6 – Sugar Cages

"This ain't working, Bard!" Mey-Rin slammed shut the cover of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. "What with you second-guessing every word I say to you, I'm starting to think you don't trust me at all, no you don't."

"Trust?" Bard grit his teeth. He shook cigarette ash onto the floor since he'd be swabbing the whole place down to start from scratch again anyway. "When I question you tellin' me to put a cup of salt into the meringue, know that it's a matter of common sense. Trust got nothing to do with it."

"An' who made you the almighty professor of meringue? You've put your thumb into the yolk of every egg you've cracked. When was the last time you tried to make one? What's that you say? Never? I thought as much." She poured milk into glass and thumped it down in front of the exasperated chef. "Now drink something before you get even more grumpy than you already are."

"No one puts a cup of salt in anything! Ever!" Bard pounded his fists on the table, sending globs of over-salted custard and egg-shell-ridden, mysteriously un-fluffy raw meringue flying up to spatter the ceiling. "Or can't you read—" He almost said "either," but stopped himself at the last second. No one but Sebastian knew how terrible he was with books. "Why do I put up with this? And with you lot? I quit. Let me go drown myself in a ditch full of flamin' gin, like a man. Where's my blowtorch?" He took a determined step toward the pantry.

"Hold 'im down, Finny." Mey-Rin blocked his path. "His blood sugar is crashing, and 'e'll be but a puddle of gibbering nerves if 'e don't get nothing in his system."

The gardener grasped Bard from behind and pinned his arms to his side while Mey-Rin held the chef's nose and poured the milk down his throat. When he stopped spluttering and straining against Finny's iron grip, they set him gently into a chair.

"I'm sorry, Mey-Rin," said Bard at last when he'd recovered somewhat. "I didn't mean to get so angry. It weren't at you, though. I'm shouting at myself, really. Shouting's what chefs do, innit?" He stared down at the cigarette pinched between his finger and thumb. "You and Finny take a rest while I mop up and try to decide which finger to present to the earl on a chopping block. At least my trigger finger's safe. I 'ope."

"Bard!" cried Finny. "Don't say that. The young master isn't so cruel."

"Sebastian said my fingers was on the line, and 'e don't give no empty threats. Do you think if this little one 'ere was a stump, it would give me an air of mystery?"

Finny bit his lip as if holding back tears. "Stop it," he snapped suddenly with uncharacteristic force. "I like your hands the way they are."

Something about the way Finny said this caught Bard off guard. He looked askance at the gardener, whose face now glowed a strawberry-red.

"There's still three hours until the dinner," piped up Mey-Rin to fill the awkward silence. "At least wait for the verdict to put your 'ead in the noose."

"I know, I know," said Bard, "but I prefer a little mental preparation. Finny, how are our egg supplies?"

"Eggs?" said the scarlet-faced gardener. "That, err, I mean to say…between three batches of bad Crème Anglaise and five lit'ral meringue flops, this little egg here is the last one on the whole estate."

Bard wondered idly if he should save the young master the trouble and dock his own finger with his carving knife himself.

"I'll run into town to buy more," offered Finny before Bard could even ask the favor.

"I still have to press the napkins and tablecloth before the guests arrive," added Mey-Rin hurriedly, though Bard suspected that Sebastian had already done it. Probably she was just sick of him and the claustrophobic kitchen. He could hardly blame her.

The maid and gardener hurried off to their respective tasks. Bard couldn't tackle his next, undoubtedly doomed, batches without any eggs, so he set about swabbing the floor, walls and spattered ceiling. By the time he'd finished Finny still hadn't returned with the eggs, and he didn't expect to see Mey-Rin in the kitchen again that evening unless she were there under some form of duress.

The hands of the kitchen clock seemed to slip forward faster than usual, yet still Finny hadn't come. There had to be something else productive to do.

Sugar cages. He'd nearly forgotten about the garnish for his crème anglaise—he usually did forget garnishes, dismissing them as affectations of Sebastian-style froofy cuisine. But time wouldn't fill itself, and sugar cages, as far as he knew, contained no eggs. After five more minutes spent flipping through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volumes one and two, he remembered that books had lists in the back called indexes. At long last he found the correct page. Immediately his eyes were drawn to a skull and crossbones in an inset near the bottom of the page. He ran his fingers over the accompanying text until the letters unraveled themselves.

"Warning: working with hot sugar can be dangerous. Melted sugar adheres to skin, causing deep burns and scarring," he read aloud slowly. "Pouring water into boiling sugar can be explosive and even lethal." Bard's mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. "At last. Somethin' I can wrap my 'ead around."

He set to work at the stove with a pan of caster sugar and water, bringing it to a boil and holding it there until it formed thin brittle threads when he drizzled it off the spoon into a glass of cold water. He barely had to even glance at the recipe—somehow just knowing that he handled lethal materials activated some instinctual switch in his brain. He deftly drizzled the molten sugar substance over the bowl of a greased ladle in a thin spider-web pattern, and when it had cooled he used his thumbs to pry it free in one piece. The sensation of succeeding at anything on the first try was so foreign to him that he stared for a full minute, bewildered, at this perfect crisp cage of caramelized sugar threads in front of him before he remembered that he needed a dozen of the things and left the first cage to cool on a square of waxed parchment. By the time Finny finally arrived, Bard had spun over twenty perfect sugar cages, then cleaned and polished the pan.

"I'm so sorry, Bard," panted Finny, setting a basket of eggs on the table. "The village grocer only had six eggs left so I ran to the Blackburn farm, and then saw the hen lady on Chickory Lane, and I still only could get two dozen. The whole county is in shortage, thanks to us."

"Only two dozen?" Bard's little finger began to tingle. He did a few figures in his head. "That means only one casualty batch."

"What?"

"It means we've a slim margin for error."

Finny's upbeat expression collapsed like a souffle. "I never seem to do anything right on the first try. Do you?"

Bard glanced around the room at the sugar cages lined up on a sideboard. "Yes, actually." He felt slightly hurt that Finny hadn't even noticed them. "Here, take the book. It's open to the recipe. Read from the top, but hurry. We don't have much time left. Double the recipe, so it don't take so long."

"Yes, chef!" Finny seemed to have regained his enthusiasm somewhat. "To start, we need twelve eggs. You're supposed to separate the eggs, but it don't say how.

"Whites in one bowl, yolks in the other."

"But won't it be faster to just put six eggs in one bowl and six in the other?"

"That ain't how that works," said Bard dryly. He cracked an egg over a bowl and passed the yolk back and forth between eggshell halves until most of the white had dripped down. Just as he was about to toss the yolk in a second bowl, his thumb slipped and pierced it. "You slippery bastard," he growled as a drop of yolk fell into the whites. At least it wasn't much. What difference could it possibly make? "Come on Finny, just read what it says."

Eagerly Finny rattled off a list of ingredients while Bard measured them into the bowl with the whites.

"Wait…"

"What now?" Bard was already whisking the concoction for all he was worth.

"Umm…I think some of those ingredients were supposed to go in the other bowl."

"You think?"

"First there's a list, then at the very end they tell you what goes where. They should warn you, or put things in better order or something. "

"You and Mey-Rin tell me something completely different every time." Bard slapped the bowl upside-down over the sink. He glanced uneasily at his final dozen eggs. "Think of all the orphans and legless Crimean veterans we might have fed with all them wasted batches." He tried to make Finny stand aside, but the gardener was adamant that he would help, and read more carefully this time. He even grasped Bard's hand and wouldn't let go until the chef handed the book back to him. "Twist my arm then," said the chef, giving way at last. "But we're only doing a six-egg batch this time."

For the next batch (was it the sixth? Seventh?) Finny read with more care, but when Bard got to the part where he had to whisk until the whites reached the stiff-peak stage, they still hadn't firmed after ten full minutes of beating.

"Not again…"

"Let me try," said Finny. "Maybe they need a stronger arm. Not that your arms aren't fine the way they are. Because they are very fine and, um, I'll just be quiet now." He trailed off into another awkward silence.

"Thank you?" Bard reprised his confused look.

Finny channeled his evident frustration into the egg whites, but even after another ten minutes they still hadn't stiffened.

Bard stared at his hands, trying to memorize how they looked with all their fingers, and already felt twangs of nostalgia.

Sebastian breezed into the kitchen with a veritable gust of shiny black coattails to check his Boeuf a la Bourguignonne which had been braising for the past four hours, and for the first time Bard noticed how the kitchen had filled with the hearty scent of it. At the sight of the dud meringue, the butler shook his head sadly as if he'd expected such an outcome all along.

"You've been sticking your thumbs in the yolks, haven't you?" Sebastian said with a sigh.

"What's it to you?" snapped Bard. "How I break my eggs is my business."

"Well you can save your breath and stop whisking. If it's not thickened by now, you're merely wasting your time. Better start over. The Bay of Fundy delegation has moved to the dining room, and I'm serving up the first course as soon as I've plated it. You have a three-quarters of an hour at most to put the finishing touches on your piece de resistance. Otherwise…" The butler mimed a chopping motion. "You will suffer consequences, Chef Baldroy. You can hardly claim that you had no time to prepare."

By the time Bard had wiped out his bowls, Sebastian had divided the Boeuf Bourguignonne among twelve plates, arranged alongside delicate towers of mashed parsnip and celeriac shaped with crimped metal forms, and garnished with fresh herbs.

"Tick tock, tick tock." As the butler wheeled his dinner trolley past Bard, he knocked the chef with an elbow. "Perhaps you should rethink your tactics, squad leader. And your chain of command."

"Meaning what?" Bard shouted after him.

"Slamming your face into a wall won't convince the wall to move out of your way." The butler gave him a coy smile. "Think about it," he said, and disappeared.

"Shall we try again, Bard?" Finny reached for the last six eggs.

"No." Bard slumped into a chair. "'E's right." He pressed his palms into his eyes. "I need to think. What do I keep doing wrong?"

Finny shrugged. "I like you just the way you are."

Bard was prevented from snarling some sarcastic remark he would have immediately regretted by the arrival of Mey-Rin. The maid entered the kitchen clutching a freshly laundered chef's coat and apron to her bodice.

"Chef Bard wants to know what he's doing wrong?" she said with a little too much glee in her voice. "I'll tell you, yes I will." She dropped the apron and coat into Bard's lap. "You never know when to keep your hands off. "

Bard decided that perhaps this was a more insightful statement that he'd cared to admit. "And these?" he asked instead, looking at the clothes she'd handed him.

"Are for when you present yourself and your dessert to the young master. That's what Mr. Sebastian said."

A pair of handcuffs slipped out of the apron when he lifted it, and clattered to the floor.

"And I guess this is a message from Mr. Sebastian as well." Bard didn't ask it like a question. Because of course it was a message. He retrieved the cuffs and spun them on his finger, staring at them intensely as he did so.

"I don't like that look on 'im," said Mey-Rin to Finny. "Bard's getting that look again. He's about to do something rash and…and horribly stupid."

Though the handcuffs didn't have a key, the wrist sections were open. Bard snapped one manacle on his own wrist and it locked itself with a click.

"Mey-Rin, make 'im stop!" cried Finny.

The maid planted herself in front of the chef, and tried unsuccessfully to distract him from the biscuit tin full of pre-rolled cigarettes he'd pulled from a cupboard. He shoved a dozen or so end-down in a glass.

"Bard! You aren't thinking this through. Don't do something you'll regret."

Meanwhile Bard lit a candle and set it next to his cigarette glass and teacup-ashtray at a corner of the table. He placed Mastering the Art of French Cooking in front of it all, opened to "Crème Anglaise with Floating Islands and Sugar Cages." He pulled up a stool, seated himself, and before Finny could get a headlock on him, shackled himself to the table leg.

"What 'ave you done, Bard!" shouted Mey-Rin and Finny in chorus.

"I think they call it mise en place."

Mey-Rin threw her hands up in despair. "I'll go find Mr. Sebastian, 'e must have the key." Finny just choked back tears.

"Don't bother, Mey-Rin. It's too late now." Bard leaned forward and plucked a fresh cigarette from the glass with his teeth. He lit it with the candle and inhaled deeply. "I'm the chef of this godforsaken kitchen. I'm the one who should be directing operations here. Sebastian was right, and you too, Mey-Rin. The only way I can finish this blasted recipe is if I don't lay one cursed finger on a goddamned thing." He blew a cloud of smoke at the pages in front of him. "Now wash your 'ands, you two. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do."

"Yes, chef."

Bard stared at the first line of text and silently willed the letters to cease their somersaults and line the fuck up already, but these were particularly mutinous bastards. When he moved his hand to try to cover the words, the handcuffs stopped him short.

"Bugger all." Perhaps he hadn't thought this through enough after all. He glanced at the clock. Dinner would have been served by now. He had twenty minutes left, at most. A drop of sweat slid down his nose and splattered on the paper.

Then a finger appeared on the page, and slid across the letters one at a time, slow enough for Bard to unravel their meaning. He glanced up, and into the older, serenely smiling face of Phantomhive's former butler.

"Mr. Tanaka."

The older gentleman gave his soft characteristic laugh and sipped from the mug of green tea clasped in his other hand. Tenaka had become such a fixture at the tea kettle that Bard barely registered his presence in the kitchen anymore. The man rarely said anything intelligible, and didn't now—not that Bard expected him to. But there was no time to waste on niceties, and Bard wasn't given to niceties in general, certainly not under duress.

"Mey-Rin," barked Bard in his best chef/sergeant voice, "since you gave me hell earlier about breaking yolks, do you know how to separate an egg?"

"Yes, chef. Better 'n you, chef!"

"You're on meringue duty. Get to it! Finny, you measure out the milk and cream, exactly as I tell you, into that pan. You're my custard cook. Can you handle the heat?"

"Yes, chef!" Finny's tear-streaked face bore a fresh grin. He poured out the amounts Bard read to him.

"Good. Add a teaspoon of vanilla. Heat it on a low flame. Low! The second you see bubbles, you let me know."

"Yes, chef!"

Bard continued giving directions in his brusque manner while sweat glistened on his face. Each time his cigarette ran low he spat the butt into his teacup and lit a new one in the candle.

"Aren't those whites stiff yet, Mey-Rin? Pass 'em off to Finny and mind the stove. Ah, now that's looking like a meringue. You mean any yolk at all will ruin it? Why didn't anyone bother to tell me? Well done, you lot, well done, but we aren't out of the frying pan yet. Look sharp, look sharp. Three minutes left on the simmering. Too hot! See how it spatters? Cool it off, quick!"

"Really, Bard," said Mey-Rin with an amused curl of her lip. She tilted her glasses slightly so that he could catch a glimpse of her eyes. "When 'ave you ever complained about something being too hot?" But she dipped the bottom of the pan in a basin of cold water so that it sizzled.

Bard swore under his breath and tugged at the handcuffs. Tenaka's guiding finger reoriented him in the text. "We need to poach spoonfuls of meringue in the hot cream. Them's the 'floating islands'. What kind of inane dish is this? Who invents this shit? Finny, stir one hundred grams of sugar into the yolks, and be quick about it!"

They whisked and poached while Bard read until he was certain his eyes were bleeding. His attention flickered from the text to the clock to Finny and Mey-Rin, his line cooks, barking corrections or warnings whenever he sensed some grievous error in the making, and his fingers at stake.

"Plate it, hurry! Thirty seconds to go. No, not an actual plate, use a parfait glass, Sebastian always uses a parfait glass. Pour in the custard, now the meringues, easy there—Finny, wipe up those drips! We can't serve a sticky glass to the young master else he'll think he's got a stable of asses for his staff. The sugar cage, don't forget the garnish you lot! Hands off, Finny, you'll crush it. Mey-Rin will do it, but you'll have to guide her along. She's got no depth perception. And…" Bard shut his eyes as the maid dangled the sugar cage precariously over the parfait glass. She gasped. He forced his eyes open. And…perfection. It was a breathtaking sight.

"The earl will take his dessert now, Chef Baldroy."

Bard wished for nothing more at that moment than a pair of free hands, which which to pull up his goggles. A pair of hot tears scorched his cheeks, despite his attempts to blink them into oblivion.

"Allow me." The butler leaned over Bard and unlocked the cuffs, his key in one hand as if he'd fully expected to find the chef in such a state. "Now put on that fresh coat and apron, hurry. I see one presentable crème anglaise. But where are the other eleven?"

Bard bit his cigarette in half. "I—but I—"

Mr. Tanaka, meanwhile, pointed to some tiny words in the lower corner of the page.

"Serves three," Bard read aloud, then added, "or one earl, who likes his parfait glasses full." He began to untie his apron with shaking fingers. "Well, what are you lot waiting for? Finny, Mey-Rin, plate the rest of the sugar cages. Yes, put them directly on the plates." The chef shed his stained and burned coat, and pulled on the fresh one.

Before he knew it, Bard stood with Sebastian just outside the grand dining room. On the trolley sat one perfect crème anglaise and eleven sugar cages, garnishes garnishing nothing.

"This is how you choose to go out, then?" asked the butler with a heavy dollop of misgiving in his voice.

"With my boots on." Bard and adjusted his collar and flexed his fingers, perhaps for the last time.

"Wait here then." Sebastian stepped into the dining room. "And now, my lord, I would beg your permission to call forth our chef Baldroy with the dessert." Sebastian leaned back out into the hall where Bard waited with the trolley, and plucked the chef's cigarette from his mouth. "There. You are now slightly more presentable than before." He straightened one of the spun sugar garnishes. "Do proceed, and mind your tongue, man. I placed the chopping block there on the second shelf of the trolley, for your convenience."