Caesar's Palace Shipping Week 2016: Day 6 - Reveal

If you pay the price, she'll let you deep inside
There's a secret garden she hides

Dickon was determined to pronounce the word properly, which proved difficult with his Yorkshire accent, so Mary smiled and repeated it slowly for him — sha-hee took-ra. By the time Dickon finally said it right, he'd eaten almost the whole bowl of it.

"'Tis delicious, Mary," he said for the third time, licking his fingers. "I never knew thou could cook."

Mary bit her lip, pleased and embarrassed at the same time. "It isn't as good as the kind I had in India. Our servants there used to make it to use up the old bread. They put lots of honey and saffron and pistachios on it, and—" Mary stopped abruptly, overwhelmed by the memory of their old kitchen in India, and the smell of spices. She could almost feel the hot desert air on her face again, even though it was a cool autumn day on Misselthwaite Manor.

Dickon smacked his lips. "Well, thou makes the best I've ever tasted."

Mary wasn't surprised that he liked shahi tukra. She'd offered some to Colin — truthfully, she'd wanted to test it out on him, before giving any to Dickon — but it had smelled too strange and exotic for him to try it. But Dickon could eat anything. He could eat all the foods that grew wild on the moor. The crabapples that grew down by the stream gave Mary sour stomach if she ate even one, but Dickon could eat them endlessly and never get sick. He could eat the wild onions that grew near the house; sometimes he dug them up, brushed the dirt off, and ate them like apples. He could eat the spicy wild peppers that were too hot for anyone else.

And he was eating Mary's sweet, spicy shahi tukra now, as the two of them sat together on the steps outside the manor house. "Thou learned to make it in India?" he asked her, dragging his spoon along the bottom of the bowl.

Mary nodded. "Well, I didn't really... I mean, our servants there used to make it," she said again, uncertainly, "and I wanted to learn how, because it was my favorite dish, but I didn't want to ask them to teach me — and I didn't think they would have, anyway."

"Why not?"

Mary stared down at the skirt of her dress and began smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. "Oh, nobody ever wanted to do anything with me in India," she said tensely. "They all just wanted me kept out of the way. So I just — just sort of watched the servants whenever they cooked it, and tried to remember what they did."

Her hands were now shaking a bit from sadness and anger as they flew across her skirt. She startled, then stilled, when Dickon set the empty bowl on the ground and laid his calm hands over her wild ones. Mary had never really talked about her life in India with anyone, and Dickon knew that she hadn't just cooked him a meal; she'd also revealed a part of herself that she'd always kept hidden.

"Thank thee, Mary," he said, and she finally raised her eyes from her skirt to look at him. "No lady's ever gone to the trouble to cook something for just me before."

"You've given me so much," she whispered, smiling back at him.