Mud Season

The butter was ready before Camille was.

She pressed her thumb into the block at five o’clock exactly and it gave the way it should, cool and bendable, like clay. The dough had rested in the walk-in overnight. The pastry kitchen was fifty-eight degrees, because the inn’s old furnace did not push heat to this end of the building until six, and for once she was glad of it. Cold was good for croissants. In April in Vermont it was good for very little else.

She rolled the dough into a long rectangle, laid the butter on two-thirds of it and folded it in thirds like a letter. She turned it, rolled it and folded it again. Her hands knew the work so well that her head was free to worry, which was a pity this morning.

The window over her bench was black. In another hour it would show her the gravel drive, the kitchen porch and, off to the left, the yellow cottage where her daughter was asleep. For now it showed her a woman of thirty-one in a white jacket with a blue bandana tied over dark curls. There was flour on her chin. She wiped it off with her wrist and the burn scar on her left forearm flashed pink in the glass.

The baby monitor on the shelf above the mixer hummed quietly. Tilly was five and would have been insulted to hear it called a baby monitor, so Camille called it the radio.

The back door banged at twenty past five. Arlo Tatro came in sock-footed, holding his boots away from his body, with mud to the knees of his jeans.

“The staff lot’s a lake,” he said. “We’ve got two lakes now. We should charge extra.”

“Put those on the mat. On it, Arlo. Last time you only got near it.”

He set the boots down with great care, exactly in the middle of the mat, and looked at her for approval. He was twenty-four, six feet of elbows with a red beard, and he had been her breakfast cook for three years. He could poach forty eggs without breaking one. Last August he had gone off the end of the dock in his kitchen clogs after her daughter, and Camille would have forgiven him a great deal more than mud.

“How many this morning?” he asked, tying his apron.

“Six rooms. Eleven covers.”

“Eleven.” He whistled. “Hold me back.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying. Today of all days, you’d think we could fake a crowd. Get Winnie’s bridge club to sit in the dining room and look rich.” He pulled the eggs out of the reach-in. “Do we know who it is yet?”

“A representative of Hallett Hotels will arrive Monday afternoon to assess the property.” Camille had read the email on Winnie’s screen four times and had it by heart. “That’s all it said. It didn’t give a name or a time.”

“I looked them up last night. They’ve got fourteen hotels, all in cities. The one in New York charges thirty-four dollars for a club sandwich.” He cracked an egg one-handed into a bowl. “People who charge thirty-four dollars for a sandwich don’t need a place with a hole in the roof.”

“They bought us.”

“They bought four inns off a bankrupt company in one go. We came in the box. That’s different from wanting us.”

He was right, and she disliked hearing it before sunrise. Northeast Heritage Inns had gone under over the winter. On the first of April, eleven days ago, Hallett Hotels had bought everything it owned. The paychecks had kept coming, and nobody from New York had said a word until that email.

Camille gave the dough its last fold, wrapped it and slid it into the reach-in to rest. She set the timer for thirty minutes and started on the brioche.

She knew the numbers better than Arlo did, because she ran the kitchen and saw the reports. The Larkspur had twenty-two rooms. Eight of them had been shut for three years under a north-wing roof that leaked every time it rained. Last year, on an average night, fewer than seven rooms had had anybody in them. She was a pastry chef and no accountant, but she could read a loss when it had six figures in it.

There were nineteen people who worked at the inn all year round. She could name every one of them, and their children, and tell you which of them had a mortgage. If the inn closed, all nineteen lost their jobs in a county that did not have nineteen spare ones.

And she would lose the cottage. It came with the job. It had two bedrooms and a crooked porch, and it stood sixty yards from the kitchen door, which was the only reason a woman on her own could start work at five and still be the one who gave her daughter breakfast. Camille had some money saved toward a bakery of her own. It was not enough yet, and it was nowhere near enough to cover a bakery and rent and somebody to mind Tilly before dawn.

She was frightened, and she had been frightened for eleven days. She shaped the brioche anyway, because eleven people wanted breakfast.

The window went from black to grey. The drive appeared, rutted and shining with standing water. Beyond the lawn the lake came up out of the dark, flat and pewter-coloured, and three miles across it the Adirondacks still had snow on their shoulders.

At 6:28 the monitor rustled. At half past, the cottage door opened.

Camille stopped what she was doing, as she did every morning, and watched. A small figure in a purple coat over pyjamas came down the cottage steps one at a time. Tilly wore her red rubber boots and kept to the flagstones because the flagstones were the rule. She did not hurry. She stopped once to look at something in the mud and decided it was not worth picking up. Then she climbed the kitchen porch and knocked, although the door was never locked.

“Come in, Matilda,” Arlo called.

Tilly came in. She put her boots on the mat beside his and pointed at the oven clock.

“It’s six three one,” she said. “I was on time. The door was slow.”

“The door’s been slow since 1894,” Camille said. “Good morning, my heart. Come here.”

Tilly allowed herself to be kissed on the top of the head. Her curls were Camille’s, dark and springy and flat on one side from the pillow. She climbed onto the stool at the end of the bench, the one nobody else was allowed to sit on, and folded her hands.

“Warm milk, please. And the heel.”

“The end of the loaf, coming up,” Arlo said.

“It isn’t the end. A loaf has two ends and only one of them is the heel. The heel is the one that was against the side of the oven.”

Arlo looked at Camille. “Is that true?”

“It is in this kitchen.”

Camille poured milk into the small copper pan and set it on the low flame. She cut the heel off yesterday’s brioche, the dark, sweet, chewy corner, and put it on the blue saucer. Tilly inspected it and found it correct.

Then she looked up, and the grey light from the window caught her face.

Her eyes were grey, and there was nothing of Camille in them. They were a clear, light grey like the lake before the sun got to it. At the bottom of the left one sat a wedge of brown, as neat as a slice cut from a pie. Camille had seen that eye every morning for five years. Somewhere around the second year it had stopped hurting her, and she had simply come to love it, because it was Tilly’s.

“Is the New York person coming today?” Tilly asked.

“This afternoon.”

“Winnie said they’re not allowed to close the inn.”

“Winnie said that?”

“She said, ‘Nobody is closing my inn, and that’s the end of it.’” Tilly did Winnie’s voice, flat and Yankee, with alarming accuracy. “So they’re not allowed.”

“Winnie says a lot of things.”

“Winnie’s the boss.”

“Winnie is the innkeeper. The people in New York own the building.”

Tilly thought about that while she dunked the heel in her milk. “That’s a bad system,” she said.

“I think so too,” said Arlo.

Camille laughed, the first time since Friday, and felt her shoulders come down an inch. She cupped the back of her daughter’s warm head for a second. Whatever happened this afternoon, she had built this child’s whole life, the stool and the saucer and the sixty yards of flagstones, with her own two hands. Nobody in a suit could assess that away.

At seven she left Arlo with the eggs and took Tilly back across to dress her. At 7:20 a yellow school bus pulled up at the end of the drive with its lights flashing, and Lucille Bouchard opened the door from the driver’s seat. Camille’s mother was a small woman with dark hair going grey. She had driven that bus for twenty years, and since September her granddaughter had ridden in the first seat behind her all the way to pre-K in Vergennes.

“Today?” Lucille called down.

“This afternoon.”

“Call me after.” Lucille looked at her for a moment longer than the question needed. “Eat something, Camille.”

“I work in a kitchen, Maman.”

“And you never eat in it.”

Tilly climbed the bus steps by herself, turned at the top and gave one firm wave, like a person boarding a ship. The door folded shut. Camille stood in the wet road until the bus had gone round the bend toward Vergennes, and then she went back to work.

The morning went the way Monday mornings went in mud season. Eleven people ate breakfast. Four of the six rooms checked out. The linen truck got stuck in the drive, and two of the housekeepers and the gardener pushed it out. Camille baked off the croissants and then a test batch of kouign-amann for the bakery window, which would not open until May. She did the produce order and argued with the dairy about a short case of cream.

She told herself she was not going to bake anything special for a stranger from New York. At one o’clock she made maple shortbread, because there was butter left over. She knew that was not the real reason.

At a quarter to three Winnie Ostrander came through the swinging door from the dining room. Winnie was seventy-one. She wore her white hair in one long braid over her shoulder, and she owned more cardigans than anyone Camille had ever met. Today’s was dark green with wooden buttons, which was the one she wore to funerals and to the bank.

“Is that shortbread?” Winnie said.

“It’s for the visitor.”

“I’m testing it for poison.” She took two. “I’ve put him in the Champlain Room. It’s the only one where the window opens and the radiator works at the same time.”

“You don’t know it’s a him.”

“It’s always a him.” Winnie bit into the shortbread and shut her eyes briefly. “That’s good. That’s a crime, how good that is. If they shut us down I’m telling the newspaper they fired the woman who made this.”

“Winnie.”

“I know. I shouldn’t joke.” Winnie brushed crumbs off the green cardigan. Her face, with the joke gone out of it, looked tired. She had run this inn for longer than Camille had been alive. “I have the books ready and I’ll show him every page. I’m not going to hide the roof and I’m not going to beg.”

“You told Tilly nobody was allowed to close it.”

“Well, somebody had to tell her something.” Winnie looked toward the window. “You’re thinking about the cottage.”

“I’m thinking about nineteen people.”

“You can think about both. I won’t tell anybody.” She squeezed Camille’s arm just above the scar, quickly, and let go. “Whoever he is, he has to eat. People are a lot more reasonable about a roof once they’ve had your croissants.”

Winnie went out by the back door onto the kitchen porch with her second piece of shortbread, as she often did, to eat it where the guests couldn’t see. Camille propped the window over her bench open a few inches to let the oven heat out. She turned tomorrow’s brioche dough onto the bench and began to knead.

The clock on the oven said 3:00 when she heard tyres on the gravel.

A black car came up the drive, slowly, steering around the worst of the ruts. It was a long, low, expensive sedan and it was filthy to the door handles. It stopped right outside the kitchen porch, ten yards from her window. There was no driver in a cap. The man who got out had been behind the wheel himself.

He was tall and wore a dark overcoat, open, over a dark suit. He stood with one hand on the car door, looking at the inn. She saw him look at the porch rail and then the upstairs windows, and he looked longest at the north-wing roof.

Camille’s hands stopped moving in the dough before she knew why. She knew those shoulders. Then he turned his head toward the porch, and she knew all of him.

On the porch, Winnie had gone still, with the shortbread halfway to her mouth.

“Jamie Rourke,” Winnie said. Her voice came clearly through the open window. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Camille had last seen him six summers ago. He had been twenty-seven then and brown from the sun, in a faded T-shirt with a rope burn across one palm, and he had laughed more easily than anyone she knew. This man was not laughing. His dark hair was shorter. A white scar ran through his right eyebrow that had not been there before. He looked like someone who had not had a day off in years.

“It’s Gideon Hallett, Mrs. Ostrander,” he said.

She would have known the voice with her eyes shut. But the name was Hallett, which was on the email and the paychecks and a hotel in New York with a thirty-four-dollar sandwich. Camille stood with her hands in the dough and understood, slowly and completely, that the man she had loved had never existed under the name she had called him.

He was not looking at Winnie. He was looking past her at the kitchen window, straight at Camille.

His eyes were grey, and the left one had a wedge of brown at the bottom. She had seen that eye across the bench this morning, over a saucer and a cup of warm milk.

Camille did not look away. She would not give him that. She thought about the kitchen door behind her and the note that had come under it one August night, with nine words on it and an initial. She thought that it was three o’clock, and that Tilly was seven miles away in Vergennes and would not be home until half past five.

She had two and a half hours to decide what to do.
***