As Rose watched, Lily snapped back into “performance mode.” She pasted on her signature smile and rushed over to Rose. She held up her hand, and Rose reached down and shook it.
“Congratulations!” Lily said. “Oh, you were wonderful!”
Rose climbed down from her father’s shoulders as Ty hurried over. “All right, El Tiablo,” he said. “Cough it up!”
“Cough what up?” Lily asked innocently. She turned to the cameras with a laugh and shrugged.
“The Cookery Booke!” Sage cried. “That was the deal! We win, you give us the Booke!”
“That’s right, you witch!” Miriam shouted. “Give them what’s theirs!”
While Lily turned to say something to Jeremius, Sage pulled his tape recorder from his pocket and tucked it into the hood of Rose’s sweatshirt.
“What are you doing?” said Rose.
“Trust me,” he said, winking at his big sister.
Lily turned back to the Blisses. “Ohhhh, that Cookery Booke!” Addressing the cameras, she said, “I promised these children that if they won, I would give them an autographed copy of my family’s old cookbook.”
Lily held out her hand. Jeremius reached into a brocade satchel that hung over his shoulder and pulled out a thick tome covered in brown leather: the Bliss Cookery Booke.
Rose thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She took the Booke from Jeremius and held it close to her chest.
Lily put her arm around Rose and turned to face the cameras, her vast white smile glinting in the light. Smiling and nodding all the while, Lily bent and whispered in Rose’s ear. “Enjoy it while you can, because I’m going to get the Booke back.”
“Steal it back, you mean,” Rose said.
“It’s not stealing. I’m just doing what I have to do to get where I want to go. You don’t seem to want to go anywhere. And that makes you a loser, Rose. You may have won the competition today, but you’ll always be a loser.”
“Can’t you just be satisfied with your show?” Rose whispered. “You already got what you wanted. The whole world knows who you are now.”
“It’s not enough,” Lily hissed through her smile. “It will never be enough.”
Sage reached into the hood of Lily’s sweatshirt and pulled out his tape recorder, then butted in between Rose and Lily. “What was that you were saying, Aunt Lily?” he asked, smiling at the cameras.
“I was telling her how impressed I was by her baking!” Lily said, also smiling for the cameras.
“Really?” Sage asked, rewinding the tape recorder. “’Cause I thought I heard you say this!”
Sage held the tape recorder up to the fuzzy gray microphone dangling overhead and pressed PLAY. “And that makes you a loser, Rose,” piped Lily’s voice through the tiny machine’s speaker. “You may have won the competition today, but you’ll always be a loser.”
The crowd close enough to hear quieted in surprise; the cameramen looked up from their lenses in shock.
“I was joking!” Lily cried into the sudden quiet. “Doesn’t anyone understand sarcasm?” Lily turned to the cameras. “Folks watching at home, this young woman is wonderfully talented, and clearly a winner! I will even have her on my show if she would like! She could be my assistant!” Lily turned to Rose. “Would you like that?”
“No, thank you,” said Rose.
A young reporter wearing a suit jacket that hung loosely around his skinny shoulders nudged Lily out of the way and spoke into the camera, one hand holding a microphone and the other pressing on his earpiece.
“Brent Highland, KRF News. This just in, viewers! Gala runner-up Lily Le Fay has officially been mean to adorable twelve-year-old winner Rosemary Bliss, telling her that she will, quote, ‘Always be a loser.’”
Lily stared at the young reporter in horror, then sprang into action, tackling the reporter to the ground like a lion pouncing on a gazelle.
Two security guards shouldered through the crowd and seized Lily by the elbows. While Lily shrieked and batted at them, they dragged her through the crowd and out the doors of the expo center, Jeremius running after them.
Rose reached down and helped the young reporter to his feet. He brushed off the front of his jacket and picked up his microphone. “I’m here with the winner of the seventy-eighth annual Gala des Gâteaux Grands, and the youngest winner in Gala history: twelve-year-old Rosemary Bliss.”
She took a deep breath and smiled into the camera. “Hello,” she said.
“Now, Rosemary,” said the reporter. “As young as you are, your victory might be a shock to some. Did you expect to win?”
“Absolutely not,” Rose said. “There were more than a few times when I thought I was toast.”
“Part of the surprise for Jean-Pierre Jeanpierre was the simplicity of your recipes,” Brent continued. “Was this a deliberate strategy on your part?”
“Well, no,” Rose said, thinking about it. “We just . . . we have some old family recipes that are simple, but very delicious.”
“And where can viewers find these simply delicious recipes?” Brent asked.
Rose laughed. “I’m afraid they’re going to have to remain a secret. But you can find them at the Follow Your Bliss Bakery in Calamity Falls, Indiana, or at La Panadería Bliss in Llano Grande, Mexico.”
But the reporter was staring behind her. Rose turned to find Ty gazing into the camera, shifting between “The Slow Burn” and “The Sensitive Auto Mechanic.”
The reporter looked puzzled. “Is he all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Rose said, putting her arm around Ty and dragging him forward. “This is my older brother, Thyme. He’s not only the handsomest person I know, but also the most helpful.”
Ty smiled sheepishly. “Thanks, mi hermana. You’re not so bad yourself.”
Sage was watching them from the side, staring with longing at the camera, so Rose reached over and pulled Sage into view. “And this is our younger brother, Sage, who is indispensable in a sticky situation.”
“How did you like Paris, Sage?” Brent asked, holding out the microphone.
“I thought it was Seine-sational,” Sage said with a wink. He took hold of the microphone. “But seriously, what a city. Ei-ffel in Louvre with it. There’s nowhere in the uni-Versailles I would rather be.”
Brent yanked his microphone back. “Puns! Funny! Rose, do you have any words for young aspiring bakers out there?”
Rose thought a minute. “Well, you ought to stick with it, even after you mess up—but sticking with it is a lot easier if you have a family who believes in you.”
Rose turned and beamed at her mother and father.
“And now, if you don’t mind,” she said, “we’re all very hungry, and we’re going to go eat lunch.”
The cameramen and women put down their cameras and began packing up their equipment. Brent shook Rose’s hand. “Great job, Miss Bliss. You’re a natural.”
“Natural is right!” The smell of cologne and tanning oil wafted out from behind the cameras as Joel and Kyle, the producers of Lily’s 30-Minute Magic, leaned down to kiss the air on either side of Rose’s cheeks.
“Wow,” said Joel. “All I can say is, W-O-W. You were incredible out there!”
Without looking up from his cell phone, Kyle said, “America loves you.”
“What would you think of Baking in Bliss?” asked Joel.
“What’s Baking in Bliss?” Rose asked, her head spinning from the smell of cologne.
“Your TV show, of course!” said Joel. “The future of Lily’s 30-Minute Magic is uncertain—it was getting tired anyway. We’re looking to fill the slot with something fantastic, something fresh, something completely unexpected, and that’s you!”
My own TV show? Rose thought, stunned. What would she have to talk about on a TV show? She only knew about how to bake magical recipes in a small bakery.
“I don’t know what to say,” she answered truthfully. Of course being on TV would be exciting, but wouldn
’t it mean spending all her time away from her family, and the bakery? “I need to think about it, I guess,” she said.
Joel shook Rose’s hand. “Call us when you’re ready to be a star.”
Rose rejoined her family. Albert folded her into the huddle and patted her on the back. “Let’s go drop the Cookery Booke off at the hotel,” he said. “Then let’s go stuff our faces.”
Two hours later, Rose was stuffed to the brim with an early dinner of quiche lorraine and sole meunière and cassoulet. She and her siblings and her great-great-great-grandfather rode the elevator up to the family suite with the twins Desjardins. Purdy and Albert had stayed downstairs to check out of the Hôtel de Notre Dame and had sent Balthazar and the children ahead to pack their suitcases.
“I think I’m going to die,” said Sage, stumbling along the carpeted hallway toward the Bliss family suite. “I’ve never eaten that much in my life. And I’ve eaten a lot in my life.”
Ty said nothing—he just burped and patted his chest with his fist. “Excuse me, amigas,” he said.
Miriam and Muriel stopped in front of their room. “Well,” said Muriel, sighing. “I suppose this is good-bye.”
Ty smoothed his hair. “Run on ahead, everyone. I’ve got to say good-bye to my new friends.”
Everyone gave Miriam and Muriel hugs and two-cheeked kisses, then hurried down the hallway toward their room, leaving Ty to soak up one last glorious moment of romance.
Rose peeked back to see what Ty was up to. Would one of the impossibly glamorous Desjardins twins give her doofy older brother a kiss? Would both of them?
“You are wonderful, Ty,” said Miriam.
“I agree,” said Muriel. “You are a wonderful brother.”
Ty hurriedly popped a piece of peppermint gum in his mouth, then stared, starry-eyed, at the twins.
“In fact, you remind us so much of our younger brother, Henri,” said Miriam, “it’s frightening. You look just like him. That is why we took such a liking to you.”
“You are so cute—and so is he!” said Muriel. “We would know. We used to change his diapers.”
“Looking at you is like looking at our little Henri, who we miss so much,” said Miriam. “So thank you. Thank you for reminding us of our baby brother. And thank you for letting us be your big sisters this week.”
Ty’s face went from elated to bewildered to very depressed, all in a matter of seconds.
Rose would have smirked if she hadn’t loved her brother so much.
“Thank you, I guess,” he mumbled as the twins planted exaggerated, sisterly kisses on both of his cheeks.
Ty waved wanly, then turned and jogged toward the rest of his family.
“Sorry, brother,” said Rose, patting him on the back. “You’ll get ’em next time.”
Rose caught up to Sage, Balthazar, and Leigh in front of the door to the Bliss family suite.
She opened the suite door and stepped into the darkened living room. She heard a rustling sound. “Jacques, is that you?”
“No!” he squeaked from her sweatshirt pocket. “I am right here, remember?”
Rose threw on the light switch.
Jeremius was hopping up and down on the ottoman, the Booke clutched to his chest. He cackled and once more leaped toward the open window.
“You gotta be kidding me!” Ty cried. “We just spent a week getting that back!”
Gus launched himself from the BabyBjörn on Balthazar’s chest, leaped through the air like a caped action hero, and landed on Jeremius’s head.
Jeremius reeled, confused, then finally swatted Gus across the room and clambered out the window. They watched Jeremius skip over to the adjacent rooftop and carry the Booke off into the afternoon.
“No!” Sage cried. He turned to Rose with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Rose! You worked so hard!”
“Don’t worry, Sage,” said Rose, reaching into her backpack and pulling out a thick, dusty, brown leather-bound book. “The Booke is perfectly safe.”
“Wait, that’s . . . that’s the Booke?” Sage gasped. “Then what did Jeremius steal just now?”
“The Shakespeare book I found in my room, the one we tried to trick him with earlier.”
Sage and Ty exchanged a look, then Ty patted Rose on the back. “I’m impressed!” Ty said.
“What a great-great-great-granddaughter I have,” Balthazar said proudly. “Out-tricking a professional trickster.”
Meanwhile, the pile of gray fur on the ground was groaning. “Will no one help a Scottish Fold to his knees?” Gus cried.
Jacques crawled out of Rose’s sweatshirt pocket, dropped to the ground, and darted over to where Gus lay, flat on his back, paws in the air. Jacques took hold of Gus’s front paw and pulled with all his might, but the rotund cat wouldn’t budge. Finally, Sage scooped him up and cradled him like a baby—a heavy, furry baby with yellow eyes.
Leigh flopped down on the couch. “Personally, I wish Lily had gotten away with the cookbook,” she said, mimicking Rose’s voice exactly. “She certainly would have done more with it.”
Rose stared angrily at the Lily-loving demon who had occupied her little sister for far too long. “All right, Leigh. That’s enough. I’m turning you back to normal, once and for all.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Leigh sneered at Rose using Rose’s voice. “I am taking a nap, where I will dream of Lily’s marvelous tart, which should have won the prize during today’s festivities.” Leigh rolled over to face the back of the couch and began, promptly, to snore.
“She must be stopped!” Gus shouted.
Rose plopped the Booke down on the granite kitchen counter and turned the pages. She loved the feel of them on her fingers: soft and worn, but strong, unbreakable.
She remembered what her mother had said months ago, after Leigh had eaten the tainted pound cake: “What she needs is—”
“—a Turn-Back Trifle,” Balthazar piped in, finishing her sentence. Rose pawed through the pages, searching for the recipe.
“Why, when they assembled the Booke, did no one bother to put these in alphabetical order?” Rose huffed.
Finally, toward the middle of the Booke, Rose came upon the recipe:
Turn-Back Trifle, for the Restoration of Time Lost.
It was in 1586, in the ill-fated colony of Roanoke, that Sir Lionel Bliss did construct this trifle for his beloved daughter Hatilda, whom he wished would stop growing up. The trifle did reverse Hatilda’s age by one year for each layer of trifle she ate. Sir Bliss constructed a trifle of ten layers, and after taking a bite, poor Hatilda was again two years old.
“How is that going to help Leigh?” Sage asked. “If we make it two layers high, she’ll disappear. Or she’ll be in Mom’s womb again or something. I don’t think she would like that.”
“A layer of trifle,” Rose pontificated, “consists of sponge cake, fruit, custard, and whipped cream. So if we just give her the sponge cake, it’ll turn her back a quarter of a year. Three months—right before she ate that poisoned pound cake.”
Sir Lionel Bliss did begin his cake of sponge by placing two fists of flour pure as snow in the center of the wooden bowl. He cracked six of the chicken’s eggs into the flour, then hovered over it with his mason jar, releasing the sting of the ancient hornet.
“What the heck is an ancient hornet, Abuelo?” Ty asked.
“It’s a hornet from the Queztmectal rain forests, destroyed by a fire in the fourteenth century. Their stingers had magical properties. There are only a few left in the world, and I have one. Or at least I did until that hateful little turd ran off with my mason jars. We have no way of getting an ancient hornet.”
Gus cleared his throat, accidentally coughing up a hair ball. “That’s not necessarily true.”
“What do you mean, Gus?” Balthazar asked suspiciously. “You weren’t, say, rifling through my bags, were you?”
“I hate that hornet,” Gus went on. “He used to say terrible things about me. Whenever I went nea
r him, I could hear him chattering under his breath. ‘Gus smells like tuna. Gus licks his own feet. Gus’s tail makes him look like a bumper car.’ One day I couldn’t take it any more. I took the jar off the shelf, and I rolled it across the floor back and forth, like a hockey puck.”
“I told you a million times not to do that!” Balthazar protested. “The hornet is hundreds of years old! He’s delicate!”
“Sometimes I can’t help myself,” Gus replied. “Like the first day we arrived, for instance. I was passing by Balthazar’s suitcase, and I heard his terrible little voice calling out for me, so I took him out of his jar and just . . . played hockey with him. I swatted him underneath the sink, but my paw couldn’t reach in to fetch him out. He could still be there, but I don’t know how we’ll retrieve him. The space is too narrow.”
“I shall go!” cried Jacques as he scampered over to the sink and darted into the tight space underneath.
A moment later he reemerged, carrying the frail hornet in his paws. “You wouldn’t believe how mean this hornet is! The things he said about me. . . . I can’t repeat them! He stings with his abdomen and with his words!” Jacques dumped the hornet into a little juice glass and wiped his hands clean.
“See?” sighed Gus.
While Rose mixed up the batter for the sponge cake, Balthazar looked through the pages of the Cookery Booke.
“What are you looking for?” Rose asked.
“Signs of misuse,” he replied. “Missing pages, defamation, things like that.”
Once Rose had finished the batter, she tilted the juice glass in which the ancient hornet lay over the bowl. The hornet sighed as he slid to the rim of the glass. With a lot of creaking and complaining, he managed to stick his stinger into the yellow batter, which turned a violent, pulsing red. Rose tilted the glass away from the batter, and the hornet slid back to the bottom.
“Don’t hornets die after they sting something?” Sage asked.
“Hornets do not die after stinging,” Leigh piped in from the couch using Balthazar’s deep, gravelly voice, “because their stingers are not barbed. Also, they are not beetles; they are part of the order Hymenoptera, whereas beetles are members of the order Coleoptera. I’m sure Lily knows all of the insect orders.”
A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel Page 17
