“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 facto
ry 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.”
She followed him, bemused, and set her box down on his leg, then dropped her valise to the floor and unbuttoned her coat. He watched her silently but did not behave as a gentleman and offer to help her remove it. Leaving her hat on, she sat down and poured tea for both of them.
“I brought a new cake, baked yesterday. We can both test it, but it is made with Bristol Flour, not Douglas Flour. The entire Douglas shipment for the month has been adulterated, as best I can tell. The fact that we’ve had almost no complaints tells you the state of the flour market in general.”
“Our aristocratic clients won’t accept that.”
“No, but then, most patrons at our level aren’t eating out of common shops, so they aren’t used to common goods.”
“You are correct about that, Miss Redcake.”
She opened the box and took a knife from the tray, slicing into her cake. “What have you learned about Douglas Flour?”
“It’s owned by the Earl of Fitzwalter.”
“I already know that,” she said, impatient. She slid the knife under a cake piece and moved it to a plate, then handed it to him.
“The thing is, I’m related to Lord Fitzwalter,” he said, not taking the cake, his hand going to his hair again.
The knife dropped from her fingers onto the cake, marring her decorative efforts. “What?”
Chapter Four
“Normally, Miss Redcake, I am the first person to be obsessed with my position. Redcake’s has been my life since 1884, when your father hired me. I was not particularly qualified for the position, but neither was he qualified to run a retail establishment. We learned together.” He clasped his hands around his teacup. It had rained all morning, and the ensuing dampness would have caused him to light the fire, or at least the stove, in the room, if he hadn’t been woolgathering. He needed the cup’s warmth, but even that didn’t quite quell the fine tremor in his limbs.
“I know all this,” Miss Redcake said, dropping another slice of indifferently frosted cake onto a plate.
Ewan didn’t think he could force a morsel of anything down his dry throat, but he needed to taste the product, so he set down his cup and took the plate. “Why was Douglas Flour our primary supplier and not Bristol Flour?”
“Mr. Hales, kindly finish your earlier thought, about your familial relationship to Lord Fitzwalter,” Matilda said.
He noted her light brown eyes had a mesmerizing hint of silver in them when they caught the light. When he’d first seen her a few years ago, he hadn’t thought her beautiful, though she had always carried herself well. Her more recent severe style suited her looks. Her hairstyle allowed him to see the planes of her face. She would be far more beautiful in middle age than any apple-faced, plump beauty. But he would not be in the Redcakes’ sphere by then. He would be the Earl of Fitzwalter.
“Yes, of course. I do apologize. My parents died young and I went away to school. I had not understood there to be any relations, but as it turns out, my father was merely estranged from his family.”
“Go on.” She took a bite of cake and smiled.
He thought she was pleased by the taste of the cake rather than his words. Following suit, he tried the cake. “It’s fine.”
She nodded. “I’m not sure the grain is quite as delicate, but such an improvement over the adulterated flour.”
He nodded. “Lawrence Douglas, the earl, was my father’s uncle, my great-uncle. I had no idea until very recently.”
“I see.”
“I’m not certain you could, at least not yet. The earl has one daughter and her children, assuming she had a male heir, could not inherit.”
Matilda’s eyes went wide and she set down her plate. “Never tell me you are now the heir to Lord Fitzwalter!”
“That is exactly what I have to tell you.” He set his plate on top of the box.
“How long have you known this, Mr. Hales?”
“It was news to me just this week. I do wish Lord Judah was in town.” He picked up his teacup, cradling it.
She shook her head. “So you can tender your resignation?”
“Can you blame me? I have to take up my duties to the family, now that Lord Ritten is deceased.”
“Undeniably a difficult situation. And you in line for the promotion.” She winced.
“I am sorry for that. I was looking forward to the challenge. Like you, however, I need to do what my family asks, and in this case, they want me in the countryside, running one of the earl’s estates.”
“Good heavens. Have you ever been out of London?”
“No.” He picked up his cake plate again, noting in detached fashion that his fingers shook.
“Terribly indelicate of me, of course, but h
ow long do you think it will be before you have autonomy again?”
He knew she was wondering how long it would be before the present earl shuffled off this mortal coil, as if anyone could really know that. “It hardly matters to the Redcakes. I will be gone from your lives soon enough.”
Matilda swallowed the last morsel of her cake and set down her plate. “Mr. Hales, I do not believe anyone in my family wants you gone from our lives.”
“No?”
“Least of all me.”
He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly at first; she’d spoken in such a low tone. “No?”
She put a hand to her temple, as if answering the question gave her a headache. “You’ve been a great help to me. Your reports are very precise. I know you are the person who prepares them, even if they come from Lord Judah. And you’ve assisted me with this shilling cake disaster. I appreciate anyone who takes me seriously, as it is hard for men to treat a woman so.”
“I see.” He forced a smile. “I’ve worked hard to be an efficient and effective employee.”
“And a rakish man.”
The unexpected comment made him sit straight back in his chair. “What?”
“You’ve cut a swath through the ladies of the tea shop.” Her lips curved. “I have wondered what your secret is, especially given that I’ve only ever attracted one man to me, yet you seem to be catnip to many ladies.”
He could find no words, at first. Especially because she’d said she wanted to be taken seriously. And yet men discussed such things among themselves all the time. “I had no idea I had such a reputation. I courted a young lady downstairs, then Betsy Popham.”
“Then that ended.” She raised her eyebrows.
“She left me. My pride was hurt, and I suppose I had flirtations with a few of the cakies.”
“Were you affianced?”
“No, but I was expecting it.” He winced as he remembered that time. Betsy had never understood how she’d hurt him.
“I am sorry.” She leaned forward and patted his hand.
Her interest kept him speaking. “A number of employees go to the Egyptian Hall for the magic show once a month or so, and to some of the music halls. I suppose I might have paid too much attention to one young lady or another.”
Wedding Matilda (Redcakes Book 6) Page 5