He had skipped over three or four social strata now; he’d known better than to look for a mark among people like Dolly’s parents or the small merchants. Such folk feared to lose what they’d built up and were as penurious in their way as his uncle; they didn’t share what they had, and when they caught someone trying to get a bit for himself, punished him with fury. No, when Skif decided that he was going to help himself to the bounty of others, he knew he’d need to find someone who had so much that he couldn’t keep track of it all, and so many servants that it wasn’t possible even for them to do so.

The drawback was that in such a rich household, there were privileges that were jealously guarded, and as he knew very well, even those things that the owner thought were refuse had value. The cook and her staff all had the rights to such things as fat skimmed from the cooking, the burned or otherwise “spoiled” bits, and “broken meats”—which last were cooked leftover items that had been cut into or served from without actually having been on someone’s plate. Depending on the household, unless such items were designated to go to the poor, the cook and helpers could sell such items from the back door, or give them to relatives who were less well-provided-for, or a combination of all of these things. “Scrapings”—the leftovers scraped from plates into a slop bucket by the dishwashers—belonged to the dishwashers in some households, or were fed to household animals in others, and again could be sold or carried off, if not fed to animals. Stale bread and cake were the provenance of the pastry cook, sometimes a different entity from the head cook, who had the same options.

All these leftover items were jealously guarded from the time they became leftovers. But from the time they left the hands of the cooks until the moment that they were brought back to the kitchen, no one was paying any great amount of attention to the quantities on platters in a so-called “great” household.

And that was where Skif had found his little opportunity to exploit the situation.