Story Snip from Larksong: Chapter 15 and Baking Class 2 with Samba Schutte!

hapter 15!

Larksong is set in Montreal, July 1914.

In chapter 1, Alice, after her grandmother's funeral, arrived at the family cottage to take care of her grandmother's aviary, only to find that her parents had already leased the cottage to another family for the summer.

The only way she could have one more summer in her favourite place was to surreptitiously take on the role of governess to the two young girls...

In chapter 2, we met George, laid up at the hospital with a broken leg. Instead of joining his friends on a Grand Tour of Europe, he's being sent off to recuperate at a rented cottage in the country...

In chapter 3, we returned to Alice's point of view, and saw her bonding with George's younger sisters. Then she got a surprise -- George was arriving at the cottage that very day!

In chapter 4, we had a hint that Alice finds George attractive and interesting -- but also unbearably rude.

In chapter 5, they had their first argument.

In chapter 6, they argued once more, but the stakes were higher: war is on the horizon.

In chapter 7, George attempted a rapprochement. The chapter ended with him asking, "Why don't we both go sit in the parlour?"

In chapter 8, Alice had some feelings stirring...

In chapter 9, during their first evening together, they began to suss each other out over a card game.

In chapter 10, we reached the end of the evening, with harsh words from George, but a détente of sorts before they went their separate ways for the night.

In chapter 11, we started the next morning in George's point of view, with his dawning realization of his attraction to Alice.

In chapter 12, we saw that this realization did not lead to greater friendliness.

In chapter 13 (which I mistakenly also labelled as 12!), a new complication arose, in the form of the arrival of George's rather rude brother.

In chapter 13 (hopefully I won't make any further numbering errors!), George was busy with inappropriate (as he thinks) thoughts of Alice.

(I've skipped a scene where Alice takes the girls down to the lake and needs to pretend with a neighbour, Mrs Chase, that she is not a governess, but simply helping out with the girls. Then, while Alice is distracted, trying to spin her web of half-truths and discussing the threat of war on the horizon, Lucy gets up on a rickety boat tied up at the dock and fell off into the water.)

In chapter 14, on returning from the lake, Alice and the girls overheard an argument that ended with this outburst from George to his brother Albert: "I don't need your tales of self-pity. The question is, what are you going to do about it, now that you've f***ed it all up?"

In chapter 15, we witness the fallout from the argument, then have a moment between Alice and George in the garden...

Lucy clapped her hands over her mouth, eyes wide.

Alice made to drag her by main force up the path and around to the kitchen door but Albert's reply froze her as neatly as George's cursing had his sister.

"In a matter of weeks, none of this will seem important," he said in a voice of deadly calm. "If England goes to war, I'll be one of the first to sign up. I'll be covered in medals and glory while you're still stretching your legs on the track. James is a coward, he won't go. Who'll be the credit to the Cunnick name then?"

He shoved George in the shoulder and barrelled down the stairs, passing them on the path without so much as a glance. Only now did Alice register that he wore a polo shirt and bathing trunks, and had a towel draped across his shoulders. His legs and arms were pale in contrast to his sun-reddened face.

"Albert, you won't really go, will you?" Eleanor called after he'd gone by.

Albert halted and turned. He looked them over one by one and shrugged, tugging at the ends of his towel. As casual as if he were returning from a victorious tennis match, rather than racing off after a hurtful row with his brother.

"Sure I will, sis. It won't be for long. Won't you be proud of a brother who's decorated with medals?"

"Not if they have to pin them on while you're laid out in your coffin."

"Eleanor!"

"Don't you remember Uncle Walter?" Eleanor went on, not heeding Alice's admonition, nor her hand on her arm. "Don't you remember all the praise they heaped on him, and him too cold and stiff to know or care?" Albert's eyes narrowed, but he shrugged again, slipping the towel off, then throwing it jauntily over one shoulder. "Sure I do. But this'll be different. Don't you worry your little head, Eleanor. Want to go for a swim, Luce?"

"No! I want to jump off the dock again!"

Albert chuckled. "Sure, we'll both dive off, right into the middle of the lake."

"It'll be cold." Lucy, all trace of her lisp gone, sidled away from Alice and over to her brother.

"It will. But you're as brave as I am, aren't you?"

"I am!"

They moved off without a backward glance.

"You may join them, if you like," Alice said quietly, holding out her hand in an offer to take the deckchairs off Eleanor.

"No, thank you." Eleanor hitched the chairs higher in her arms and tramped up the path. "I think I'll write to Mother and Father."

"No one likes a tell-tale," George said from his seat on the porch steps.

Eleanor had to step over his outstretched leg to get past him and into the house. The sight of her bare leg lifting over his cast suddenly recalled Alice to the fact that she was still in her bathing costume and bare-legged herself. Inelegance that was excusable in his sister would certainly not do for her, so she turned aside and made to go around the aviary to the kitchen door.

Eleanor's blistering response rang from behind. "I'm not going to tattle, Mr Know It All," she told George, in echo of Albert. "If I were, the first thing I'd mention wouldn't be Albert's frightening plans or the fact that he's evidently been expelled from Queen's but won't admit it. I'd tell them that you sit around mooning and following our governess with your eyes. So there!"


***
Alice considered asking to be excused from supper and taking a tray up to her room, but doing so would mean facing George and the others in any case.

She stayed, helping Elsie serve up the shepherd's pie before taking her place at the table beside Eleanor. Albert and Lucy returned at that moment, clattering up the porch steps, chatting nineteen to the dozen. Lucy's lisp was gone, and her bonnet was back on her head. Albert must've swum for it.

Alice helped her change out of her wet costume and dry her hair. They returned downstairs and slipped into their seats. Albert and Eleanor gabbled merrily, as though nothing more alarming had happened than a stray dog barking up at the wire mesh of the aviary.

Bewildered by the family moods, Alice concentrated on her meal. If Albert found it odd that she'd sat with the family, he didn't say anything. Nor did anyone explain or even refer to the fact that George seemed to have disappeared.

***
Snap! The wind caught the newspaper. George held it with both hands, but it curled at the ends, and he couldn't read the most important paragraph.

What had France decided?

Albert's ideas were all wrong, but what if–– Mother and Father were in Switzerland; if they'd left for France or England, they'd have sent a telegram. To this place? No, to James, and by the time the news caught up with them in this backwater––

Snap!

Drat the wind. This garden wasn't half as well designed as he'd thought. Maybe the man who'd planned it never read the papers out here. Perfect spot to bring a girl, an arm about her shoulders to keep the breeze from her heated skin. Golden-pale skin, like Alice––the governess.

That wasn't quite the insult Albert had meant it to be. There were worse fates, after all, than serving as a governess.

It wasn't as though anyone hadn't wed a girl and brought her into society before. Take cousin Charles and that farm girl he'd eloped with just last month. Mother'd been all too pleased to leave and "get away from this sordid gossip".

But he remembered Europe being just as bad, on his first trip three years ago.

That'd been before Charles even met his girl. 1911. Charles'd racked up gambling debts, which his father had consented to pay off, quietly, if Charles agreed to disappear for a few months.

Charles had categorically refused, and George had been tooled off to accompany him, meeting up with some distant relatives on a walking tour in Switzerland. Far up on the side of an Alpine height with an aunt and a couple of distant cousins their age, Ronald and Hillary, they'd still had to fend off intrusive questions and had struggled to keep Charles from picking up Jass, the local fad in cards.

They'd missed the season back at home, too. He remembered various postcards from friends, hinting at scandalous hijinks at various soirees, dropping names; the Lloyds, the McKerrows, the Ludlows. Some of the same names had been in Paris, their last stop on the way home. That was Europe, all the expats congregating at the same watering holes, gossiping about each other behind everyone's backs.

Perhaps it was different now; he ought to be there to see for himself!

Not a word from Banks or Guigsy, fickle friends. Not even a note to wish him a speedy recovery. And where were the girls?

Captain of the hockey team, ringed by beauties, and now look at him.

Fighting the wind in a forsaken garden for snatches of two-day-old news. There, have at it. Blow all the papers around, see if I care.

Someone would collect them, Elsie or––

"What? Oh it's you." He shaded his eyes against the setting sun and looked up at Alice from under his palm. How had she appeared so silently, without his noticing?

"Are you all right?" she asked, tray in hand, holding what looked like tea and a generous helping of shepherd's pie.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"You missed supper."

"The sun's still out. Wasn't it too early for supper? What're we, farm folk?"

Alice didn't dignify that with a response.

Damnation, she looked good, all thin lines and softly waving hems. How come the breeze was so gentle with her?

She seemed to already know the tricks of this garden; just where to set the tray she'd brought so no cool air disturbed the surface of the tea.

"Don't do that!" he snapped as she began to gather up the blown papers from the bushes and the lawn. "I'll get them."

"It's no trouble." She set the stack on the bench beside him, tucked under a rock.

"I can get around perfectly well, I'm not a bloody invalid."

What was it about her sweet nature that riled him? As if he were daring her to turn as sour or insipid as other women he'd known.

She was such a contrast to the adoring girls that used to hang off his arm, laughing at every word from the captain. Hockey, hell, they didn't care what he played so long as he was popular on campus and off.

Alice didn't even know how he'd broken his leg, but she thought to bring him supper on a tray. And he couldn't even thank her properly.

"You didn't have to do this," he got out. "I'll be along in a minute."

"It's no trouble," she said again, and met his gaze.

If he didn't know better, he'd say her look was an understanding one, but that was ridiculous. What could she know of the heights from which he'd sunk?

Last week, I took another baking class with Samba Schutte!

This time, we made cupcakes!

My assistant!

My chocolate ones overflowed the first time, so I made them again a couple of days later. The frosting is the tastiest frosting I've ever had!

What's your favourite cupcake flavour?