LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  Debbie broke the silence. “Your pancakes?”

  “Actually, crepes. With strawberries.”

  “Poor man,” Jane said seriously. “He didn’t have a chance.” She leaned forward. “Kady, dear, I can fully understand that he fell in love with you, but are you in love with him? You aren’t marrying him because he gushes over your food, are you?”

  “I haven’t agreed to marry the other men who have eaten my food, then asked me to marry them, now have I?”

  Debbie laughed. “Have there been many?”

  Jane answered. “According to Mrs. Norman, there’s one a night, men from all over the world. What was it that sultan offered you?”

  “Rubies. Mrs. Norman said she was glad he didn’t offer me an herb farm or she feared I might go with him.”

  “What did Gregory offer you?”

  “Just himself,” Kady said. “Jane, please stop worrying. I love Gregory very much.” For a moment, Kady closed her eyes. “The last six months have been the best of my life. Gregory has courted me like something out of a novel, with flowers and candy and attention. He listens to all my ideas about Onions, and he has told his mother that I’m to have carte blanche when it comes to buying ingredients. I didn’t tell anyone, but in the months before Gregory returned, I was thinking about leaving Onions and opening my own restaurant.”

  “But now you’re staying. So does that mean Gregory is going to leave LA and live here with you?” Jane asked.

  “Yes. We’re buying a town house in Alexandria, one of those beautiful three-story places with a garden, and Gregory is going to get into real estate here in Virginia. He won’t make as much money as he did in LA, but . . .”

  “It’s love,” Debbie said. “Any babies planned?”

  “As soon as possible,” Kady said softly, then blushed and looked down at her coleslaw, which had too much fennel in it.

  “But how does he look in a face veil?” Jane asked again.

  “You must tell me,” Debbie said, when Kady didn’t answer right away. “What is this about a face veil?”

  “May I?” Jane asked, then when Kady nodded, she continued. “Kady’s widowed mother worked a couple of jobs, so Kady stayed with us most of the day and she was like part of our family. She used to have—” She looked at Kady, one eyebrow raised. “Still does?” Kady nodded. “Anyway, all her life Kady has had a dream about an Arabian prince.”

  “I don’t know who he is,” Kady interrupted, looking at Debbie. “It’s just a dream I have. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing, ha! You know what she did all the years she was growing up? She drew veils across the lower half of every man’s photo she saw. My father used to threaten her within an inch of her life, because he’d open Time magazine or Fortune and, if Kady had seen it first, she’d have blacked out the bottom half of each man’s face. She carried black markers with her wherever she went.” Jane leaned toward Debbie. “When she grew up, she put the markers in the case with her knives.”

  “She still does,” Debbie said. “At school we all wondered what her black markers were for. Darryl once said—” She gave a look at Kady, then broke off.

  “Go on,” Kady said. “I can bear it. Ever since he heard me say that he couldn’t even fry a chicken, Darryl has not exactly been my friend. What did he say about my markers?”

  “That you used them to write letters to the devil because that’s the only way you could cook the way you do.”

  Both Kady and Jane laughed.

  “So tell me about the man with the veiled face,” Debbie encouraged, and this time Jane nodded for Kady to tell her own story.

  “It’s nothing really. When I was growing up, I was obsessed with finding this man.” She looked at Jane. “And now I think I have. Gregory looks very much like him.”

  “Him who?” Debbie said, frustrated. “Either tell me or I’ll make you eat processed cheese!”

  “I never knew you had such a streak of cruelty,” Kady said dryly, then, “Okay, Okay. I have a recurring dream, and it’s always the same. I’m standing in a desert and there is a man sitting on a white horse, one of those beautiful Arabian horses. The man is wearing a robe of black wool. He’s looking at me, but I can only see his eyes because the lower half of his face is covered with a black cloth.”

  For a moment, Kady’s voice became soft as she thought of the dream man who had been such a compelling part of her life. “He has unusual, almond-shaped eyes. The outer lids dip down just slightly, so they give him a look of sadness, as though he has seen more pain than a person should have seen.”

  Abruptly, Kady came back to the present and smiled at Debbie. “He never says anything, but I can tell that he wants something from me and he’s waiting for me to do something. Every time it frustrates me that I don’t know what he wants. After a moment he holds out his hand to me. It’s a beautiful, strong hand, with long fingers and tanned skin.”

  In spite of herself, Kady felt the power of the dream even as she told the story. If she’d had the dream only once or twice, she would have been able to forget about it, but there had never been a week since she was nine years old that she hadn’t had the dream. It was always exactly the same, with not the tiniest variation.

  Her voice grew so quiet that both Jane and Debbie had to lean forward to hear her. “Always, I try to take his hand. More than anything in the world I want to jump on that horse and ride away with him. I want to go wherever he is going, to be with him forever, but I can’t. I can’t reach his hand. I try to, but there is too much distance between us. After a while his eyes show infinite sadness, and he withdraws his hand, then rides away. He rides as though he is part of the horse. After a long moment he halts his horse, then turns back for just a second and looks at me as though he hopes I will change my mind and go with him. Each time I call out to him not to leave me, but he never seems to hear. He looks even sadder, then turns and rides away.”

  Kady leaned back in her chair. “And that’s the end of the dream.”

  “Oh, Kady,” Debbie said, “that gives me goose bumps. And you think Gregory is your Arabian prince in real life?”

  “He is dark like him, and from the first moment, we were attracted to each other, and since he proposed marriage, I have been having the dream every other night. I think that’s a sign, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s a sign that it’s time for you to leave your life of food and men on white stallions and join the real world,” Jane said.

  “I never looked,” Kady answered.

  “What?”

  “I never looked under the horse to see if it was a stallion or not. Could be a mare. Or maybe a gelding. But then how do you tell if it has been gelded?”

  “I’m sure that if people ate horse meat, then you would know,” Jane said, making the other two women laugh.

  Debbie gave a great sigh. “Kady, I think that may be the most romantic story I have ever heard. I definitely think you should marry your Arabian prince.”

  “What I want to know is what you are making poor Gregory wear to the wedding. A black robe?”

  Kady and Debbie laughed; then Kady said, “My dear Gregory may wear as little or as much as he wants to the wedding. He isn’t thirty pounds overweight.”

  “And neither are you,” Jane snapped.

  “Tell that to the woman selling wedding dresses.”

  Jane started to reply, but then a busboy began to clean their table, broadly hinting that it was needed and they should leave. In a few minutes, the three women were back out on the streets of Alexandria. Jane looked at her watch. “Debbie and I need to do some shopping at Tyson’s Corner, so shall we meet you back at Onions at five?”

  “Sure,” Kady said hesitantly, then grimaced. “I have a whole list of things I’m supposed to buy for the town house. Things that don’t go into the kitchen.”

  “You mean like sheets and towels, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes,” Kady said brightly, hoping Jane and Debbie would volunteer to help her with th
is incomprehensible task. But luck wasn’t with her.

  “Debbie and I have to pool our money and get you something nice for a wedding gift, and we can’t do that with you around. Come on, don’t look so glum. We’ll help you look for sheets tomorrow.”

  “Isn’t there a rather nice cookware shop in Alexandria?” Debbie asked, thinking she’d much prefer to go cookware shopping with Kady than gift purchasing with Jane.

  “I believe there is,” Kady said, laughing. “I never thought of that. Maybe I can find a way to occupy myself after all.” It was obvious that she was joking and that she’d intended all along to visit the kitchenware shop.

  “Come on,” Jane said, taking Debbie’s arm. “No doubt poor Gregory will be sleeping on cookie sheets and drying with waxed paper.”

  “Parchment paper,” Debbie and Kady said in unison, a chef’s inside joke that made Jane groan as she pulled Debbie away.

  Smiling, Kady watched her two friends go, then breathed a sigh of relief. It had been years since she’d seen Jane, and she’d forgotten by half how bossy she was. And she’d also forgotten how worshipful Debbie was.

  Looking about her at the beautiful fall sunshine, for a moment Kady didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She had hours of freedom. And that freedom had been given to her by her dear, darling Gregory. For all that Gregory was heavenly, so kind and so considerate, his mother was a tartar. Mrs. Norman never took an afternoon off, so it never occurred to her that Kady should have time off either.

  But then, truthfully, Kady didn’t have many interests outside the kitchen. On Sundays and Mondays, when Onions was closed, Kady was in the kitchen experimenting and perfecting recipes for the cookbook she was writing. So, even though she’d lived in Alexandria for five years, she didn’t know her way around very well. Of course she knew where the best cookware shop was and where to buy any produce imaginable and who was the best butcher, but, truthfully, where did one buy sheets? For that matter, where did one buy any of the things that Gregory said they’d need for their house? He’d said he’d leave all that up to her because he knew how important such things were to a woman. Kady had said, “Thank you,” and had not told him she had no idea how to buy curtains and rugs.

  She had, however, spent a bit of time redesigning the kitchen of the town house into a two-room masterpiece, with one area for baking and another for bone-burning, as the pastry cooks called the work of entrée chefs. The two rooms, one L shaped, the other U shaped, met on either side of a big granite-topped table, where Kady could beat the heck out of brioche dough and hurt nothing. There was open storage and closed storage and . . .

  She trailed off, letting out a sigh. She had to stop thinking about cooking and kitchens and think about the problems at hand. What in the world was she going to wear to her own wedding? It was all well and good to be in love with a gorgeous man, but she didn’t want to hear people say, “What’s a hunk like him see in a dumpling like her?” Debbie and Jane had been so nice to fly to Virginia to try on bridesmaids’ dresses and help Kady choose her dress, when they needed to return in six weeks for the wedding itself. But the three of them weren’t making any headway. Seeing herself in that mirror this morning had made Kady want to skip the whole thing. Couldn’t she just wear her chef’s coat to the wedding? It was white.

  While she was thinking, her legs carried her to a certain cookware shop that never failed to have something Kady could use. An hour later she exited with a French tart cutter in the shape of an apple. It wasn’t a wedding veil, but it would last longer, she told herself, then started toward the parking lot and her car. It was early yet, but there were always things to do at the restaurant and, besides, Gregory might be there.

  Smiling, she began to walk but stopped in front of an antique shop. In the window was an old copper mold in the shape of a rose. As though hypnotized, she opened the shop door, making the bell jangle. Reaching past an antique table and a cast-iron cat, she took the mold from the window, saw it was something she could afford, then looked around for a clerk to pay.

  There was no one in the shop. What if I were a thief? she thought. Then she heard voices in the back and went through a curtain into a storage room. Through an open doorway leading into a yard, she heard a woman’s voice raised in annoyance and frustration. “What am I supposed to do with all of this? You know very well that I don’t have room for even half of these things.”

  “I thought you’d like them, that’s all,” said a man’s voice. “I thought I was doing you a favor.”

  “You could have called me and asked.”

  “There wasn’t time. I told you that. Ah, the hell with it,” the man said, then came the sound of crunching gravel as he walked away.

  Kady stood still in the storeroom, waiting to see if anyone would enter, but no one did, so she looked out the door. In the service yard was a pickup truck loaded high with dirty old trunks and boxes with tape around them. The tailgate was down, and on the ground were half a dozen more metal boxes and wooden crates. The whole mess looked as though it had been stored in a leaky barn for a couple of centuries.

  “Excuse me,” Kady said, “I wonder if I could make a purchase.”

  Turning, the woman looked at Kady, but she didn’t answer her. “Men!” she said under her breath. “My husband was driving to a hardware store and saw a sign that said, ‘Auction,’ so he stopped and saw that lot number three-two-seven was ‘Miscellaneous Unopened Trunks,’ so he bought the whole lot. All of them. He didn’t look or ask to find out how many there were, he just put up his hand and bought all of them for one hundred and twenty-three dollars. And now what am I going to do with all of these? And from the looks of them, most are trash, I don’t even have room to store half of them out of the rain.”

  Kady didn’t have an answer for her, and she did have to admit that the piles of crates and boxes didn’t look very promising. Maybe “Unopened Trunks” was supposed to conjure the idea of hidden treasure, but she couldn’t imagine any treasure inside these things. “Could I help you pull them inside?”

  “Oh, no, he’ll be back, and he’ll stack them up for me.” With a sigh, the woman turned to Kady. “I’m sorry. You’re a customer. You can see how upset I was, since it looks as though I left the front door unlocked. Could I help you with something?”

  As the woman had been talking, Kady had been looking at all the boxes. Sitting on the bed of the pickup, under three cobweb-covered crates, was an old metal box that had once contained flour. It was rusty in places, and the writing was hardly visible, but it was still good looking in a craftsy way. She could envision the old box on top of the cabinets in her new kitchen.

  “How much for that box?” Kady asked, pointing.

  “The rusty one on the bottom?” the woman asked, obviously thinking Kady was an idiot.

  “I have X-ray vision and I can see that that box is full of pirate’s treasure.”

  “In that case, you have to carry it. Ten dollars.”

  “Done,” Kady said, fishing thirty dollars out of her wallet, ten for the box and twenty for the rose-shaped mold.

  As the woman stuffed the money in her pocket, Kady pulled the box off the truck, then shook it. “There really is something in here.”

  “All of them are full,” the woman said in exasperation. “Whoever owned this stuff never threw away a piece of paper in his life. And the mice have been into most of them, as well as mildew and nasty crawly things. Go on, take the box. If there’s something valuable inside there, it’s yours. My guess is that it’s still full of flour.”

  “In that case I shall make antique bread,” Kady said, making the woman smile as she grabbed one side of the box and helped Kady pick it up.

  “Can you carry that? I can get my husband to—”

  “No thanks,” Kady said, her forearms under the bottom of the box, which was bigger than she’d first thought; she could barely see over the top of it. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind hooking that mold onto my handbag.”

  As the w
oman did so, she looked at Kady speculatively. “You know, I think I’ll have a treasure sale on Saturday. I’ll give these cases a good vacuum and sell them as ‘Contents Unknown.’ At ten bucks each, I might make a profit yet.”

  “If you do, your husband will take all the credit,” Kady said, smiling from around the box.

  “And he’ll never pass another auction without buying everything in sight. I’m going to have to consider this one,” she said, laughing as she led Kady around the shop into an alley. “Right through there is the street. Are you sure that isn’t too heavy? It’s nearly as big as you are. Maybe you should bring your car around.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Kady said honestly, for her arms were strong from years of lifting copper pots full of stock and kneading huge mounds of bread dough.

  But as strong as she was, by the time she had walked the three blocks back to her car and put the tin box into the trunk, her arms were aching. Looking at the rusty old thing, she wondered what in the world had made her buy it. Gregory was moving some furniture from his house in Los Angeles to Alexandria, but he’d told her that he thought their town house needed Federal furniture, not the big, white sun-country sofas and chairs he owned, so he planned to sell most of what he had.

  Closing the car trunk, she sighed. “Federal furniture,” she said to no one. “Where’s Dolley Madison when you need her?” As she got behind the wheel, she thought that for tomorrow night’s dinner, she might do some experiments with rabbit in red wine, something eighteenth century.

  Chapter 2

  IT WAS ELEVEN P.M., AND KADY WAS EXCEPTIONALLY TIRED AS she entered her boring little furnished apartment. She’d chosen the place because it was close to Onions and because she wouldn’t have to buy furniture.

  For the life of her she couldn’t figure out what had been wrong with her tonight. In theory everything had gone very well. Gregory had been at his most charming, and she appreciated the effort he’d made to entertain her friends. Even Jane had been impressed, telling Kady that her own husband felt no obligation to talk to her friends and, instead, often spent his days with his face behind a newspaper. As for Debbie she was so starry-eyed from eating Kady’s cooking and having a man who looked like Gregory pay attention to her that she could hardly speak.