‘Thank you,’ said Fabian. ‘I could never have done it without you.’
‘But I fear if we want to make any greater creations we shall have to find another bakery even bigger than this one, with a larger oven and a pantry wide enough to feed a whole city!’
Fabian thought it was a fabulous idea. So they began to search again, and eventually they found a town a little further along the coast, with a population twice the size of their current home, in which they rented a larger property. And so, in due course, they moved and settled in, and began to sell the iced buns and fruit tarts and loaves of bread that they had always sold, and proved as popular and successful as they ever had.
Over the course of the following year, as their business thrived and their popularity grew, Freshpenny began to find that it wasn’t just the sight of Fabian’s moustache that got on his nerves, but also his ridiculous duck-like walk. What’s more, he was convinced that the moustache smelt. He took to sniffing loudly whenever Fabian was near but instead of taking the hint, the other man decided Freshpenny could smell some food which had gone off, and got himself into a state, waddling around the place and fussing so that Freshpenny thought he would go mad.
For his part, Fabian felt he could hear nothing but Freshpenny’s whining voice. Even when he got away from the shop for an hour’s walk in the countryside, he could still hear it ringing around his head like a gate on squeaky hinges. Worse than this, though, was Freshpenny’s habit of slamming things.
The merry baker showed his satisfaction at the end of every day by closing the shop door with a resounding slam. But that would just be the final note in an orchestral performance that lasted from the first slap of the dough on the kitchen counter, and went through a hundred and one variations after that. Throwing the oven door open with a bang, crashing it shut, thrusting the till drawer closed with the flat of his hand so that every silver coin danced a frightened jig, clumping the bread down on the shelves and clapping people’s hands in double-fisted handshakes hard enough to break their fingers. By the final snap of Freshpenny’s apron strings and the jangle of his keys being thrown on to their hook, Fabian was a jumpy wreck of nerves. He pined for silence, and viewed every new day with dread.
All this time they kept up the pretence of friendship to one another, even in private, and their renown for extraordinary creativity with food continued to grow. The newspapers wrote about their bakery, the word passed infectiously from mouth to mouth, and soon buying a cake at Fabian & Freshpenny’s Bakery became the one thing that everybody who came to the town had to do.
A visiting party from St Petersburg arrived: Freshpenny fashioned a huge cassock sword as long as an oar and as sharp as a razor, layered with pastry, marzipan, icing and jam. A rich merchant told them he wanted a special dessert for his daughter’s birthday: Fabian crafted an astonishing rainbow from seven different-coloured arches of hard-candied sugar beneath which a swan fashioned from meringue swam between sculpted hills of ice cream. It was declared the eighth wonder of the world by all who saw it, and the guests feared to eat a bite lest they ruin its exquisite beauty (all save the merchant’s daughter, who was a greedy pig and tucked in at once).
But these accomplishments took their toll. The enormous effort and the awful tiredness which followed each creation meant that their considerable irritation with each other did not remain unspoken for long. As they closed the door each day on their final customer, their wide smiles would vanish and they would snarl pettily at one another.
‘Sweep up, you fat sweaty pig!’ Fabian would bark, duck-waddling to the back door.
‘I’d rather be well built’ – Freshpenny would shout, as this was how he preferred to describe himself – ‘than a weasly little runt!’ and he would slam his broom against the wall, making Fabian jump.
There was nothing to be done. The more they craved to be away from one another, the faster the orders poured in, and business improved more than ever.
One day Freshpenny ‘accidentally’ tripped Fabian, who fell clean into the burning oven. Afterwards Freshpenny claimed that the oven door had slammed itself shut of its own accord, locking Fabian in. It was only at the enquiry of a concerned customer that Freshpenny reluctantly opened it, to see what the noise inside was. On seeing Fabian’s hands blackened with soot, and his face blackened with rage, Freshpenny let out a rather exaggerated gasp of horror, and said:
‘My lord! What a horrible accident!’
A few days later, Freshpenny was getting ready for sleep when he saw that Fabian, lying reading his book on the other side of the bed, had a funny little smile on his face.
I wonder what he’s up to, Freshpenny wondered as he climbed under the covers, when –WHOOMF! – he fell clean through the floor, landing in the man-sized mixing bowl in the kitchen below.
Feeling the cut on his forehead and wiping the blood from his eyes, Freshpenny looked up to see a perfectly circular hole, which had been sawed into the ceiling, the bed and the mattress above. Into this gap Fabian’s face now appeared, looking maddeningly pleased with itself.
‘Good heavens!’ he cried. ‘These rats will eat through anything. We really must invest in a rat catcher!’ Then his face disappeared again, and as Freshpenny clambered out of the mixing bowl he was sure he could hear a muffled chuckling.
Things got worse as time went on. One day, watching Freshpenny say goodbye to a little boy who had popped in for an iced bun, Fabian become enraged by the man’s sickly sweet and ingratiating grin. As soon as the shop emptied, he picked up a long-handled biscuit tray and, as Freshpenny turned round from slamming the door shut, still grinning, swung it with all his strength. It hit Freshpenny’s wide face with an immensely satisfying smack, knocking him out cold and denting the tray with a perfect mould of his insipid grin. Fabian took it out into the back yard, propped it against a wall and flung coals at it.
When Freshpenny awoke, he went about his business without saying a word about the black eye he now had. He let Fabian worry about what his revenge would be for a full month. Then, one evening, he slipped sleeping draught into Fabian’s bedtime cocoa where he slept, and sewed his mouth shut so that when he removed the stitches, Fabian would feel about the same amount of pain that Freshpenny did, listening to his insistent fussing all day. He bounded into the shop next morning more cheery than ever, and sold more loaves and flans and quiches and rolls than ever before.
While they concentrated on their vendetta, they did not notice that all around them there were preparations for a gigantic jubilee. It was to be the town’s one hundredth birthday in a few weeks and a succession of floats, marching bands, circus performers and dancing troupes were being recruited from all over the land to come and take part in the celebrations.
The first they heard of it was when the town’s chancellor appeared in the bakery one day. A ruddy-faced, puffed-up man with short grey hair, he stood in front of Freshpenny (whose face was almost recovered from its bruising) and Fabian (whose moustache and new goatee beard hid the marks of the stitches around his mouth), and in a rather long and embarrassing speech proclaimed the praise and gratitude of the town to the two bakers.
‘We endeavour to do our best,’ said Freshpenny, performing a curtsey with a flourish of his apron.
‘Only too pleased to be of service,’ giggled Fabian, nervously knocking over a plate of scones.
‘Glad to hear it!’ said the chancellor. ‘For we wish to give you a very special, once-in-a-lifetime commission. If you accept, you are to create a delicious biscuit to commemorate the great day, to be paid for from the town’s coffers and handed out free to every citizen, to show how proud we all are of our greatest asset: your bakery. And – why, that mould would do perfectly! Perfectly!’ They both turned to see what he was pointing at. There, leaning against the wall, was the long-handled biscuit tray indented with the image of Freshpenny’s smiling face.
Fabian protested, horrified at the idea, but the chancellor wouldn’t listen. Freshpenny himself was just as
frightened as Fabian at the idea of everyone in town biting into images of his own face, and tried to persuade the chancellor against it. The chancellor’s good humour faltered for a moment as he listened to both men’s voices at once.
‘I INSIST!’ he shouted, suddenly red-faced. Fabian and Freshpenny jumped back, and didn’t argue any more. ‘You accept the commission,’ said the chancellor, ‘and we hereby make full payment in advance.’ And with that he dropped a heavy purse of coins on the counter with a fat chinking sound, saluted the pair and marched out, making Fabian jump again at the sound of the slammed door.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this was quite the largest commission they (or, indeed, any bakery) had ever received up to that point. On the best of all possible days they could hope to serve around two hundred people. But here they were being asked to bake for thousands all at once. Their fame would reach far and wide, perhaps hundreds of miles beyond the town’s borders. And then there was the money they would be paid!
‘We could buy that fancy jam-making machine I hear they’ve perfected in Belgium!’ cried Freshpenny.
‘We could hire a pastry chef to do all that tedious kneading and rolling and crimping!’ gasped Fabian.
‘We can have a new BAKERY sign painted!’
‘And our names on the window!’
‘In gold leaf!’
They danced round and round in a circle, excited, until suddenly each of them remembered who he was dancing with. And then they stopped, and their faces became serious, and a little embarrassed, and each of them went off to begin planning for their biggest day ever.
First of all Fabian rode out to a nearby town where he knew he could find enough supplies. When he reached it, he hired a coach and horses, and bought tubs of both salted and unsalted butter, and sacks and sacks of both light and dark-coloured sugars, and organized for an enormous supply of eggs to be delivered to the shop on the day before the festival, so that they might be as fresh as possible. Last of all he bought a large bag of salt, because, as any good biscuitmaker will tell you, a biscuit can be as crisp and sweet as you like, but just the tiniest pinch of salt adds the final deliciousness to its flavour.
While he was doing this, Freshpenny took the toasting tray with his face on it to the blacksmith’s and had fifty biscuit moulds made from it, so that his face was in the centre of a perfect circle. Then, while these were being made, he returned to the shop and cleaned and scrubbed, and polished the outsides of their machines, and oiled the insides, and rubbed down the counters, and washed the windows, and laundered the curtains, and burnished the floor until it shone better than new.
Two days remained until the big event and both men went to bed early, careful not to tire themselves. But bad dreams infested Fabian’s sleep. He saw thousands of merrymakers eating biscuits with Freshpenny’s face on them; he saw the biscuits finding their way to large cities, making Freshpenny famous – the most famous baker in the world – and Freshpenny becoming rich, baking for kings and queens and forgetting him, with Fabian left behind in this shop alone . . .
He sat up awake with a start, chilled to his spine by a cold sweat. All of a sudden, and more than ever before, he detested the image of Freshpenny’s fat, smiling face. He could not bear it to be the emblem of the happiest day the town had known in all its history and, with a fresh, deep hatred, decided that he could not allow it to happen.
Checking he had not awakened his friend, he put on his dressing gown and stole down to the cellar, where there was a cupboard of dangerous poisons they had used to try to rid themselves of rats. The final bottle they had bought was the largest and the darkest, with a horrible bulbous shape made from purple glass. It contained a pure black liquid and had a label reading DANGER: POISONOUS TO ALL LIVING THINGS pasted across the front. Underneath the print, the apothecary’s handwriting declared, ‘For God’s sake, keep away from children – in fact, from everybody!’
Fabian had already decided what he would do. He placed the bottle carefully in his pocket, relocked the cupboard and walked back upstairs, smiling to himself. Back in the bedroom, he hid the bottle in his bedside cabinet as quietly as could be, and then slipped under the covers so as not to wake his partner. Freshpenny, fat-guts that he was, always tasted his biscuit dough at the last minute, to make sure it was perfect. Therefore Fabian would allow his friend the pleasure of tasting the delicious dough of the biscuit that was about to make him famous, thereby poisoning himself.
Fabian slipped off to sleep comforting himself with pleasurable images in his mind of how Freshpenny’s stupid grin would look when he found him.
The following day Fabian watched his friend become a perfect whirlwind of activity. As Freshpenny was the one who was best at biscuits, and they were working from his original recipe, Fabian took on an assisting role as Freshpenny first placed giant blocks of butter into the churn, and then poured many pounds of sugar over them.
Fabian worked the pedal frantically to keep the mixer running as Freshpenny blended together all the butter and sugar, and then the vast number of eggs, which had to be added one by one.
They had decided to leave the shop closed for the day, and once the golden mixture of sugar, butter and eggs was ready they took in turns the exhausting process of mixing in the flour. They worked and worked, sweat pouring off them, and after long hours had passed Freshpenny began to add the final flavourings – candied ginger, cinnamon, salt and chocolate shavings.
Finally it was midnight and the man-sized mixing bowl was filled with dough ready to bake. Both men staggered upstairs towards their bed, thirsty for a few hours’ sleep before the mammoth job of baking three thousand biscuits.
As soon as Freshpenny’s head hit the pillow, his first high-pitched, rasping snore broke out on the night air. Exhausted as he was, Fabian pinched himself to remain awake until the snores became heav y and regular. Then he retrieved the bottle from his cabinet and stole downstairs very quietly.
He stood over the vat-like mixing bowl and uncorked the bottle. He took a sniff. Such a horrible, vicious smell rose from its neck that it made his head swim and he tottered back a few steps before he regained control of himself. Then he approached the giant bowl again and poured a few small splashes of poison on to the top of the mountain of dough.
In the darkness he looked down at it and wondered. That little amount was enough to put paid to Freshpenny and his stupid smile forever, for sure – but the topmost layer of the dough would become dry overnight. Like the good baker he was, in the morning Freshpenny would be sure to turn the pedal to mix it up a little so that the top was fresh when he tasted it, to test its proper texture. The only way to be sure was to poison the whole lot. So in the whole bottle went, gurgling and glugging until the last few drops trickled out with a little cough.
Now he had to mix it so that it was evenly spread through the whole mixture. Able to see only by the moonlight, which gave a dim blue glow through the kitchen window, he struggled hard to move the paddle round just half a dozen times, using the last of his energy, until he knew that it was so thoroughly turned over that anyone taking a taste could not fail to be poisoned.
He pulled himself to his feet with shaking hands. He was so exhausted he couldn’t even feel relief that he would be free of Freshpenny in a few hours. He leaned against the rim of the bowl and gazed down at the dough, which in the moonlight looked as fresh and delicious as any either of them had ever concocted. In fact, in his confused state, he could not believe that it was poisonous, and suddenly he became anxious that something had gone wrong. Perhaps the bottle did not contain poison at all, but a hidden stash of grog which Freshpenny swigged in secret? He dipped a finger in and held it to the tip of his tongue – nothing, just the tangy flavour of cinnamon, sugar and that touch of salt. Sure now that his plan had failed, he popped a tiny lump in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, thinking that even if the bottle did contain poison it might somehow have gone off, or been rendered harmless by the ingredients. As the morsel
went down his throat, dizziness rushed upon him in a cloud, and he passed clean out, hitting his head on the floor.
Fabian woke to daylight, with the refreshing feeling of a cold wet cloth across his forehead.
‘Where am I? What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Don’t move, dear Fabian!’ cried Freshpenny from his bedside. ‘Thank God you’re all right. Dearest friend, when I saw you had gone downstairs to work afresh on our preparations, I knew that all this disagreement was silliness. We belong together, and together we will go on to greater things!’
Fabian kept trying to speak, but Freshpenny was possessed by an unstoppable stream of thought.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘We should move on. Find a bigger shop in a bigger town – a city even! Oh my friend, it all went so perfectly today – so perfectly and without a hitch!’ And with that Freshpenny hugged his friend tightly, only letting go when he heard a whimper of pain. ‘You are all right?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Fabian, aghast. ‘Surely it’s morning! The day has not passed?’ He began to struggle out of bed.
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Freshpenny, placing a hand on Fabian’s forehead, and pushing it back to the pillow. ‘The main thing is that you feel well again.’
‘But what time is it? Yo u have really fed all those people by yourself?’ Fabian cried, and he leaped out of bed with the strength that comes from fear, and raced down to the kitchen in his nightshirt.
‘It was tiring, I admit,’ said Freshpenny from behind him on the stairs.
Perhaps I’m going mad, thought Fabian. I can’t tell whether it’s dawn or dusk – that fat idiot might just be playing a trick on me.
He took an umbrella to use as a walking stick, and hobbled to the front of the shop, his head beating with a horrible pain.
Grisly Tales from Tumblewater Page 14