“Honey, the government says we can’t operate,” said Balthazar, wiping the top of his bald head with a handkerchief. “This document is perfectly clear: unless we employ more than a thousand people, we are shut down. That fancy lawyer, Bob Solomon, hasn’t been able to find a single loophole. And our congresswoman, Big Nell Katey – well, she hasn’t made a bit of headway with those other politicians down in Washington. They’ve got good hearts, the both of them, but we’re up against something sneaky here.”
Gus arched his back and hissed. He began to scratch at the wooden base of the breakfast table like it was a cage full of mice.
“Gus,” Purdy said gently. “No scratching, please.”
Gus sank to the ground and twisted miserably until he was lying on his back. “I’m sorry. It’s how Scottish Folds cope with sneakiness.”
“The law says that we can’t operate for profit,” Purdy explained with a strange glint in her eye. “It says nothing about operating as a charitable organization. We have to stop selling baked goods, but we don’t have to stop baking!”
Ty’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be suggesting that we—”
“—give our baked goods away for free!” Sage finished.
Ty put his head in his hands, careful not to mess up his hair. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’ll never get rich this way!”
“Giving our goods away is exactly what I’m suggesting,” Purdy said. “Our work is bigger than simple profits. Calamity Falls needs us.”
Sage groaned theatrically.
Beside her, Albert smiled and folded up the letter. “We won’t be able to give away our Bliss baked goods forever – we can’t afford to do that. But we can at least do so until we find some way around this backward law.”
“I just know this is Lily’s fault.” Balthazar rose from the breakfast table and began to pace around the room, scratching his beard. “May none of you forget: Lily never returned Albatross’s Apocrypha. I’ll bet you a loaf of Betray-Yourself Banana Bread that Lily is using the sinister recipes in that little booklet to wreak havoc on the government. I should have destroyed it when I had the chance back in 1972.”
Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather was fond of warning the family about the dangers of Albatross’s Apocrypha, a pamphlet of particularly meddlesome and nasty recipes written long-ago by a black sheep in the Bliss family. Usually, the Apocrypha was tucked into a pocket at the back of the Bliss Cookery Booke, but when Lily had returned the Booke after she lost the Gala des Gâteaux Grands in Paris, the Apocrypha was missing.
“We don’t actually know that, Balthazar,” Albert protested, though Rose thought he looked more like he was trying to convince himself than Balthazar. Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather just harrumphed.
“Never mind any of that!” Ty shouted. “The solution to our problems is so obvious! All Rose has to do is one commercial for Kathy Keegan Snack Kakes, and we can all retire to Tahiti. None of us will have to approach an oven again. They’ll be baking for us!” He and Sage gave each other a high five.
“It’s not about the money, Thyme,” Purdy said, flicking her oldest son on the side of his head. “It’s about the people of this town. They need us. And we need them. Baking is our grand purpose.”
“Besides,” said her father, “we can afford it – for now. We’ve always scrimped and saved in case of an emergency. And this? This is as much an emergency as Calamity Falls has ever faced.”
Somewhere deep within her, Rose felt a tiny flame kindle, a fire of hope and a desire to do some good the only way she knew how. “What are we going to do?” she asked her mum.
Purdy smiled, and Rose felt the dreariness of the past twenty-seven days burn away like a cloud at sunrise. “We are now the Bliss Bakery Underground,” Purdy announced. “We will bake all day and all night, and beginning tomorrow morning, we will personally deliver the cakes and pies and muffins to everyone in town. The people of Calamity Falls stuck with us through our hard times, when we didn’t have the Booke. Now we’re going to stick by them.”
Albert tore the official government letter dramatically down the center. “I think that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.”
Purdy moved Leigh to her father’s lap. She stood up and began pacing the cramped bakery kitchen. “Chip will make a major grocery store run,” Purdy said, looking at her burly assistant. “Albert – will you inventory our magical ingredients?” Standing tall, she added, “We shall not cease.”
“I’ll help,” Rose said, happy for the opportunity to reverse her careless wish and, for the first time in nearly a month, to cut loose and bake – no cameras, no reporters, just three generations of Blisses, doing what they had always done best.
Making kitchen magic.
It was three in the morning.
The heat in the kitchen was as thick as grape jelly. Rose cracked the red egg of a masked lovebird into a bowl of zucchini muffin batter to make a batch of Love Muffins for Mr and Mrs Bastable-Thistle, who, without the magical intervention of the Bliss Bakery, became shy strangers to each other.
“Mum, look,” Rose said as she mixed in the egg, watching the batter thicken and hiss as tiny hearts of flour exploded into the air.
But Purdy couldn’t hear Rose – not over the Malaysian Toucan of Fortune, whose confident squawk she released into a bowlful of pastry cream, then stuffed the cream into a batch of Choral Cream Puffs for the Calamity Falls Community Chorus, whose voices were meek and thin without them. “What was that, honey?” Purdy asked.
“Never mind,” Rose said, continuing with the muffin batter as Balthazar unleashed the gaze of a medieval Third Eye onto a batch of Father-Daughter Fudge for Mr Borzini and his daughter, Lindsey – after eating the fudge, each could more easily glimpse where the other was coming from. “You never want to look a Third Eye directly in its, erm, eye,” Balthazar told Rose. “It could blind you.”
Mental note, Rose thought. Don’t go blind.
The family had been at it for sixteen hours, and Purdy’s master list of baked goods was still only half complete.
The kitchen itself was strewn with blue mason jars filled with various sniffs and snorts and fairies and gnomes and ancient lizards and talking mushrooms and googly eyes and woogly flies and jittering, glowing bobbles of every sort. Hints of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla swirled in the air, and all the various sounds coming from the kitchen made Rose hope the neighbours wouldn’t think the Blisses were running a zoo.
Albert had ferried jar after jar of magical ingredients from the secret cellar beneath the walk-in fridge – “Watch your heads, Blisses!” – until the dingy wooden shelves were practically empty.
Ty and Sage had long since gone to bed. At one point, they’d come downstairs for a snack, but they took one look at the magical mayhem, at the chomping teeth and flying rabbits and the explosions of colour coming from dozens of metal mixing bowls, then scurried back upstairs.
There were Cookies of Truth for the infamous fibber Mrs Havegood, Calm-Down-Crepes for the angry, overwrought Scottish babysitter Mrs Carlson, and Adventurous-Apple-Turnovers for the reserved League of Lady Librarians.
There was Seeing-Eye Shortbread for Florence the Florist, who was nearly blind, Frugal Framboise Cake for the French restaurateur Pierre Guillaume, who had a notorious shopping problem, and even something for Devin Stetson, the blond boy whom Rose had thought about at least twice a day for approximately one year, five months, and eleven days. She had made him Breathe-Easy Sticky Buns to help with his frequent sinus infections, which, as far as Rose was concerned, were the only things wrong