In the summer, when there is need of additional help, a cook and maids and such, they would be under your stewardship. Please understand, whatever you decide, I have already altered my will to reflect the great service you rendered to Mrs. Cook these many years. Not merely service, of course, but devotion and tenderness.”
Judy finally met his eyes. With her smile, she all but sealed the agreement, but the Judge bowed and gave her the last word. “May I expect your decision by the end of the week?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “By the end of the week.”
Judge Cook was as good as his word. Before he left for the winter, Judy Rhines was given the keys, the ledger, a large allowance, and a free hand to make any changes or improvements she thought necessary. She stayed busy in the empty house, cleaning, canning, meeting with the gardener, and preparing the linens to serve a house filled with guests.
She gave a detailed account of her efforts and outlays in a fortnightly letter to Judge Cook, which he answered promptly with a bank draft, thanks, and eventually with
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particulars about his arrival and his family’s. He would be back in Gloucester by June, he wrote, with several guests in July and August, including four children and their nurse.
As summer approached, Judy hired two girls to serve as parlor maids, and Easter helped her locate a footman who would also help in the garden. But there simply was no local woman accomplished enough for the formal meals required by the Judge’s sister, so Judy took the bold step of placing an advertisement in a Boston newspaper.
She received only one response, from a Mrs. Harriet Plant, who wrote that a temporary situation would suit her especially, and included a list of what she described as her “highly praised specialties.” She also enclosed a letter from her employer, a dean at Harvard College, explaining that he would be in England for the summer and recommending “his Harriet” as an honest woman and a
gastronomical treasure.
When the lilacs began to bloom, Judy moved out of the upstairs bedroom, with its harbor view and lace curtains, back into her old room off the kitchen, where she would be in very close quarters with the cook until the end of August.
It was not a happy prospect, until the day that Mrs. Plant stepped off the coach.
Harriet turned out to be cut of the same cloth as Easter Carter: bluff, talkative, and unabashedly affectionate. Like Easter, she was a short woman, though she was nearly as wide as she was tall, with auburn hair and freckles down to her fingertips. She was born in Liverpool, England, and at a tender age was sent out to service in the kitchen of a grand country house where she was apprenticed to an accomplished French chef. Below stairs, the staff ate snails
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and garlic and things that sounded like swill but tasted like heaven, while the gentry consumed roasted joints and creamed soups of surpassing blandness sneered at by the Frenchman.
Judy learned all this and a good deal more within an hour of Harriet’s arrival. Her stories were funny and the tea she’d brought with her was first-rate, but Judy was alarmed at the prospect of her boisterous presence for three months.
Despite all the changes life in town had made in her, she still favored great helpings of solitude. And yet, before she knew it, Judy was entirely accustomed to Harriet Plant’s expansive ways and captivated by her cooking. Indeed, within a few weeks, she was finding it difficult to fasten her dress at the waist.
On her first full day in Gloucester, Harriet went to market, demanding that the shopkeepers let her taste everything before she bought. Then, with little more than butter, sugar, and flour, she tested the oven by baking a series of cakes and biscuits that brought tears to Judy’s eyes.
Harriet turned a basket of eggs into an airy construction spiced with some green herbal concoction she’d brought with her, and she made a cold potato soup that was the most refreshing thing Judy had ever tasted. Harriet was delighted by her new friend’s keen appreciation and responded to her praises with precise and reverent descriptions of her methods.
“No recipes?” Judy asked, amazed that Harriet arrived without books or cards.
“No need,” she said and pointed to her head. “We’ll see what these Washington folks will ask for. I can cook mush, squeak, and dowdy as dull as anyone else this side of the
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pond. My professor has been to Italy and France so I can cook as I please when it’s just him for dinner, and thank God for that. When he entertains, it’s nothing but charred beef and custard.”