He returned to the table, dropped a handful of the serving pieces into the bowl of water, chose from them a long-handled stuffing spoon blackened with time and neglect, dipped one of the soft cloths into the white paste, and began. He might get lucky, he thought. This might be the exact thing he was looking for.
When Zenobia returned, Max had cleaned only eight of the largest spoons and had not found the Cellini Spoon. He couldn’t even be sure how clean the eight were, because the paste was smeared all over them. He was lining them up on the cloth in front of him. The dirty rags, blackened with tarnish, he dropped on the brick floor beside his chair. Zenobia mumbled and muttered—was she grumbling? Max wondered—and sat back down at the table, pulling her pad of paper back in front of her.
“Foolish woman, it was always only a lunch,” she mumbled. “You remembered it wrong, all wrong. You’re more trouble than you’re worth and it’ll be the poor farm or the workhouse for you. A beef consommé,” Zenobia said, and wrote slowly. She thought, and said, “Lake fish with beurre blanc. She always liked beurre blanc, and who else knows what she likes the way I do?”
This question Zenobia seemed to direct down the length of the table to Max. Then she rose and rushed at him. “What are you doing? We’d never need all those serving spoons at once, Martha. What are you thinking?” She went into the pantry and came back with handfuls of forks and spoons and knives, which she dropped into the bowl of water. “Service for eight, no more,” she said, with a quick and, to Max’s surprise, entirely alert glance. She selected out the remaining unpolished serving spoons from the bowl, setting them aside. “You’ll find that’s enough to keep you busy.”
“Yes, Missus,” Max said. “It won’t happen again.” He made the apology as he thought a scullery maid might, but Zenobia’s unexpected energy had already left her.
“It’s not as if she ever was nice,” the cook told him. “Not kind.”
Thinking that he knew of whom she spoke, Max agreed, “No, Missus.”
“Not as bad as her father, though, and how should she hand out kindness having never been given none?” the cook asked, returning to her seat. “A chicken salad, do you think?” she concluded. “Martha must go immediately to the butcher.”
Max took a luncheon fork from the bowl and dipped a clean cloth into the polish. “Yes,” he agreed, even though Zenobia appeared not to hear anything he said. The cook summoned a maid and gave the order, then returned to writing on her pad. Max rubbed hard. It was actually sort of satisfying, the way tarnish came off onto the rag, leaving behind glimpses of glowing silver. These forks were thick and heavy, and they had an ornate B carved into their handles. He couldn’t imagine eating with such utensils. How could you help being proud, eating with forks like this?
Zenobia looked up to remind him, “The boy had kindness. I used to think—but I never said, not to her or anyone—that all the kindness of the family had been saved up for that poor boy to have, and what good did it do him? It just made him fall in love.” But just as Max thought he might learn something interesting, Zenobia got up so suddenly that her chair clattered backward. “It’s time! It’s almost time, I mustn’t forget!” she cried. “There’s the meat to set out, there’s the little salad to make,” and she was off, into the iceboxes, into the pantries, filling a wide silver tray with napkins and gleaming silver utensils of a plainer pattern than those Max was working on, kept handy in a dark wooden chest on a low table beside the staircase.
Max was going to need to look through all the drawers in this whole huge kitchen, and he thought there must be twenty or thirty of them. He didn’t see how he would have the time to do all that searching and still get this silver polished. He sped up his work and finished both fork sizes, eight of each, then turned to the knives while Zenobia worked at her end of the table, her fingers nimble with the julienne of carrots and celery to lay on top of soft green leaves of lettuce, her hand adept with the encircling quarters of cherry tomatoes. He thought she must be two different people, a simple-minded girl and a clever cook, living together in one old woman’s body. She carved slices of a cold roast beef onto a gold-rimmed plate, then set everything onto the tray, with a woven silver basket holding two soft rolls, a small gold-rimmed plate with pats of butter arranged in a circle, and a carafe of ice water. When all the rest was ready, Zenobia quickly washed, chopped, and sautéed spinach, spooned it onto the plate beside the beef, and picked up the tray.
“Let me carry that,” Max offered, seeing how wide and crowded it was, thinking how heavy it must be.
“You keep to the kitche
n,” Zenobia told him. “But I like your good manners.” Her glance drifted off over his shoulder, and he almost turned around to see who was there, but he knew better. The cook was just looking back into the past. “There haven’t been good manners in this kitchen for years, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize them.”
She left the room. Max went back to polishing the silver. He was getting more efficient at it and was coming to the end of the service for eight. Eight place settings of three forks, two spoons, and two knives each, plus the serving utensils—it made a little hill of silver, filmed with white paste, ready to be washed clean and then polished dry. It was peaceful, working with his hands like that, his mind free to consider the various puzzles and problems he was dealing with. He rubbed paste onto a teaspoon and rubbed tarnish away and thought about the dog. Whose welfare was it most important to think of? His own? Because if he hoped to earn a living, he needed to succeed at a job he’d agreed to undertake. The dog’s? Because she couldn’t, she obviously didn’t, want to spend her weekdays tied to a fence across the street from the school, and also—he had noticed how she obeyed Joachim—he suspected that the dog had little affection for her mistress. There was the welfare of Clarissa and her father to be considered, too, because they were the owners. They had purchased, fed, and groomed the dog; they had a legal right to her. And then there was the law itself. But how did you even begin to think about what was good or bad for the law, as if the law were as real and actual as a dog?
If Max took Princess Jonquilletta of the Windy Isles back to Clarissa, it would benefit three out of those four. But the one it would not benefit was the one least able to defend herself. This was definitely a problem.
The chickens had arrived by the time Zenobia returned, and she set immediately to work. She took onions and carrots out of a pantry drawer. She removed more celery from one of the iceboxes. She sat down at the table with a wooden block in front of her and took a broad-bladed knife from a drawer to begin chopping. “Mirepoix,” she whispered to herself, “and rosemary and lemon, salt and pepper, and oil to rub into the skin.” Little squares of carrots, then onion, then celery cascaded from the knife blade.