Definitely Not Mr. Darcy

be in store!

She read it again. It wasn’t a love poem. It was some kind of Regency courtship riddle turned reality-show task. She sighed. But she was up for it!

It gave her insight into Sebastian’s playful, romantic nature, and it cheered her as no other missive could at this point.

Did the other women get one of these? she wondered. But she couldn’t ask them. Sebastian had expressly written that this task would be one for her to take on alone, without even her chaperone’s knowledge.

What thing in a garden would incorporate light and shadow? The estate had acres and acres of gardens. Could the garden be in a painting? And what about the two o’clock reference? Could the answer be on a painted face of one of the grandfather clocks in Bridesbridge?

The joke was on her. She didn’t get it. Not at al . And she couldn’t ask Mrs. Crescent a thing about it.

M rs. Crescent had handed Chloe a recipe for ink, written by Martha Lloyd, Jane Austen’s sister-in-law: Take 4 ozs of blue gauls, 2 ozs of green copperas, 1 ½ ozs of gum arabic. Break the gauls. The gum and copperas must be beaten in a mortar and put into a pint of strong stale beer; with a pint of small beer. Put in a little refin’d sugar. It must stand in the chimney corner fourteen days and be shaken two or three times a day.

Chloe knew that “gauls” must be the “gal s” she had col ected from the oak trees. As for the rest, a pint of beer, even strong stale beer, sounded good right about now.

With Mrs. Crescent’s help, she managed to get through the recipe, and restrained herself from drinking the beer, but had to remember to visit the parlor chimney two or three times a day from then on to shake her vial of ink.

“Not to worry,” Mrs. Crescent had said. “I shan’t let you forget.”

With a total of ten Accomplishment Points now, Chloe faced two days of practicing riding sidesaddle on Chestnut, the nicest horse in the stable.

In her spare time, she picked up as many of Fiona’s chores as she could when the camera wasn’t around, noting that her maid seemed sadder than ever. She also made a point of scouring the estate, tramping through gardens looking for shafts of sunlight and shadows, trying to solve the riddle from Sebastian. That was how she knew she was more than smitten. None of the paintings or clocks in Bridesbridge fit the description in the riddle, not even the pocket watch on Grace’s chatelaine.

Her oil paints and stack of painting paper went untouched as Mrs. Crescent started Chloe on another task that would take more than a week: needlework. She had to embroider a fireplace screen for fifteen points when in fact the extent of her needlework skil s were sewing on buttons that had fal en off. So much for her days of leisure.

When she scrambled down the servant stairs into the basement kitchen to help Cook do the baking for the tea, she found Cook standing at the pine worktable, beating dough with her fists. Flies buzzed around as a couple of kitchen maids, who seemed sixteen years old at most, stoked the fire in the open range, apparently to set something in the cauldron hanging above it to boil. A hare, dead and skinned, hung from the rafters, and al manner of tongs and knives and industrial-sized soup ladles hung from hooks on the wal s. Black clothing irons stood upon a shelf, and everything reeked of onion.

Cook and the kitchen maids curtsied upon Chloe’s entrance, and the formality flustered her. She rol ed up the decorative, gauzy yel ow sleeves of her overdress. “Do you have an apron? I’m here to bake for the tea party.”

Cook shot Chloe a look with her icy blue eyes. “You can’t possibly bake. You belong upstairs!”

Chloe snagged an apron from one of the wooden hooks near the copper pots and tied it around herself. “If you just tel me where the strawberry-tart recipe is, I’l begin with that. I just made my own ink, I’m sure I can get a couple of the items from the tea menu taken care of over the next two days.”

Cook looked at the kitchen maids, who giggled. “If the lady insists. Here’s the recipe.” Cook opened a reproduction cookbook, cal ed A Propre new booke of Cokery, and pointed with a finger tipped in flour.

To make a tarte of strawberries.

Take and strayne theim with the yolkes of foure egges & a little white brede grated/then ceason it vp with suger & swete butter and so bake it.

Short paest for Tarte.

Take fyne floure and a curscy of fayre water and dysche of swete butter and lyttel saffron, and the yolkes of two egges and make it thynne and as tender as ye may.