She dropped herself into Amanda’s apron again and set about preparing the icing. Countess Lallia had called it:
A stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a pearle but lyke to a paste wych dydde covere my cake about lyke a napkyn, as it were a mysterie.
“I think my icing will be nicer than yours, Contessa—without all that oriental sweetmeat chopped fine and beaten into it. There will be less anticipatory excitement about my cake and more of the calm satisfaction one feels when one knows what is coming next. You had so many mixed spices and sweets and flavours in your cake that Dom Paradis could not possibly tell from one bite what the next would taste like. There is a modern slang term that describes the culinary tactics you employed on the prince’s appetite—you ‘kept him guessing.’”
At first the whole conceit of the Countess of Mountjoye’s cake—“devysed and styrred first in the yeare 1715,” and now reproduced in almost identical mixture from the old recipe—had seemed to her deliciously humorous. She had chuckled and chattered over it to herself and extracted from it a larger degree of the essence of mirth than had come to her palate and nostrils in many weeks; for it cannot be denied that life at Villa Rose lacked brightness. A mansion full of antiques, with no human associates but servants of the same vintage, did not provide the kind of environment which spontaneously generates happiness in the heart of youth. Hibbert Mearely’s widow had been a prisoner in her own grandeur, daily acquainted with that state which, to the young, is worse than sharp grief, namely, boredom.
To-day, with the departure of His Friggets, and the new meeting with her young heart—which had taken place when she regarded herself in the Orleans mirror—a joy had awakened within her like the return of her girlhood. So vivid a joy it was, so brave and confident, that it had sent her forth singing salutations to herself, as if she believed the whole sun-filled, rose-scented earth were calling to her in that syren phrase, “Good-morning, Rosamond!”
How swiftly joy had unfolded hope! And how naturally, inevitably, both had promised love! Permeated with them, she had defied Villa Rose and its antiquities to hold her spirit twenty-four hours longer. Lo, a day was given her—a Wonderful Day. In it she might recapture her lost heritage—romance.
Now, while she beat white of egg and powdered sugar together to make the fundamental paste of the icing for the Paradis cake, an indefinable sense of sorrow descended upon her. Thought lost its elasticity of hope—it lagged and drooped. A lassitude crept over her whole person. Her eyelids felt hot and heavy. There was a pressure on her head that kept it from tossing in the air after its wonted fashion like a proud hollyhock.
“Everything is going wrong,” she whispered. “I have a presentiment of it—just as if some dreadfully unhappy thing had taken place and I was about to hear of it.” A tear fell, hit the rim of the soup plate in which she was beating the icing, and, luckily, rolled off instead of in. Both eyes filled again. She wiped them on the back of her arm, and, by this mournful gesture, sent a trail of icing across the wall from the fork in her hand.
“I never felt so sad in all my life,” was her inward admission, as she set about filling the cake with the cooked concoction of chopped figs, nuts, raisins, and candied fruit that made two inches of lusciousness between the layers. This fruity mixture, further complicated with the oriental “sweets and spyces” of her period, Countess Lallia had poured into the centre of the original cake and baked the whole together. In Rosamond’s day, fortunately for the more nervous digestive apparatus of current humanity, wisdom has reduced weightiness in cookery—hence the layer cake.
She proceeded to encase the whole—a large, imposing square of three layers—in the “stylle and stykkie sauce of the smoothe colour of a pearle.”