Lady Gwendoline was alone. Only the printed words of the society ladies in the magazine meandered and dissolved in front of her eyes as she tried and retried to focus.

“Don’t let her bother you,” she whispered to herself. “Focus on the gala. Prepare, always prepare. That is the key to success.”

Nell

Nell’s room, high up in the western turret, was the smallest in Fenley Hall. Not only was it marginally smaller than the pantry, but it was also narrower than Lady Gwendoline’s wardrobe, a thought that made Nell feel not only peeved but also terribly small herself, as if her very life were nothing but a minute speck in the cosmos. Of course, she was crucial to the day-to-day running of the hall, but in more of a mechanical way, like a factory needs a part, or a motorcar needs fuel.

Tonight, the room seemed impossibly cramped, filled on every available surface with recipe books. Most of the dishes were staples of great houses around the country: venison stew, boeuf bourguignon, fillets of sole Véronique.

Mrs. Quince had let her go upstairs early, saying that she would get the stock done for the morning. Nell needed to find the right recipe for the contest.

“I need something else,” she murmured, looking up from the pages. “I need something special.”

But where could she find such a thing?

Her mind whirled with starter possibilities. The salmon mousse choux pastries she made for Sir Strickland’s parties were always well received, and her poached haddock quenelles were legendary. And yet neither seemed quite right. They both used too many scarce ingredients that everyday people wouldn’t be able to buy. Heaven only knew where the Stricklands were able to get such things. The packages always arrived from different deliverymen, in plain cardboard boxes, no source, no name, no trail.

    A whoosh on the gutter outside her window startled her. It was only the wind whisking around the corner turret as usual. It always made that faintly disturbing sound.

Like a ghost, she thought to herself.

There had been rumors that the hall was haunted, and of all things, the notion that an unhappy servant who had come to a bad end was now floating around to harass incumbents did not sound far-fetched in the least. The ghoulish forms of kitchen maids from years gone by would drift through the cellars in a never-ending search for ingredients, pots and pans, recipe books.

That’s when it struck her.

“Of course! That’s it!”

She leaped up.

“That’s precisely it! I need to find those old recipe books.”

Grabbing her torch, she plunged down the servants’ stairs, charging into the dimly lit kitchen, almost knocking poor Mrs. Quince to the ground.

“What’s the hurry, dear?”

“Do you know where the old recipe books are kept? The ones from centuries ago? I’m sure I saw them at some point.”

Mrs. Quince took out a handkerchief and mopped her brow, a gesture she used to indicate that perhaps things were going a bit too far. “Slow down, dear. I really don’t know where those old things are. I think they were thrown out when the Stricklands moved in. They wanted a lot of the old stuff gone.”

A frown fell across Nell’s face for a fraction of a second, before she took a deep breath. “Well, I’ll take a look anyway. No harm in that, eh?”

With that, she switched on her torch and dashed into the maze of cellar rooms behind the kitchen.

    Dust hung in the air of the low rooms, disused cellars, and secret nooks off the winding passages. They housed all sorts of old things: a chipped enamel weighing scale, a rusty old mincing machine draped with cobwebs, a pile of ornate platters that had enjoyed display in grand balls of the last century.

There were some butter coolers, with cloth tops kept wet to keep them cold. Thank goodness Sir Strickland bought a refrigerator! Nell thought, remembering the days where they had to scald the milk and milk jugs every morning before setting them on the cold slab in the pantry wrapped in cool, wet gauze.

A whole cellar was given up to stacks of old black pots, remnants of the time food was cooked above the fire in the kitchen. A monstrous coal-fired kitchen range had been left gathering dust in a corner, looking utterly Victorian in contrast to the sleek electric ovens Nell used today. Hanging on the wall by a large fishhook, an old enamel bathtub reminded Nell of how things had been before bathrooms: servants would carry the bath into a lady’s boudoir, dozens of maids carting up large jugs of scalding water. In a corner, a broken wooden clock lay on its side, its hands silently set to midnight.

As she raced from one arched cellar to another, finding nothing but ancient equipment, she began to slow.

Perhaps it was as Mrs. Quince said. The books had been purged. She imagined them in a heaving fire, spitting and exploding with lives dedicated to food: plumes of gold and green smoke would light the sky, the aromas of feasts of ages past infusing their memories into the universe.

Scrambling on, a final passage led to a couple of boarded-up cellars. After easing some boards away with her fingertips, she beamed her weakening torchlight into the dark, murky depths.

Fear gripped her like a cold wind snaking around her heart. A scratching sound came from the corner. A mouse? A beetle? Or a ghost from the past, guarding its secrets?

Beaming her torch around the back of the musty cellar, she spotted boxes in a darkened crevice. Beside them, a pile of something appeared dull and battered. Inch by inch, she closed in on it, the torchlight flickering.

    She dropped down to her knees, not worrying about what rats or spiders might be there, pulling out one after another, her face bright with elation.

It was a pile of old recipe books. They were stacked in the arched brickwork, their black and brown spines limp with age and use. A motley collection of odd editions, they included handwritten and old typed books with yellowed pages speaking of mutton and porter, pig’s ears in marrow soup, and venison hearts cooked in loganberries. They’d been untouched for decades, centuries maybe, some of them in boxes that exploded with dust and mildew as she tugged them open.

Each one had been carefully stored by the house cooks, preserved for another generation, another earl, another heir. Nell took them out one by one, then ferried them through to the kitchen table.

“Did you find them, dear?” Mrs. Quince tottered over to take a look.

“I knew they were here.” She looked at her elder resolutely. “If we’re going to win, we’re going to need something unique, and where better to look than into the past?”

She blew off some cobwebs, then when that didn’t work, used a tea towel to wipe them off. A particularly battered and stained volume lay on top of the pile.

“I like the look of this one. It’s called The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. Shall we start with that?”

Inside, the pages were as fragile as butterfly wings, golden and parched and smelling of must and mildew. The writing was in old script, the ornate tails on the ends of the letters making them look archaic. The lines were close together and at times uneven, and she imagined the ancient typesetting machine tilting with a lack of precision. It gave a look of insects marching across the page, patchy and irregular.

She began to read. At first the words seemed impregnable, but then she realized that the letter S was formed differently, like an f, and the word “receipt” was used instead of “recipe.” There were lists of ingredients she’d never even seen before: flower syrup, lark breast, tragapogon, whatever that was. She quickly looked it up. It was a kind of flower, from the salsify family, the shoots tasted mildly of oysters, to be cooked and served like asparagus.

    “How old is the book?” Mrs. Quince asked.

Hurriedly, Nell flicked back to the inside of the book’s cover. There, in the scrawled handwriting was a name. F. B. Bradshaw, Head Cook to the Earl of Fenley, 1728.

“It was owned by a head cook over two hundred years ago, alive and working in our very kitchen!” Mrs. Quince whispered, drawing up a chair and sitting beside her.

The book was divided up by month, and Nell flipped automatically to July, the month of the first round.

JULY