Baker's Magic (Middle-grade Novels)

by Zahler, Diane

  A sound came from behind her, and Bee spun around.

  “That’s a potato masher,” Master Bouts said. A candle illuminated his round, pink face. He pointed to the implement Bee held.

  “I’ve always used a fork to mash potatoes,” she said, twirling the masher in her hand.

  “That works too,” Master Bouts agreed. “You look better, Mistress Bee. The dress suits you.”

  “I like trousers,” Bee said.

  “As do I. But in my shop, I think a dress is best. We don’t want to alarm the old ladies, do we?”

  Bee had to smile. She’d seen those old ladies, standing around her in the street. There was no need to make them gossip any more than they already did.

  “Why are you here?” Bee asked then. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “And that is when we start the bread, my girl. Those selfsame old ladies would be powerfully angry if they didn’t have their fresh loaves for breakfast. And then do you know what they would do?”

  “No.” Bee tried to imagine the old ladies storming the shop, threatening the baker.

  “Why, they would go to another bakery, of course!” The baker chuckled at his own joke.

  Bee pointed to a row of books on a shelf. “What are those?” she asked.

  “My cookbooks.”

  Bee walked over and pulled off a dusty volume.

  “Gently, girl,” Master Bouts warned. “That one’s a rarity. Very old.”

  The book cover was leather, darkened and stained by years of use. She could just make out the title, hand lettered in gilt paint: A Booke of Baking. Carefully she looked through the pages. There were illustrations showing pastries the likes of which she’d never seen. There was a pie heaped with what looked like snow, in whorls and swirls of whiteness. There was a cake iced in a dark brown that looked like mud. She tried to read the recipes, but her reading was poor at best, and these recipes were handwritten in an elegant script that she couldn’t make out at all.

  “Can you read, girl?” Master Bouts asked gently.

  Bee was immediately on the defensive. “Of course I can read! I went to school … for a while.”

  “Ah,” Master Bouts said. “Well, this is hard reading even for a scholar. These recipes are from long, long ago. They have ingredients even I’ve never seen nor barely heard of. Look here.” He pointed to the snow-heaped pie. “This is a lemon meringue pie.”

  “Lemon?” Bee asked. “What is that?”

  Master Bouts shrugged. “Something that grows in a far-off land, I daresay. See, the lemon is the yellow under the meringue. We can’t make lemon, but we can make meringue—when there’s a customer who can pay for it.”

  They looked through the book for a few more minutes, and Master Bouts pointed out the other peculiarities of the recipes. Pecan tarts, chocolate fudge, coconut macaroons—what were these things? Bee had never heard the words pecan, chocolate, or coconut before. But the pictures nearly made her mouth water.

  “Enough of this,” Master Bouts said at last. “We can look more another time. Now we must bake!”

  At Master Bouts’s instruction, Bee shelved the book carefully and pulled out a very large bowl. Using a scoop as big as her head, she dug flour from a barrel and added a little salt and a little sugar. Then she lit the stove and heated water, testing it with her finger until the baker said it was just the right temperature, and added the yeast. “Too warm and it will cook the yeasts, that it will. Too cold and they will not come out to play,” he said.

  “But what does the yeast do?” Bee asked. The smell of it was odd—sour, sharp, with just a hint of dirty feet. It was hard to imagine that it had anything to do with something as delicious as bread. “It makes the bread rise, of course! It is the great ingredient—the most important ingredient. Have you never used yeast before?”

  Bee shook her head.

  “Where do you come from, girl?” Master Bouts asked as he mixed the dry ingredients. “Wait—look at this. See the bubbles?”

  In the bowl where the yeast and warm water had mixed, little bubbles rose up, as if the yeast were breathing under the water.

  “It lives!” Master Bouts crowed, then stirred the grayish yeast mixture into the flour. “Now the hard work—the kneading. The flour and yeast meet and create something new.” He pushed and turned the sticky mass as it grew doughlike, pushed and turned it, pushed and turned it, growing quite red in the face from the effort. He let Bee try it, but she was barely able to move the large hunk of dough around on the floured tabletop.

  “You’ll get better,” Master Bouts said. Then he oiled an even bigger bowl, dumped the ball of dough inside, and covered it with a cloth.

  “Out of the draft,” he instructed, placing the bowl on a small table beside the range. “Warm, but not too warm. And magic will happen.”

  “Magic?” Bee asked skeptically, and he nodded.

  “Time for breakfast,” the baker said. With no wasted movements, he brewed a pot of tea and uncovered a plate that held two Bouts Buns. “You’ve already had a bun today, but you may have a second, because you are nearly skin and bones. From now on, though, only one!” Bee reached greedily for the bun, and Master Bouts looked very satisfied to see how much she liked it.

  “Now, tell me your story,” Master Bouts said, pouring tea into porcelain cups.

  Bee looked down at the table, tracing the veins of the marble with her finger. She had hoped he would forget to ask. “There isn’t much to tell,” she said.

  “Tell it anyway.”

  “My parents are dead. I was raised by a family in Boomkin, a fisherman and his wife. I don’t know who they were to me. They … they weren’t very kind. After a time I couldn’t bear to stay there anymore, so I left. I’ve been on the move since then.”

  There was a silence. “That’s a hard tale,” the baker said, his voice gentle.

  Bee shrugged.

  “How long were you on the move?”

  “Since late winter.”

  “Well, you’re here now,” the baker said. “That room is empty, and I’ve no apprentice. You did well with the bread. You can stay on if you want. If you don’t steal any more from me,” he added with a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m no thief,” Bee said fiercely. Then, as Master Bouts gazed at her without speaking, she flushed and looked down at her feet in their soft leather shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “I know you are, girl,” the baker said. “We’d all do things to stay alive that we would never do otherwise.”

  There were sudden tears on Bee’s lashes, and she blinked them away furiously. Then she looked up at the baker and smiled, a little shakily. “If I stay,” she said, “I have one condition.”

  “Conditions now!” Master Bouts exclaimed. “Well, what then?”

  “You have to teach me how to make the Bouts Bun.”

  Both Master Bouts’s eyebrows went up so high they nearly vanished into the fringe atop his head. “The Bouts Bun recipe is not a gift. You have to earn it,” he said gravely. “First the bread and the pastries. Then the Bouts Bun.”

  Bee sighed dramatically, hiding her relief at the baker’s invitation. “I’ll have to stay awhile then,” she said. “At least until I master that recipe!”

  The magic of dough rising was clear to Bee before long. The giant ball of dough had swollen to twice its original size, threatening to overrun the bowl and engulf the whole kitchen. She loved punching it down, and she helped Master Bouts knead it again and then shape it into long loaves, which they set to rise a second time. Then the baker showed her how to make a buttery tart crust, and she made crust after crust while he filled them with custards and berries. It was hard work, but there was a rhythm to it, and Bee found that she enjoyed it much more than she had expected. She was happier than she could remember being in a long time.

 
They baked the sweets and the bread in the two ovens, and when the first batches came out, perfectly browned and smelling like heaven, they arranged them on the bakery shelves out front. Master Bouts let Bee choose the plates to hold each tart and batch of cookies, and she was surprised at how much fun it was to match the plate to its pastry. A plate decorated with leaves and vines held blackberry tarts. Star-shaped cookies graced a plate the color of the evening sky just before dark. When the bakery opened at eight, everything was exactly right.

  Master Bouts unbolted the door and went out to pull back the shutters. There was a line down the street, waiting. Everyone had come to see the new girl, the stranger with the shorn hair and trousers, the stealer of buns. The old ladies looked at Bee with suspicious eyes as she wrapped their loaves in jute paper and tied them with twine. The baker took their money and gave them their change, for Bee had no practice with counting. But, she thought, surely the old ladies believed it was because she couldn’t be trusted. Still, she squared her shoulders and met each glare wide eyed, forcing herself to smile sweetly when the customers held out their hands for their purchases and wishing them a good day when they spun on their heels and marched out, still curious. It was very taxing.

  Near sunset, the boy from the day before came. He was dirty again, but this time his hands were clean.

  “Still here, I see,” he observed, and Bee gave him her practiced smile as she handed him a loaf of bread. “And in a dress!”

  “At least my clothes are clean,” she retorted before she could stop herself.

  “Mistress Bee,” the baker rebuked her gently. “Willem is a customer.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” the boy said cheerfully. “I could use a wash, I’m sure. Bee, is it? I’m Wil, apprentice to my da, the blacksmith. It’s filthy work, blacksmithing. Not what I’d pick to do, but …”

  “Sorry,” Bee muttered, a bit ashamed at her assumptions about him.

  “And how are you liking the bakery?” Wil asked, unbothered by her rudeness. “I’ve heard some reports of your work already. Very good, people are saying. Even Mistress de Vos said she felt quite lighthearted when she ate a slice of that oat bread for lunch.”

  “Mistress de Vos, lighthearted?” the baker said. “Well, that is a triumph. Bee, I do believe you have the makings of a baker!”

  A baker! She’d never in all her days considered doing such a thing. She had never thought beyond simply surviving. Her whole life had been spent scrabbling and scrambling. Since the end of winter she’d not even known where the next meal would come from, much less what she’d be doing a week, a month, a year ahead. To be a baker—to sleep in that soft bed off the sweet-scented kitchen, to plunge her hands into butter and sugar and flour, to eat a Bouts Bun every day … it was almost too much. She wasn’t sure what to do with such a feeling.

  She turned away from Wil and Master Bouts and hunched her shoulders. “I don’t know that I’ll stay,” she said in a low voice. “I have … other things I need to do.” She didn’t wait to see Wil’s confusion or Master Bouts’s disappointed expression but pushed through the door that led to the kitchen behind the shop, desperate to get away before an emotion that she couldn’t name took her over completely.

  CHAPTER 3

  Bee could hear Master Bouts shut up the shop, pulling the latch to lock the door before he came back into the kitchen. She sat at the long table, her head in her hands. He took a seat himself, his weight making the reed stool groan.

  “No need to stay if you don’t like the work, girl,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Bee raised her head. “I do like the work.”

  “Then … ?”

  “Why do you want me here?” she burst out. “I don’t understand.”

  Master Bouts stood. “Tea?” he inquired, and without waiting for an answer he turned his back and put the kettle on. He stood waiting for it to sing, tapping his fingertips together as he considered his response.

  “I hadn’t thought it through,” he admitted after a time. “My last apprentice left—got a better offer from Mistress De Kooi, on Caneel Street. And I just had a hunch you might be well suited to the job.”

  “Don’t you have any family to help you out?” Bee pressed on. It was hard to believe she was suited to any job.

  The kettle whistled, and Master Bouts poured the hot water into the pot. Then he brought it to the table and sat to wait while it steeped.

  “I do not,” he said at last. “I had a family once. A wife, a little son.”

  Bee wasn’t sure if she should ask. But now she had to know.

  “What happened?”

  “It was the year of the fever. That was before you were even born, I think. It didn’t hit Zeewal hard, but they’d traveled out to the coast to visit my wife’s parents. They took sick, and her parents, too. All four of them, gone before I could get there.” The baker’s voice was even, but Bee could hear the pain in it.

  “What were their names?” she asked.

  “My wife was Janneke. My son we called Frits, for Frederick.”

  “Those are nice names.”

  Master Bouts said, “I had two cats for a time that I named after them, just so I could say their names every now and then. They kept the mice down in the kitchen, but it felt wrong. So I gave the cats away.”

  “Yes,” Bee said, nodding. “I can see why.”

  The cat that had slept in the corner rubbed up against Bee’s leg, and she patted it, looking at Master Bouts questioningly.

  “There are always mice, of course,” he said. “When this one came to me later, half starved, I couldn’t turn it away. But I named it Kaatje.”

  Master Bouts poured the tea, and Bee took a sip. It tasted like flowers.

  “That’s my story. Maybe not as hard as yours, because I was grown when I lost my people.”

  “Hard enough,” Bee said. “I’m sorry.” She breathed deeply, inhaling the fragrant steam from the tea. “So that’s why you want me to stay—to take the place of your family?”

  Master Bouts shook his head. “Certainly not, girl. No one will ever take their place. I want you to stay because I need an apprentice and you need a place of your own. You can make that place here if you’d like.”

  Bee turned that idea over in her mind. She wanted it so much that it frightened her. But she pushed the fear down as far as she could and said, “I would like it. I think I would. For as long as you’ll have me.”

  “That’s as long as you’ll stay, Mistress Bee!” the baker said, smiling so hard his cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk’s. He lifted his teacup and proclaimed, “A toast to the baker’s new apprentice!”

  Bee clinked her teacup against his—gently, for the porcelain was thin. And then Master Bouts said, “Toast—now there’s an idea. Some toast with honey and a mess of just-picked morels sautéed in sweet butter for supper, what do you think?”

  The days and weeks passed in a blur of learning and baking. Bee grew more and more delighted with her work, learning how to temper a custard so the eggs didn’t curdle, how to bake a sugar cookie so the outside would hold its shape and the inside remain soft and sweet, how to make a braided loaf of bread so it looked like a girl’s golden plait and tasted like sunshine and wheat. The happier she was, the happier Master Bouts’s customers seemed to be.

  “Mistress de Kooi’s patrons are deserting Caneel Street and coming here!” the baker announced to Bee, a month into her apprenticeship. “She’s mad as a trapped eel, that she is!” They celebrated by splitting the day’s second Bouts Bun.

  Wil, the blacksmith’s apprentice, stopped in nearly every day for a loaf of bread and a bun. Bee had forgiven him for tripping her. Secretly, she was grateful to him, though she would never let him know that. He took great pleasure in teasing her; he’d decided that Bee was no name for a person, and that it must just be the first letter of her real name. So every time he c
ame in, he addressed her by a new and awful name that started with B.

  “And how are you today, Bernewif?” he would ask, sweeping her a low bow, then ducking as she tossed a wadded-up ball of jute paper at his blond head. Or, “What’s good this morning, Mistress Balthechildis?” The day he inquired, “Do you have ginger cookies, Berta-Pieternella?” she laughed so hard she collapsed on the floor behind the counter.

  “That is no real name!” she cried.

  “Oh, it certainly is,” Wil assured her. “My great-aunt is named Berta-Pieternella, and she deserves every syllable of it.” A few days later he brought his great-aunt by the shop and introduced her, and the old lady’s dour expression grew even more displeased when Bee had to run into the kitchen, red faced and shaking with giggles.

  But on a Monday in July, Bee woke up in the dark at her usual time and felt her own darkness descend. She didn’t know why at first. In the past weeks, she hadn’t thought much about her life before the bakery; she’d hoped that was all behind her. So the shadowy feeling took her by surprise.

  She rose and started to measure the flour and the salt, hoping the work would push the gloom away. But there was no escaping it. At last she realized: it was the anniversary of her mother’s death—of the shipwreck that had drowned her, and nearly Bee as well. She’d only been an infant and had no memory of the wreck, but somehow on the anniversary every year, her mind went to it, and it weighed on her all day until the sun set.

  Bee kneaded the dough with Master Bouts in silence, lost in her thoughts. Often her fingers went to the necklace around her neck, tracing the delicate flower engravings. She was sure it had been her mother’s, though she had no proof. Her foster mother had kept the necklace in a box, wearing it herself for special occasions. Bee had not been allowed to touch it, but she took it when she left. It was the only thing she had that linked her with her real family.