At least one person appreciated her efforts. The Thomas fan shot a last quick look upward, then set off on his mission, oh-so-casually. Sylvie half expected him to tuck his hands in his little pockets and whistle. With a wiggle of tiny fingers, he took a headlong dive toward her current pride and joy.
“Oy. Kid.”
He froze comically, inches from the Castle, as Mabel Yukawa appeared from behind the waterfall. Sylvie’s senior assistant was holding an amezaiku bird in one hand, the small candy sculpture half-finished, its translucent wings painted in a cascading effect of pink and blue feathers.
Mabel pointed a blue-tipped brush at the guilty-looking child. “Were you going to touch that castle?”
She and the boy gave each other a shrewd once-over, their faces equally skeptical.
“Yes.”
As Sylvie handed a completed tray of truffles to a snickering kitchen hand, Mabel nodded and sat back down at the small table where she was painting an entire jungle of sugar animals. “I respect your honesty. Don’t.”
The little boy drew nearer the table, now fixated on Mabel’s deft fingers as she finished coloring the bird. “Could I do that?”
Mabel picked up a candy leopard and held it up to the light. “Not well.” She reached for a fresh brush and dipped it in a dish of black food dye. “You have extremely small hands,” she added disapprovingly.
They narrowed their eyes at each other again.
“So do you,” he pointed out, accurately and with obvious indignation, and Mabel tilted her head.
“True.” With the tip of her pointed boot, she pushed a second chair in his direction. “Well, what are you waiting for? Sit.”
He almost fell over his short legs hastening to join her, and Sylvie shook her head, grinning, as Mabel put a sugar snake on his outstretched palm and handed him a brush. Her instructions were abrupt and drenched with exasperation, but her hand was gentle as she guided his decorating attempt.
When the family had left, Mabel’s new number-one fan clutching a rainbow-streaked snake, and his mother loaded down with cakes and sweets, Sylvie spoke without looking up from her notebook. “Some of the staff actually smile at customers. I casually mention.”
“Some of the staff are simpering twits.” Mabel fluttered her brush over the side of a large fish, iridescent pearly scales appearing beneath her fingertips. A piece of nougat came flying out of the kitchens and smacked her directly on the forehead. Sylvie heard the slap of a congratulatory high five. Mabel didn’t so much as pause. “Most human beings are insincere cretins who cover egocentric impulses with meaningless social gestures. At least they buy things. Helps pay for my new couch.” She finished the fish, examined the piece of fallen nougat, put it in her mouth. “Kids are usually more tolerable. Stickier fingers, but less bullshit.”
The floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind Mabel was full of chocolate boxes, packaged to look like vintage books. As she spoke, the hidden door in the central panel opened and Jay Fforde, Sylvie’s best friend and business partner, came in from the staff offices. He was holding a thin sheaf of papers. “Would these be the ‘tolerable’ kiddies you threatened to drop-kick into the chocolate waterfall last week?”
Mabel was well over a foot shorter than Jay. At the bakery Christmas party, she’d glanced with loathing at the limbo pole, walked straight underneath it, and headed for the bar. She still managed to look down her nose at him now. “Valuable life lesson. If you feel comfortable shoveling handfuls of stolen sweets into your pockets, I might feel comfortable shoving you headfirst into a pipe.”
Jay raised his brows at Sylvie. “Have we considered moving Mabel’s workstation so she’s slightly farther away from the paying customers? Perhaps about”—he made a pinching motion with his finger and thumb—“two postcodes to the left?”
“Have we considered getting a haircut, so we look slightly less like an aging rocker?” Mabel asked conversationally. “It’s swell of you to take over potions class while Sylvie’s back on telly, Axl Rose, but you don’t have to go full wizard cosplay.”
Jay opted to ignore that, although his fingers went briefly to his shoulder-length hair. It was quite a bit longer than usual, possibly because of his current girlfriend. Lovely woman. Kept telling him things about his artistic soul. He’d started writing poems and reading them aloud to Sylvie in their shared office.
It had been a trying few months all round.
She closed her notebook. “Are you sure about taking over downstairs?”
At the street level, Sugar Fair welcomed customers into a bright, child-friendly fantasy. The architecturally designed enchanted forest was awash in jewel tones, and gorgeous smells, and the waterfall of free-flowing chocolate.
But it was the Dark Forest downstairs that had proved an unexpected money-spinner, an income stream that had helped keep them afloat through the precarious first year.
Four nights a week, through a haze of purple smoke and bubbling cauldrons, Sylvie taught pre-booked groups how to make concoctions that would tease the senses, delight the mind . . . and knock people flat on their arse if they weren’t careful. High percentage of alcohol. It was a mixology class with a lot of tricks and pyrotechnics. It had been Jay’s idea to get a liquor license.
“Pleasures of the mouth,” he’d said at the time. “The holy trinity—chocolate, coffee, and booze.”
With even her weekends completely blocked out, Sylvie had almost made a crack about forfeiting certain other pleasures of the mouth, but Jay had inherited a puritanical streak from his mother. Both their mouths looked like dried cranberries if someone made a sex joke.
The sensuous, moody haven in the basement was a counterbalance to the carefully manufactured atmosphere upstairs. There were, after all, reasons to shy away from relentless cheer. Perhaps someone had just been through a breakup, or a family reunion. A really distressing haircut. Maybe they’d logged on to Twitter and realized half the population were a bunch of pricks. Or maybe they’d picked up the Metropolitan News and found Dominic De Vere indirectly trashing their entire business aesthetic in a major London daily.
Whatever the reason—feeling a little stressed? A bit peeved? Annoyed as fuck? Welcome to the Dark Forest. Through the bakery, turn left, down the stairs.
“There’s absolutely no way you can keep your current workload and take up this judging gig on Operation Cake,” Jay said emphatically. “You’ll conk out from sheer exhaustion by month’s end. And while I know you’d prefer to blowtorch your own eyeballs than work hand-in-glove with Dominic De Vere—”
“Especially when it was directly his vote that booted you off before the final in your series,” Mabel cut in, avidly eavesdropping. The comment was heavy with ire. Despite describing most reality TV as “like looking up the devil’s colon,” the Queen of Doom and Gloom held a grudging fondness for Operation Cake. Sylvie had once had to drop a package off at her flat on a Sunday night, and had found her watching last year’s series in a onesie.
It’s just so damn cozy.
To watch, undeniably. Behind the cameras, it was a business like any other, with the accompanying pros and cons. Sylvie had some fond memories of her time as a contestant, and she was flattered to be asked back as a judge. She also had reservations.