Baker's Gonna Bake

Cora

Cora Mae Limbert was a brunette beauty, an oil painting waiting to happen and if she had been born Royal it already would have.
She had a square shaped face with delicate features, a pale creamy complexion and sparkling green eyes that conveyed her kind nature, with a twinkle alluding to her mischievous side. The daughter of a southern English gangster who had spent her twenty six and a half years growing up in a privileged, and sheltered swirl of niceties, unfamiliar to half the girls her age. She had not wanted for anything materialistically, but yearned for excitement and had spent her teenage years detained in the country manor of her ancestors learning to write, read and type on a type writer. She was determined to have uses to enable herself a career and resulting escape from the monotonous existence that had been forced upon her by her privileged heritage.

Her father had insisted she live her life in the country and find herself a husband who owned land, to start a family and a legacy but she had ignored his sheltered and simple hopes for her and moved to the smog of the big city a year previous. She stayed, on her fathers request with her aunt and uncle in their town house and took a job in a sewing factory during the war. She made a couple of friends and built a little life for herself separate from her upbringing which was what she had always set out to do. Her father had bought her a motorcar to make sure she was able to visit her mamma and sisters often, and so she wouldn't have to walk the streets of London alone which suited her well even if he had made a ridiculous statement with the expense of the vehicle. He'd gone one step further and assigned a driver too, but she'd insisted there was no need and in the end she wore him down. He was relentless in getting his own way but she could sometimes be worse.

So through no desire of her own, rather it was just the life she was born into, Cora was a lady who wore the latest fashions, had her own car, a job and a face fit for a king to marry. Collectively it meant she had prospective suitors flocking around her like the dirty pigeons that pecked the cobbles she drove on. That was until they discovered her family name and suddenly decided she wasn't an appealing prospect if they valued the attachment of their balls and wanted to father children from them.

Cora longed to join in with real life, but she was naive beyond measure and the grit of a London existence often left her feeling out of place, lost and quite lonely. Her friends from the country wrote, but as they married and procreated the frequency of correspondence naturally dwindled. There were the women in the sewing factory who had been nice enough at first, friendly even, but during a time when pearl bracelets and crystal hair pins were considered the Crown Jewels, she stood out like a sore thumb and was soon shunned and talked about like an outsider, leaving her feeling resented and even more out of place in society. Throw in the fact that she was so stunningly beautiful, it had so far been her downfall in a drab and dreary post war city.

All of these circumstances were what had led her to the bakery reception room she stood in nervously now. She knew from the gossip at the sewing factory that the bakery was full predominately with male lower class workers and she figured this would be a direct positive as it would mean there would be no whispering women to look down their nose at her for being slightly too posh and prettier than them.

The problem and the reason for her apprehension was that this particular bakery, situated a stone's throw from her aunt and uncles house was owned and run by the gangster Jew her daddy had told her to stay well away from.
Back when she had insisted on living and working in London, Mr Limbert had given his brother, her uncle and stand-in guardian, a list of do's and donts that she should follow when conducting herself around the city.
She should be home at 11pm each evening, even on the weekends, she should dress in such a manner that would not attract the wrong kind of attention from potential suitors and she should stay away from socially or professionally mixing with his enemies or counterparts. Her father seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere, of which he reminded her often but she had obediently followed his overprotective orders all year until this point.

Alfred Solomons had been on that list of people to avoid like the dirty plague, but she figured due to their comradarie in recent times, having heard his name mentioned at her uncles tables regarding the docks, that her working for him wouldn't cause any particular tensions. Cora didn't need to work for financial reasons but her sanity depended on it. She needed culture and conversation, and besides she had read every book available in the city library, and was bored bloody stupid. So on a whim she had decided to enter Mr Solomon's' big old mill and outright ask the man for the advertised job she had seen  displayed in the paper on her uncles table at breakfast. After all was said and done, the worst he could say was no, even if she wasn't used to hearing it.