Bliss. Kathryn Littlewood

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СКАЧАТЬ Rose called. “Mum and Dad are going away! Please come downstairs.”

      It was only eleven in the morning, and Ty rarely emerged from his cave before mid-afternoon. Rose cracked open the door. Ty had strung up a sheet to divide his and Sage’s sections of the room – Ty’s was behind the sheet, of course – but just past the edge of the sheet, Rose could make out a single white sock dangling off her older brother’s foot.

      She pulled the sheet back and poked his broad, bare back. “Ty.”

      Ty groaned. “You better have an amazing excuse for coming in here,” he said, “because you woke me up in the middle of a basketball dream.”

      “Mum and Dad are leaving for a week. She is putting us in charge of the bakery!”

      As soon as she said the words out loud, Rose imagined herself dancing around the kitchen in her mother’s blue-and-white-chequered apron, leafing through the Bliss Cookery Booke, sifting flour and melting chocolate and mixing in the tears of heartbroken young girls, or a vial of a good man’s last breath, or a pat of the chalky, bitter powder made from the ashes of summer campfires, or – who knew what she might use? Then she would turn the crank to raise the secret lightning rod that sometimes powered the main oven, and just like that, she’d be making magic. Rose sometimes grumbled when her parents asked her to help with the bakery, but only because the help never entailed any real magic.

      The real magic, the blue-mason-jar magic, she imagined, would be worth all the trouble.

      “Are you serious?” said Ty, bolting up. “This is great!”

      “I know!” said Rose. “We’ll get to actually bake!”

      Ty scoffed. “Correction, mi hermana.” Ty had taken to using Spanish whenever he could, in preparation for the day when he would finally become a pro skater in Barcelona. “You’ll get to actually bake. I’ll get to actually relax.”

      Downstairs, Albert closed the shutters on all the kitchen windows, while Purdy lit a candle. Rose imagined that this was what it was like to be sworn into a secret society. She stood at attention, awaiting her parents’ instructions. Ty was slouched across the rolling chopping block, his chin in his hands, moaning with boredom.

      “We don’t want to leave you,” said Purdy, “but our neighbours need us. We’ve asked Chip to come in full-time this week, but he can’t do all the baking and run the counter, so we need you two to pitch in more than usual.”

      Rose shivered with excitement as Albert picked up the Bliss Cookery Booke.

      “First things first,” he said, opening the stainless steel door of the walk-in refrigerator and carrying the book inside.

      Rose and Ty followed their father through a narrow hallway lined floor to ceiling with cartons of ordinary milk, butter, eggs, chocolate chips, pecans and more. A dim fluorescent bulb flickered from above.

      At the end of the hallway hung a faded green tapestry.

      Rose had seen it before, when she would unload cartons of eggs after a trip to the poultry farm, and it had always captivated her. It was thick, like a Persian rug, and covered in delicately embroidered pictures: a man kneading dough; a woman stoking a fire in an oven; a child in a nightgown eating a little cake; an old man using a net to capture fireflies; a girl sifting a snowfall on to a frosting.

      Purdy rested her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “Honey, do you have the key you copied this morning?”

      Rose patted her breast pocket and removed the two silver keys – the tarnished one her mother had given her that morning and the shiny new one that Mr Kline had just made. She handed them to her father, who pocketed the old key, then pulled back the tapestry to reveal a short wooden door with faded planks and cast-iron bars, the kind of door made back when people were shorter. He pushed the delicate prongs of the shiny new whisk-shaped key inside the lock on the door, which looked like an eight-pointed star, and turned to the left.

      The door creaked open. Albert yanked an old brass chain, and a dusty bulb came to life overhead.

      Rose stood with her mouth agape.

      Beyond the door was a tiny wood-panelled room the size of a short closet, crowded with medieval treasures. A painting of a thin, moustached man wearing a long robe the colour of an eggplant – on the frame was written HIERONYMUS BLISS, FIRST MAGICK BAKER in old English lettering that was almost impossible to read. An engraving of an aproned woman serving a piping hot pie to a king at a long banquet table: ARTEMISIA BLISS, WOMAN BAKER, HONOURED BY CHARLES II. A sepia-toned photograph of a man and woman holding hands outside a bakery, alongside a newspaper clipping from 1847: “Bliss Bakers Arrive on Lower East Side, Feed Immigrants.” The four of them stood, huddled in the storeroom, peering at the ancient artefacts by candlelight. “Your mother and I call this room the library, even though there’s only one book in it. The book is more important than all the books in all the libraries in this whole country, combined. So this is a library.”

      Even Ty was impressed. “Bet you’re glad you became a Bliss, huh, Pop?”

      Albert nodded. When he married Purdy, Albert had taken her name instead of the other way round. “Who wants to cling to a name like Albert Hogswaddle,” he’d said, “when you could become Albert Bliss?”

      Albert sat the Bliss Cookery Booke on a dusty pedestal in the middle of the little storeroom, and they all huddled around, barely fitting inside the room. “The book stays here. No one opens it, no one moves it. Rose, I am giving you the key to this room.” He slid it on to a string, knotted it, and handed it over. Rose wondered briefly how her mother had known they’d need an extra key. But then she shrugged it away: Her mother just knew things. It was part of her magic.

      Rose took the key from his outstretched palm and hung it round her neck. She burned with excitement.

      “But you are not to open this door unless there is a fire,” Albert said, the ever-present smile suddenly gone from his face. “In which case you should try to save the book. I repeat: Do not open this door. There will be NO magic.”

      All the excitement flew out of Rose, and she deflated like a popped balloon. No magic? Why?

      “Tick tock, people!” shouted Mayor Hammer from inside the Hummer. “The flu is spreading even as we speak!”

      Albert huffed and puffed in the background as he hauled six leather suitcases from the house to the driveway and loaded them into the Hummer. One was filled with clothes, the other five loaded down with jars of Madagascar cinnamon and dried fairy wings, with special black sugars from a forest in Croatia and trapped doctors’ whispers, with dozens of things mundane and mysterious.

      Purdy gathered Rose and her siblings together in one big clump in the driveway. “Rose and Ty, you’ll help Chip in the kitchen.”

      Ty groaned. “Why do I have to help? That’s Rose’s territory.”

      Purdy patted Ty sympathetically on his beautiful, tawny cheek. “I know you can do it, Thyme.” She went on, looking at Sage. “Sage, you’ll stay with your sister Rose. I mean, help her.”

      “Of course! I will be very helpful,” Sage said, winking devilishly at Rose and everyone else.

      Rose rolled her eyes. Sage’s idea of helping usually involved whining and trying to СКАЧАТЬ