Suddenly, the cat veered to the right, jumped up two steps and disappeared through a hole between a pair of rustic wooden doors, as though the hole was made just for the cat to come and go as it pleased. Christmas mused for a moment on the self-sufficiency of cats, their determination not to need anyone else; they were content to carve out their own lives and live them to the best of their ability, which was what she’d done, certainly since she’d left Sydney, but maybe before that too. Growing up with her mother’s lack of attention to things like clean school uniforms or sports days and awards nights meant she’d had to.
But now she couldn’t help thinking that it would be nice to walk up the alleyway with someone else instead of by herself.
The scholarship class didn’t start making chocolate until just before midday and didn’t finish until almost midnight. They were squashed into a small commercial kitchen at the back of a vineyard, with stainless-steel benches and appliances and Tuscan orange tiles. For light, there was just a row of small windows above the workbenches, and hanging bulbs that swayed in the breeze.
Master Le Coutre had changed from a poetry-quoting, dancing philosopher to a marching, barking commandant. This was boot camp. There would be no breaks, he informed them, handing out blue-and-white-striped aprons. There would be no chairs, other than for Henry, on account of his seniority. There would be espresso shots from the vintage copper machine in the corner, which looked like a domed rocket ship with appendages of hanging scales, pressure dials, levers and crested taps, but they would need no food, he told them, because tasting their products was an essential part of the job and they would receive enough sustenance from that. Was he understood?
They all nodded in shocked silence. Philomena slipped her notebook into her back pocket and folded her hands in front of her. Tibbie Tottie struggled to do up the strings of her apron. Henry looked around, presumably for his chair, as there was none to be seen. Jackson Kent stood to attention beside Christmas, and his calm strength and broad chest (she could see the man’s pecs and eight-pack through his T-shirt, for goodness’ sake) slightly eased her anxiety about what lay before them.
Master Le Coutre split them into two groups. Henry, Tibbie Tottie and Philomena were in one, and Jackson and Christmas were in the other. The day would be divided into two six-hour shifts, one focusing on savoury chocolate creations and the other on sweets, the groups swapping halfway through.
Christmas and Jackson were to begin with the savoury tasks. They started out simply, melting dark chocolate to make sauces, then moved on to a chocolate tapenade, featuring olives, anchovies, garlic, chilli and rum. Jackson’s scarred nose twitched as he poured the oily anchovies into the food processor.
‘Not a fan of the little fish?’ Christmas asked.
‘They smell like cat food,’ he said.
They tasted it with celery sticks and crackers. It had a good texture, firm and smooth. But Christmas had to agree that the smell was off-putting.
They both loved the milk chocolate glaze for roasted pumpkin pieces.
‘I made something similar for my sister and her husband and three boys. It’s fantastic for kids who won’t eat vegetables,’ Christmas said, wiping up the sauce with her last piece of pumpkin.
‘You could put it on pretty much anything, I should think. We might have just solved the problems of parents everywhere who despair about their children’s diets.’
It was an odd conversation, considering that neither of them had children. Christmas leaned back against the bench, her feet hurting already, only three hours into the first shift. ‘Do you want kids one day?’ she said.
Jackson slid his empty plate into the dishwasher and took Christmas’s from her to do the same. He closed the door and faced her. ‘Johannesburg is not an easy place to have children,’ he said.
‘No, I imagine it’s not. Do you have a partner in your life?’
He rested his eyes on her and she had the feeling that he was skilled at seeing right through people. ‘My duty is intense. It is one reason I am looking for a new career.’
‘I get that. You want to be happy.’
He tilted his head slightly, the light cast by the bulb above him shining through the small stumps of his close-cut hair. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I get that too.’ She smiled and put her hand on his elbow. ‘Come on, let’s get some coffee from that old rattler over there. We’ve still got chocolate oysters, rabbit, goat cheese and fennel to get through.’
It was a good thing the sun didn’t set in France until ten o’clock in summer. The extra daylight helped them all to keep going when the fatigue began to hit. Only Jackson, so used to being on his feet for lengthy periods, was still looking reasonably fresh when the teams switched over.
‘Time!’ Master Le Coutre shouted, as if this was a sporting event. Each group finished cleaning their workstations to pass to the other. Tibbie Tottie looked fragile, her eyes bloodshot. Master Le Coutre had shouted and clapped at her for her slowness, and when she’d dropped a pile of cocoa butter transfer papers he had launched into a lengthy diatribe in French, the tone of which, combined with his flailing arm gestures, was unmistakable to everyone in the group.
Christmas and Jackson had also borne the brunt of his wrath when they burned white chocolate and then butchered some oysters while extricating them from their shells.
‘What does he expect? We’re not chefs,’ Christmas grumbled under her breath to Jackson.
‘He seeks excellence. That’s not so bad,’ Jackson said.
‘I suppose.’
Her mood improved when they started their sweets shift with raspberry champagne truffles. They were divine, no other word for it. They began with the champagne and vodka ganache, sneaking sips of the champagne as they went, which went a long way to lifting flagging spirits, then whizzed together dried raspberries and icing sugar to coat the ganache cube. The dish was a revelation, and Christmas knew she’d be adding it to her shop products and to her life. The smell of the raspberries and chocolate was intoxicating enough in itself, even without the kick of the champagne. The colour was gorgeous, a pale pink, and the soft, powdery texture of the coating tickled the tongue before the silky ganache spilled out into the mouth and filled the nostrils with its piercing aroma.
‘I could die right now and be happy,’ Christmas said, swallowing another piece and closing her eyes in pleasure.
They made chocolate sponge and cut it into slices, as though it were bread, to assemble chocolate club sandwiches. They tempered chocolate into slabs and made triangles and shards, easy enough for Christmas because she did it all the time. They decorated moulded cat-shaped chocolates with paintbrushes, using coloured white chocolate as paint—definitely not one of Christmas’s strengths, though she was pleased to see that her pieces were finer than anyone else’s. They wrote with tempered white chocolate in tiny paper piping bags.
They moulded chocolate teddy bears that could stand upright on their feet and then sprayed them with melted chocolate and cocoa butter to give them a flocked finish.
‘They look too cute to eat,’ Jackson remarked, his face softening as he gazed at the little bears, giving Christmas a small glimpse into a man who might just have been as soft on the inside as the whipped chocolate mousse they were making concurrently with the bears.
When the sun had finally disappeared below the horizon, Christmas and Jackson had whipped, stirred, crumbled, cooled, heated, spread, shattered, hammered, glazed, filled and decorated their way through Master Le Coutre’s list of tasks.
Christmas stopped to look at her hands. They were trembling from fatigue, sugar, alcohol and caffeine. ‘I need some real food,’ she said, gobsmacked that Jackson was still motoring through the cleaning. She’d let go of any pretence of wanting to help him and was simply grateful he could work like a machine to get it all done.
Tibbie Tottie was now curled up in a corner of the kitchen, glassy-eyed with weariness, her mobile phone clutched to her chest, while Philomena and
Henry finished cleaning their workstation.
Master Le Coutre was beaming around the room, a wild look in his eye as he surveyed the bounty spread out on the central bench. It looked like a full banquet table in a medieval castle. ‘Marvellous, marvellous!’ he shouted.
Christmas went to retrieve her phone from her handbag to take photos. Her body was charged with a new burst of energy, somewhat akin to the rush of finishing a marathon, she imagined, and she suddenly felt wonderful.
Jackson smiled at her. ‘You made it through the pain barrier,’ he said.
‘Seems like it.’
Finally, Master Le Coutre dismissed them. ‘Go now,’ he said. ‘Find yourself dinner. I will put all of this away and tomorrow the vineyard will serve it to customers, and your love, your dancing, your creativity will be shared with others through your beautiful creations.’
Even Tibbie Tottie managed to pull herself up to standing and look pleased with the colours and sights laid out before them.
Christmas wanted to stay longer, to soak up the achievement, but her stomach growled loudly and she didn’t want to get dragged into another mad scheme of Master Le Coutre’s. So she said goodnight, kissing him on each cheek, thanking him for his guidance, forgetting his admonishments and fiery temper.
‘Come on,’ Jackson said. ‘There’s an open-air restaurant not far from here. Let’s get something to eat. I’m starved.’
‘You’d never find a restaurant in Tasmania that served food at this time of night,’ Christmas said, enjoying the beef cassoulet. It was far too hearty for a warm summer evening, but she was ravenous. There were many delicious salads on offer but she needed more than green leaves and goat’s cheese. The heavy, hot meal made her sweat, but it was fantastic, fortifying her from the inside, distracting her from the throbbing in her feet.
‘We used to have curfews in Johannesburg,’ Jackson said.
Christmas stopped chewing. ‘Jackson, your life is so scary.’
He grunted. ‘Maybe I should come to Australia. I hear it’s quiet.’
‘A lot of it is. A lot of it’s empty.’
‘Empty is good. Silence is good.’
Christmas poured water from the carafe on the table, wondering what Jackson had seen in his time but too afraid to ask. He was hoeing into a carpaccio de boeuf—a wide plate of paper-thin slices of raw beef, which looked a lot like salami, with a topping of spinach leaves, cherry tomatoes and a mountain of freshly shaved parmesan, drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice. A bowl of hot chips sat beside him. Between them sat two glasses of white wine served bien frais—extra cold—the outdoor lights reflected and sparkling in them.
‘I can’t believe tomorrow morning is our final farewell,’ Christmas said. ‘Mind you, I’m not sure I could take another day of work like that. I work hard at home and twelve-hour days aren’t unusual, but that was brutal. Speaking of which, what have you thought of this strange course we’ve been on?’
Jackson wiped his mouth with his serviette. ‘For me I think it’s actually been less about the technical side of working with chocolate and more about discovering passion I didn’t know I had.’
‘So you’re happy you came?’
‘Definitely. I feel much more alive now than I did before. And I’m sitting here in the peace and quiet, with the stars above, enjoying this fabulous meal with you, and there’s nowhere else I need to be. It’s perfect.’
‘Naw, that’s so sweet. What are you doing next?’
‘I’m staying at the language institute just outside of Sauveterre. It has a residential course for intensive French instruction.’
‘You do set the bar high!’ she said, leaning back in her chair, putting her hands on her distended belly. ‘I’m heading to Sauveterre too—we should share a taxi.’
‘That’s a good idea, thanks,’ he said.
‘I decided to treat myself with a week in a chateau so I can explore Provence. But my plan is indulgent relaxation, not straining my brain on learning French. There’s no way I could conjugate verbs. I don’t even know what conjugation is.’
‘In grammar, it is just about producing different forms of a verb. But it also means to couple, or to connect.’
‘This is starting to sound like one of Master Le Coutre’s lectures on making love as a metaphor for working with chocolate,’ she said.
‘The French language is very sexy.’ Jackson’s eyes held hers, unwavering, unflinching.
‘It’s really late,’ she said, her voice weakening. ‘We’d better get back to the hotel. This has been a marathon day already.’
•
A man just two-thirds the size of his former incarnation came up the driveway and knocked on Lincoln’s door.
As soon as Rubble stepped inside, Caesar threw himself on the newcomer, then turned around so Rubble could scratch at the itchy spot on top of his rump, at which Caesar made small ruffing noises in appreciation.
‘Maybe you two should get a room,’ Lincoln said, opening the bottle of red with a satisfying pluck of the cork.
‘I don’t know how Eleisha would feel about that,’ Rubble said, accepting a balloon glass of wine.
Lincoln smiled. ‘Pretty name.’
Rubble burst into a huge grin, lines now appearing on his face where flesh once plumped them smooth. ‘The prettiest.’
‘You look great, by the way,’ Lincoln said, leading Rubble out into the backyard, where they sat in plastic reclining chairs and looked at the grass he still hadn’t mown, while Caesar stalked the fence line.
His friend patted his much-reduced gut. ‘Lydia isn’t just talking; I can’t shut her up.’
‘How does Eleisha feel about you hiding away and working?’
‘She isn’t missing out, trust me. I’ve got so much energy since meeting her that there seem to be twice as many hours in the day as usual.’
They sipped in silence for a few moments while the sea captain next door began to hammer and saw in the fading light. Caesar barked at him half-heartedly.
‘What’s he doing over there?’ Rubble said, getting to his feet to peer over the tall wooden fence.
‘He’s been building something for ages. It’s big but I’m not sure what it is.’
Rubble walked closer to the fence to have a good long unashamed look. He turned back, grinning. ‘It’s a boat.’
‘Really?’ Lincoln got up and surveyed the scene for himself. ‘It is too.’ He could see it now, the spine, the ribs, the hull. ‘Why the hell would he want a boat in his backyard?’
‘Everyone needs to be the captain of his own ship,’ Rubble said sagely, putting a paw on Lincoln’s shoulder. ‘That’s what Eleisha and I are doing. That’s what the sea captain is doing.’ He looked at Lincoln meaningfully.
‘And you think I need to do the same.’
‘Maybe it’s time to chart some new waters.’
•
‘Have you heard anything back from Christmas about the new information on her father?’ On the phone, Val sounded breathless, as though she was walking through the house and picking up toys and clothes as she spoke.
‘Nope,’ Emily said sending a document to the printer in her home office.
‘So I guess she’s ignoring us then? She really isn’t interested in looking for Gregoire?’ Val sounded disappointed.
‘It’s a shame, I agree. But I think I should just stay out of it now. I’ve already made my opinions very clear and I think I’d be ruining our friendship if I continued to push. If she changes her mind in the future and wants to talk about it, she’ll know where I am.’
‘Yes, you’re right. We don’t want her to stop talking to us. So we’ll just let it go?’ Val clarified.
‘I think it’s for the best.’
•
To: Christmas Livingstone
From: Abigail Hurst
Subject: Cheyenne
Hi,
Cheyenne’s fine. She’s just having some personal time off. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure she’ll t
ell you about it when you get back.
Abigail
•
The scholarship group was farewelled in a private function room of their hotel the next morning over pains au chocolat and raspberry mousse, all whipped up by Master Le Coutre after a dawn visit to the street market. They broke fresh bread and grazed on the last of the season’s plump figs, as well as preserved walnuts, rabbit salad, stuffed artichokes, capers and a sinful number of pastries. Afterwards they hugged and exchanged email addresses, though of course Christmas knew she wouldn’t be in contact with any of them. Except, perhaps, Jackson.
But before she left the building, she took Master Le Coutre aside, nerves making her hands unsteady as she fiddled with a bouquet of field flowers on the bench next to her. He raised his bushy brows expectantly at her, his white chef’s shirt still buttoned up tightly at the neck.
‘I want to ask you about chocolate,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper, and he leaned in to hear her over the laughter and jovial banging and scraping of chairs as the group members prepared to leave. She couldn’t believe how nervous she was. It wasn’t as though Master Le Coutre hadn’t read the application Emily had submitted on her behalf. Disappointingly, he’d not said a word about it, and neither had she. But she couldn’t leave without asking him.
‘Well, you know I want to find and make medicinal chocolate—chocolate with special health benefits,’ she said, steeling herself for potential ridicule.
‘Oui.’
‘Um, well, I’m just wondering, do you have any advice for me, or ideas? Is it just a dream or do you think it’s possible?’
He held up a hypnotic finger, lowered his voice and intoned slowly and seriously. ‘There is a legend that speaks of a cacao tree. She is so revered by the people who tend her, and so valuable in the way of dollars to the people who “own” her, that very few know of her location. She is somewhere in South America, though almost no one knows exactly where, and she is heavily guarded.’
All background noise faded away as Christmas strained every cell to focus on what he was saying.
‘This tree is very old. At the same time each year, when she produces a crop of pods, an official makes his way through the jungle to count the number. She is known as The Compass for every cacao plantation everywhere. The biggest chocolate maker in the world forecasts its entire year’s profit based on her bounty. All chocolate in the world is tied to this tree.’ He spread his hands wide and his eyes turned to saucers, taking in the imagined globe.
The Chocolate Promise Page 24