Tilly Brook had never baked for a prince before. She was a town baker, thirty-four, round-cheeked and flour-dusted, with a little shop by the river bridge where half the city bought its morning bread. But the palace pastry cook had fallen ill a week before Prince Laurence's birthday, and the Queen, who had tasted Tilly's honey cake at a charity fair, sent for her.
For three days and two nights Tilly worked in the palace pastry room. The cake she built was seven tiers of white sugar and gold leaf, taller than a man, each tier resting on hidden wooden supports she had cut and fitted herself. When the servants carried it into the white-and-gold banquet hall, the guests applauded.
Then, in the middle of the toasts, it leaned, swayed, and collapsed onto the marble.
At the high table, Lady Imogen Crane looked at the ruin, then at the plump baker, and said sweetly, "Like the baker, it couldn't hold itself up." The ladies laughed until they cried.
Tilly did not cry. She knelt in the wreckage, pulled out one of the supports, and held it up. It had not broken. It had been cut almost all the way through.
"Someone sawed through the supports," she said. Then she looked at the high table, where a silver knife lay beside every noble plate. "With a silver knife, my lady?"
Prince Laurence set down his goblet and ordered the steward to collect every silver knife from the high table.
Tilly knew those cuts were not hers. Her kitchen saws left coarse, straight teeth marks. These were thin, uneven, and shiny grey at the edges, where soft silver had rubbed against hard wood. And only one kind of silver knife in that palace had a serrated edge: the little fruit knives laid at the high table, and nowhere else.
The steward laid the knives on a white cloth in front of the prince, each one marked by the place card it had come from. Most were clean. One was not. Deep in its tiny teeth were pale wood dust and grains of sugar. Its place card read: Lady Imogen Crane.
Imogen laughed and said it must have been switched. But a small voice spoke up from the doorway. Pip, the youngest page, twelve years old, had been sent to fetch more wine during the toasts. In the corridor he had seen a lady in pale rose silk come out of the pastry room, quickly, with something silver in her hand. Imogen was the only lady in rose silk that night.
The why came out the next morning, and it was uglier than spite.
Lady Imogen's uncle, Master Crane, held the royal contract for the palace flour. It had made the family rich. On her first day in the pastry room, Tilly had opened a sack of his flour and frowned. It was too white, too heavy, and it squeaked between her fingers. She tested it the way her grandmother had taught her, with a drop of vinegar, and it fizzed. It was cut with chalk. Tilly said so to the head cook, who said so to the steward, and the steward said he would look into it after the banquet.
Imogen heard about it the same day from her uncle. If the town baker were dismissed in disgrace, no one would listen to her about flour. So during the toasts, Imogen excused herself, slipped into the empty pastry room, and sawed through the supports with the only blade she had: her own silver fruit knife. She thought the cake would fall later, in the kitchen. It fell in front of everyone instead, and she could not resist laughing.
The steward tested the flour that afternoon. Every sack from Master Crane was cut with chalk, and had been for years. The palace bread, the soldiers' bread, the hospital bread had all been made with it. Master Crane lost the royal contract and was ordered to repay the treasury for every sack. Lady Imogen was sent from court to her family's country house, and the story of the silver knife followed her there.
Prince Laurence went down to the pastry room himself that night. Tilly was there, at midnight, flour to her elbows, baking again.
"What are you making?" he asked.
"Your birthday cake," she said. "A little late. And much shorter."
It was three tiers tall, with honey and almonds, and the whole court ate it the next evening. Before the first slice was cut, the prince stood and raised his glass to the new Royal Baker, Mistress Tilly Brook. Pip the page boy got the first piece.
