She had measured the yeast and salt by eye, the way she always did for a small household loaf, and her eye had been designed for a household of four, not a hall of forty. By the time she understood the scale of the miscalculation, she was already committed.
The second problem was the persistent draft from the lower kitchen door, which arrived at regular intervals and dispersed fine white powder in directions she had not planned for and could not seem to prevent. She had propped a stool against the door. The draft came through anyway.
By the time she fully grasped the disastrous extent of the situation, the chaos was already well underway.
"More water, me Lady?" asked Bridie.
The girl had absolutely no business being in the kitchen during baking hours, but she had arrived twenty minutes ago under the pretense of fetching salt and was showing no signs of leaving the spectacle.
"Nay," Margaret said, her jaw tight as she struggled with the mass of dough. "Less. I said less before."
"Ye said more, me Lady."
"I said..." Margaret stopped. She looked down into the wide wooden bowl. She looked at Bridie's twitching mouth. "I'll need to add more flour."
The dough was not cooperating. She had been told once, by her nurse in the Lowlands, that bread required a patient spirit, and she was trying to be patient, but it wasn't helping. The gray mass sat in the bowl. She turned it over and pressed her weight intoit. The dough gave slightly under her fingers and then bounced back to its stubborn shape.
"If ye work it from the heel of yer hand," said Catriona's voice from the stone doorway—she had also mysteriously arrived, apparently for reasons entirely unrelated to watching the Lady fail— "and push forward rather than down…"
"I am pushin' forward," Margaret insisted, her hair slipping from its pins.
"Ye're pushin' down, me Lady."
"It's the same direction."
"It is nae the same," Catriona pressed her lips together, her chest heaving with a suppressed breath. "Me Lady."
Mrs. O'Halloran had slowly drifted down the length of the table, her boots silent on the flags, nearing the center of the situation. She was currently wiping down a copper mixing bowl that did not require her presence at that end of the room.
Margaret worked the dough with renewed vigor. Her forearms ached. The mass improved slightly, losing some of its wet stickiness. She was making progress. She was absolutely making progress.
She reached blindly for the small clay jar to dust the rolling board one last time, and her elbow clipped the raised edge of the container.
The flour went askew. Most of it landed on the oak board, which was fine. A good amount coated her forearms and fingers, as expected. But a large, white patch flew upward and landed squarely on her left cheek. She didn't realize this right away until Mrs. O'Halloran's composed, blank expression softened into something warmer at the corners of her eyes.
"What?" Margaret asked, freezing mid-knead. "What is it?"
"Nothin', me Lady," Mrs. O'Halloran said, her voice suspiciously tight.
"What?" Margaret reached up with a clean wrist, touching her cheek, and encountered the thick, velvety layer of flour clinging to her skin. She closed her eyes for one brief, private moment, letting her forehead drop toward the rim of the bowl.
Then she heard the heavy oak kitchen door creak on its hinges.
She opened her eyes instantly.
Fergus was there, standing in the doorway.
He had come, she assumed, for the same mundane reasons men ever entered the kitchens. Something practical, something involving a blacksmith's order or a message that required Mrs.O'Halloran's immediate attention. It had nothing to do with her. He had taken two massive steps into the warmth of the hearth and stopped dead.
His dark gaze found her immediately, as it always did, bypassing the servants entirely. His eyes moved slowly. From her flour-dusted hands, up the line of her bare forearms, to the glaring white evidence clinging to her left cheek, down to the bowl of resistant dough, and finally back to her flushed face.
He took it in, in that precise, methodical order, and Margaret watched him receive the full tactical accounting of her defeat.
Neither of them moved.
The entire kitchen held its breath. Even the great log fire in the hearth seemed to quiet its snapping. Then Mrs. O'Halloran laughed. She put the back of her gnarled hand to her mouth and laughed like a woman who had been holding a heavy weight back for the better part of an hour and could not bear it one moment more.
Behind her, Bridie went off at the exact same time, a sharp snort escaping her nose, and Catriona turned away from the wall, her lips pressed flat against a brilliant smile she could no longer contain.
