The patron thief of brea.., p.10
The Patron Thief of Bread, page 10
“It took a long time for it to get this bad,” Griselde said. “My Symon tried to warn me. He was always pulling me away from the ovens, telling me to take two steps back before I stuck my nose in — but I liked watching the loaves rise as they baked. There’s something supremely satisfying about watching the fruits of your labor. Now I pay the piper. Symon,” the baker added, her face glazed over with reminiscence, “is my late husband. He’s been gone six years now.”
Duck felt like she’d gulped down a stone.
Not late as in late for dinner.
Late as in he would never be on time again.
“You would have loved my Symon. Everyone did. He could spiral dough into a morning bun with one hand and shape baguettes with the other.” Griselde shook her head free of the memories, clearing her throat. “Anyway. You’re not the only one who is missing someone, Duck. I want you to remember that, in case you need to talk about it. I’m here.”
The hand, again, extended toward Duck.
Only this time, it wasn’t a tool the baker was looking for.
Duck’s instinct was to pretend she hadn’t seen it, but a strange curiosity drew her to set her own tiny hand into Griselde’s big one, which enveloped hers like an oven mitt. It was surprisingly soft, considering how solidly muscular it was, and there — Duck could detect the baker’s heartbeat.
She dropped the hand and stood up, searching her mind for an excuse to leave, but no one else needed her. This was the only place she was supposed to be now.
Griselde kindly saved her. “What time is it?”
Duck found the mechanical clock on the opposite wall. “Just past six.”
“Zounds! It’s getting late.” Griselde started stacking the remnants of their feast in her arms. “Time to start winding down. Yes, I know it seems early, but come three in the morning, you’ll be happy that you got rest.”
The baker refused Duck’s help with the dishes, instead nudging her off toward the stairs. “Get to sleep. You’ll be working twice as hard tomorrow.”
Upstairs, Duck used the chute above the cellar, took off her apron and whites, and lay on her bed.
She had never slept on a linen before.
Duck rolled over and stared out the window. If she bunched herself up toward the head of the bed, she could just see the top of the cathedral — the big ugly gargoyle silhouetted against the sky.
I should go to sleep, she kept thinking, but her mind did not want to settle. It was wound up tighter than a fishing net, and her thoughts seemed caught within—
Gnat and his scheming.
The Red Swords, skulking around Odierne.
Ash and the other Crowns, waiting for their bread, which Duck was supposed to supply.
Finally, she curled up on her other side, the cathedral behind her, and let sleep find her.
Tomorrow morning, the real work would start.
Journeyman
“So. You’re the new apprentice.”
The journeyman who had handled the trays of rolls and buns on market day now looked at Duck with an expression of pure disdain.
Duck didn’t even bother trying to answer; he made her so nervous, she knew she’d be stammering until kingdom come.
The man was lean, with a boyish face, as though he were not fully grown yet, despite being several years into adulthood. His skin was a rich brown, and his eyes were deeply vigilant.
Duck had drifted through the night in a light, unsatisfactory slumber, worried that she’d be late on the first day of the job, but she’d finally fallen into a good, deep sleep when she’d heard someone downstairs. Frantic, she’d jumped into her uniform, come into the kitchen, and found not the baker but this stranger, prepping the yeast in bowls along the counters.
Now he poured a miller’s bag of flour into a large mixing tub, glaring at her with suspicion. “Exactly how old are you supposed to be?” The way he phrased it made Duck freeze. Had he already figured out that her apprenticeship was a scam?
He tossed the empty flour sack onto a chair, whipping it past Duck with extra speed. “Do you even talk?”
“Eight,” she squawked.
“For the love of Saint Odile!” he said in exasperation to Griselde as she strolled into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. “I thought you were going to find someone who would actually help this season. This is a mere child.”
“This,” Griselde said, crossing the room to clutch Duck’s shoulders, “is Duck. Duck, meet Petrus, my journeyman. He was once an apprentice, just like you.” There was force in those words, Duck could hear — a request for manners, a plea for sympathy.
“I was once an apprentice,” Petrus echoed, “but at least I was larger than an oatcake.”
“Ignore him,” the baker cheerfully told Duck, and then said to Petrus, “You may have been as long as a string bean when you were a lad, but you barely had a nose, and you don’t have much more muscle now as an adult, so I would hold my tongue when it comes to criticisms of the physical form if I were you.”
Petrus scowled. “I just don’t like the way you open your doors to any mangy scruff that needs a home—” he started, but the baker snapped her fingers.
“Enough. This isn’t scruff. This is Duck. And you will treat her with the same respect that I treat you. Understand?” She said all of this with a smile, but there was something formidable in the way she held her jaw.
Petrus mumbled a reluctant agreement, then stalked off to the storeroom.
Duck hovered where she was, afraid to move, until she heard Master Griselde whisper, “Don’t pay any attention to him when he’s in a mood like that. He’s got a baby who won’t let him sleep — wild-spirited, that Hugo is, which is just what Petrus needs to teach him some patience. He usually takes it out on the dough, which is good for the bread — but if he tries to bully you again, come find me.”
But Duck knew she would never tell Griselde when Petrus picked on her again. No one liked a rat.
Besides, Duck was used to being badgered, especially by an authority figure.
At least he wasn’t calling her Garbage.
She already knew she needed to be careful around Griselde, but she had to be doubly careful around Petrus — he had the air of a constable about him, always watching for even the slightest whiff of trouble.
Master Griselde saw many things, but Petrus would see even more. Duck would need to stay on his good side.
She studied the journeyman again when he came back into the kitchen. He lifted another sack of flour with minimal strain, a movement that had obviously been practiced many times over the years. He tossed the empty sack on the chair with the other one, then reached for a spoon and made a crater in the flour into which he poured a bowl of wet, foaming yeast.
There was something about how he worked, Duck noticed, that was . . . graceful. Equal parts habit and pride.
He’d rehearsed everything until it was total reflex — now he could putter around the kitchen with the yeast and the salt and the peel, king of the bakery.
Perhaps it was jealousy that had him so sour at her. Perhaps Petrus hated that there was someone else here to soak up Griselde’s attention. Well, the last thing Duck wanted was to step on any toes. She was not here to be Griselde’s pet. She was here only as a funnel — bread and coin went through her to the Crowns.
She was here for nothing more.
“Are you waiting for written instructions?” Petrus noticed Duck watching him. “Make yourself useful, Duck. Get moving.” He’d used her name, but he’d also used the same tone Gnat did when he called her Garbage.
“I don’t—” Duck started, but Petrus gave her a look of pure venom, so she scampered around to the other side of the oven to hide and think.
She could fill the water tubs, she decided. That was one of those endless chores that always needed doing. She carried buckets in from the outside barrels, then found a rag and cleaned up a bit of flour that had sprinkled onto the countertop.
“What is this?” Petrus pointed at the stack of empty flour sacks that Duck had moved onto the floor in order to wipe off the counter.
“Are you trying to kill her?” he snapped, nodding in Griselde’s direction.
Duck shook her head, baffled, but Petrus flung the sacks into her hands so hard, she nearly tumbled backward.
“She can’t see, nitwit,” Petrus growled. “If the flour sacks fall onto the floor, she could trip over them and fly straight into an oven.” He ended his lecture by thumping her on the head. “Think!”
Duck flooded with shame. At his command, she walked the empty flour sacks out to the back porch, then fetched ingredients, cleaned spills, and stirred water into flour until her arms ached, trying to get everything right, trying to stay out of Petrus’s way, but feeling very much like she was one slipup away from ruining this whole scam.
Duck’s first full day as a baker was finally over.
She lay flat on her back in her bed, her body sore, reviewing the day’s hardest work.
First she’d helped Petrus make dough for the trenchers, the long, flat loaves that were the cheapest ones the bakehouse sold, the perfect bread for soaking in stew. People bought them in bulk, then let them grow stale for three or four days — that way they could be used as plates and spoons.
Duck made the mistake of asking if this particular batch would be saved for market day — five days from now — and Petrus snorted.
“We can try that, if you’ve got an extra hundred coronets lying around for the penalty.” He continued to mold the loaves with his hands, muttering, “Save them for market day, honestly. Listen here — there are laws about bread—”
“No less than thirty,” Griselde Baker piped in.
“And if we don’t follow them, we get fined like a law office,” Petrus went on. “We can’t bake anything any sooner than midnight the night before we sell it — and that’s not just for market day; that’s any day.”
“But you sell so much,” Duck said, aghast. “It must take hours to bake them all! Surely there’s another way—”
“Oh, if there was a loophole, we’d have found it.” Griselde chuckled. “Such strict regulations come from the guilds, who get them straight from the queen of Avilogne herself: All breads must be baked fresh that same morning. Standards for sizes and flavors and quality of ingredients must be upheld. Every region has its own rules. Even prices are set in stone. Bread is the staple of life, after all. Makes sense that they’d monitor it more closely than sin.”
So baking bread was much more than flopping dough into ovens — and Duck’s eyes were opened to the realities of this trade more than once that first day.
Such as when the baker showed her the difference between yeasted and unleavened loaves. The unleavened loaves were thick, impossibly wet masses that had to be thrown into the oven the second they were shaped so they would crisp up, get a nice hard crust on them, and keep their forms.
But the yeasted loaves . . .
Those were monstrous blobs.
The very concept of yeast had Duck’s head spinning — little granules of something that was living? You fed it sugar and warm water, and then it grew? And you put it inside your bread, and it grew even more?
And then you ate it?
Duck had never heard such a wild thing in all her days.
“You like cheese, don’t you?” Petrus quipped, but Duck needed further explaining before she understood his point — apparently cheese was alive, too.
And worms in apples, and maggots in meat, and mold on cake — was there any food in the world that was just . . . food?
Petrus mixed the yeast into the flour, then covered it with a towel and told Duck not to touch it under any circumstances. Within a few hours, the dough had tripled in size! Petrus poked his finger into it, and it shrank back, then rose up again as if it had a will of its own.
“Now we shape the loaves,” Griselde Baker informed Duck, using a pastry scraper to get all the sticky dough out of the bowl, “and leave them in a patch of sun so they can have a second rise. That way they hold their shapes in the oven.”
The only thing that cut through Duck’s wariness as she stared at the moving, living dough, soaking in the sunlight like a drowsy cat, was the thought of the end product — fluffy, lovely bread.
Worth the strange path through bubbling yeast, absolutely.
After mixing, rising, shaping, rising again, and baking, they had nearly ten dozen trencher loaves cooling on the racks.
“Let’s take a break before we open shop,” Griselde announced, and spread out a meal of cold smoked ham, half a loaf of horse bread (wheat dough containing beans and peas), and mugs of tea.
Petrus went home to eat with his wife and son, cutting through the backyard.
The baker settled into a chair at the table and inhaled her tea, letting the steam waft into her face — and then a knock came at the door.
Griselde groaned. “Good gracious me! Ah, well, this is why I have an apprentice, I suppose. Duck, go open that. If it’s the miller, give him the empty sacks and tell him a hearty thanks from me.”
But when Duck opened the door, she found three farmers on the porch, all of them sunburned beneath their brimmed hats. They each held a five-pound burlap sack in their arms.
“Uh . . . one moment,” Duck stammered, then reluctantly fetched the baker, feeling guilty and useless, but Griselde didn’t seem to mind.
“A bit early today, aren’t we, boys?” Griselde held the door open as the farmers stepped into the bakery.
“A bit hungry, you mean,” said one of the men as they congregated in the entryway, away from the heat of the ovens.
“It’s harvest season,” another one added. “Sun don’t go down until late.”
“Well, then, let’s get you on your way. Your usual, Josse?” Griselde waited for an affirmative answer before wrapping up five of the cooled trenchers, trading them for Josse’s sack of flour.
“Same for me,” said another farmer. All three relinquished their flour sacks to Duck, who, at the baker’s instruction, carried them into the storeroom.
The last man asked for only three trenchers, then reluctantly said, “You wouldn’t happen to have anything . . . special I could trade you for, do you? Maybe some sweet buns? Only it’s my little girl’s birthday today. I’m happy to bring you another sack of flour to make up for the price, or even a cartful of potatoes—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Griselde felt for the handle of the nearest cupboard, then opened it and pulled out a small, round, white thing. “There. A delicious almond and honey cake. Cateline still likes unicorns, doesn’t she?”
The farmer did a double take. So did Duck — the cake Griselde had produced was covered in a thin layer of goopy white sugary cream, and she’d also shaped horned beasts out of marzipan that danced across the top.
“Unbelievable,” the farmer said, nearly in tears. “You never forget a thing, do you?”
“I could never forget the sight of you and your wife showing off your precious bundle, wrapped in her blankets. That tiny pink face!” Griselde folded her arms, as prim as someone her size could be. “You tell Cateline that Griselde Baker says happy birthday.”
The farmers left with grins on their faces, one of them already breaking one of his loaves in half. Another one tried to slip Griselde a penny, which she turned down with a sneer. “Don’t insult me.” But when she shut the door behind them, she was smiling.
“You just witnessed a bit of a workaround, you see,” she informed Duck. “Technically, we’re communal property — this entire bakehouse belongs to all of Odierne. So if folks want to come in with their own flour and use our ovens to make their own bread, the guilds say we have to let them. The problem is, no one but us knows how to make a decent loaf of bread.” She slapped the back of the largest oven affectionately, then rubbed it as if it were sore from all its hard work. “So instead, if a villager wants to bring me a sack of grain with the idea that they would bake themselves some trenchers if they knew how, and I whip it up for them instead . . . well, do you see? Then I don’t have people messing around with my ovens, and they’re not out more than a bit of flour.”
Duck did see. It was an under-the-table, sneaky kind of deal — loaves of ready-made bread in exchange for flour, which went right into the storeroom for the baker to use that week. A barter instead of dealing in cold hard cash.
Very clever. Gnat himself would have been proud.
“As for the cake,” the baker went on, “that’s my own vice. I just love them. Making them. Baking them. Selling them. Eating them. There’s nothing better in the world than a nice slice of something sweet, don’t you think?”
Duck had to decide quickly whether or not to lie. Instead of saying anything, she gave the baker a noncommittal shrug.
Griselde made a face like a cat whose tail had just been stomped on. “Haven’t you ever had cake?” she demanded, and when Duck shook her head, she gasped. “Never had cake? Oh, my dear, dear Duck!” She held her hands to her heart, pressing deep into that barrel chest of hers. “We’ll have to remedy that at once! I believe I have enough sugar—”
But Petrus came in just then, smelling faintly of sour milk.
Griselde put a finger to her lips and whispered, “Petrus doesn’t approve of the way I bend the rules. Let’s not tell him about the unicorn cake.” She arranged her face in a professional smile, but there was a faint twinkle in her opaque eyes.
The baker thought she had a secret. A secret with Duck.
An odd feeling swelled in Duck’s chest, but she flushed it out with the thought of the Crowns, Gnat in particular, asking her to spill everything she knew about the baker.
Duck couldn’t have any secrets with Griselde. Duck was here to keep her own secrets.
“How is little Hugo?” Griselde asked.
To Duck’s surprise, Petrus lit up. “He’s in such a mood today! Babbling and kicking like an egg dancer—” Seeing that Duck was still in the room, Petrus darkened. “He’s well enough. I’ll open the shop now, yes? Let’s get those loaves moved.”
