2 – You Can't Unboil an Egg

"What are you doing up so late, Baldroy? The rest of the household is in bed."

"'Cept fer you, Sebastian, sir." Bard sat at the kitchen table, painstakingly dipping a pen into a pot of ink and transcribing letters with the concentration of a diamond cutter. That the letters appeared to constantly revolve and switch places before his eyes did not make things easier. He hated all writing—and reading—because the mischievous letters hated him right back, and hid from him, and taunted him with their general screwing around. "Line up, you damned berks," he muttered when the letters he'd just written as "desserts" rearranged themselves into "stressed". Which one had he written? The wrong one of course.

"Are you…writing?"

Bard leaned over his paper to hide his inevitable errors from the butler's gleaming eyes. "I'm just drawin' up the menu for tomorrow, just to save time. That's what the chef does, innit?"

"Well…"

"I thought we could take advantage of surplus supplies an' seasonal produce, an' anyway, it's all very cost effective that way—"

"Baldroy." Sebastian placed a firm hand on the chef's shoulder, and Bard tossed his pen across the room in fright. Ink sloshed from the inkpot and spattered his unfinished menu draft. "I am the one who plans the young master's meals, not you. When it comes to matters of cuisine, I am the one who knows what the Earl of Phantomhive desires. No ingredient, no matter how exotic, is beyond my reach. Your instinct for proletarian thrift is charming, but has no place in an Earl's kitchen. I certainly won't stand for serving the young master—what is that you've scrawled there?— a Ploughman's Lunch. And you can take your zucchini muffins to the ammunition dump that is your pantry and blow them to kingdom come."

"But I've got to use up the bumper zucchini crop somehow, sir. If Finny found out I was detonating 'em, he'd launch me at the moon."

"Then you and Finny can run the eight miles to our nearest neighbors, abandon the lot of them on their doorstep, and pretend you're doing it 'just to be nice.' Take care you don't get shot. Because that would be my first reaction, if I were them."

"But I—"

Sebastian slid his own beautifully calligraphied menu in front of Bard's nose, though not close enough for the end of the chef's cigarette to scorch it. "Tomorrow the Earl of Phantomhive shall breakfast on smoked salmon tartlets with crème fraîche, and at noon dine on mustard and tarragon phyllo pastries topped with a berry glacé. Tea shall be accompanied by a rhubarb pear napoleon, and for supper you will serve a hearty lamprey and kidney pie with a side of gingered carrots in aspic."

Bard stared at the butler's menu, but couldn't make sense of the spiraled, swirling handwriting. "I'll…plan to peel the carrots then. And…core a pear."

"Excellent. And I'll need you to wrangle the lamprey out of its natural habitat. But don't even think about touching the salmon. It is already pre-smoked." Sebastian gracefully took a seat opposite Bard. "And since you seem so suddenly to have gained a modicum of initiative, I shall sit here until you have successfully recited my entire menu back to me, including the ingredients and preparation times required—for you—to prepare each dish. It's past midnight already but I don't need much sleep myself."

Bard sighed. His eyes throbbed. "Initiative. What was I thinking. I must 'ave rolled oregano into my cigarette by accident. Why must you be so damned inconvenient?"

"Yes, what an inconvenience I am. How inconvenient of me to happen upon the sole survivor of a slaughtered battalion, a survivor who surely would have died of exposure, or shot himself out of despair, if not for my interference. It was in a strawberry field as I recall. I remember the smell of them, mingled with blood."

Bard stabbed his cigarette end into a saucer.

Sebastian cocked his head, and the ghost of a smile twitched his lip. "You never did eat any of that compote yourself, did you?"

The chef tore a strip from his own failed attempt at a menu and rolled it into a new cigarette.

"Well," continued the butler, "if you'd rather end up choking to death on gin in some filthy gutter, say the word." He leaned in and held Bard's eyes in his fiery gaze. "That future is written right…there." He tapped the chef's forehead with a gloved finger. "Your dismissal can easily be arranged. It's not like you'll be missed."

Bard sat very still through all of this, though his eyes twitched without him realizing it. "You bastard. How do you do it?"

"Do what, Baldroy? The seven-layered napoleon? Or the glacé?"

"Well yeah, them too. I meant, how come you can say all that to me, and basically tell me to go off myself, and I…I feel like I'd rather die than leave. I'd step in front of a bullet for the young master, an' maybe you too. You fucking blighter."

"It's called emotional manipulation, Baldroy."

"The hell it is."

"If you're feeling wretched, throw yourself at my feet. You'll experience an invigorating sense of self-worth, and I'll promise not to laugh. Loudly, that is."

"I'm not that far gone yet."

"Au contraire. I have you eating from my palm. If that initiative of yours begins to get in my way, however, be warned that I have the power to provoke from you theatrical outbursts that will forever alienate your friends. All two of them."

The chef sat unmoving, as if he'd become suspended in a clear aspic jelly. Just as Sebastian opened his mouth to suggest that he start his menu memorization, Bard interrupted.

"So I guess gettin' the Earl's permission to go to chef school to actually, you know, learn my bleedin' job, is too much initiative fer this household."

"It might be, Baldroy. It just might."

"It'd make your life easier though, eh? An' the Earl has plenty of coin. Unless you think I'm some sort of threat to your bond wi' the young master."

Sebastian gave a shark-like grin that made Bard regret he'd started this conversation in the first place, and fed into it for so long. "A threat? Certainly not. Though I don't see how you learning to boil an egg and butter toast will ease my many duties in the least."

A thought flashed through Bard's mind, a thought he didn't dare voice out loud. If he were to become a competent, hirable chef, he could find employment in any number of houses in Britain or abroad. But if this were prevented, he would only ever have one home. Here.

Was that so bad? Sebastian, despite his snark, did not seem that eager to banish him from the manor. Sebastian didn't want him hired—or hirable—anywhere but here.

"Le Cordon Bleu looks down on stove-top cordite use, Baldroy. You would despise every minute of it. At least here you may dabble in your hobbies as long as you apologize profusely and do the repair work yourself."

True. Where else, Bard thought, could a man with a hankering for firepower keep a gatling gun in his pantry?