The Chocolate Kiss

CHAPTER 2



Magalie was enchanting children with morsels of her dark-chocolate house two weeks later when the bearer of bad news burst in.

In this case, it was the toyseller from the quixotic shop four doors down. “Have you heard who’s coming to the island?” Claire-Lucy gasped.

Magalie retained her calm, continuing to break off house pieces to pass around to the children. Even if Superman himself was stopping by to sign autographs, the island in the heart of Paris and Magalie’s place in it would stay the same. And that was what mattered.

The aunts claimed a share of the credit for the chocolate house, but Magalie was the one who had designed September’s display. It was pure dark chocolate, of course. They didn’t really do milk chocolate at La Maison des Sorcières. But Magalie had fitted out the window frames with long strips of candied lime peel, and the roof was thatched with candied orange peel. Up the walls of it, she had twined such delicacies as flowering vines made from crystallized mint leaves and violet petals, both personally candied by Aunt Aja, a delicate, tricky business that involved the brushing of egg whites and sugar onto hundreds and hundreds of mint leaves and fragile violet petals with a tiny paint brush. Over and over. Only Aunt Aja could do it. Geneviève and Magalie soon started throwing things.

Feeding these works of deliciousness to impressionable young children was one of Magalie’s favorite moments of each month. Aunt Aja had confessed that the first few times she and Geneviève had concocted elaborate window displays such as this one, they had been young and refused to destroy their work, leaving it to time itself to decay it with the pale brown bloom on the chocolate. At which point, it was no longer even remotely as delicious as it once could have been. The lesson, according to Aunt Aja, was one of recognizing transience. But Magalie hated transience, so she put it into other terms: one must always know when to yield magic into the hands of the children who wanted to eat it up.

So they made their displays fresh every few weeks, and from all over the Île Saint-Louis and the further hinterlands of Paris, children showed up on the first Wednesday of every month—Wednesday was the day children got off school early—dragging parents or nannies by the hand, to eat the witches’candy.

In front of September’s witch house, lost in a forest of dark-chocolate tree trunks, a tiny black hen pecked in a little garden. The black hen had been formed in one of Aunt Geneviève’s extensive collection of heavy, nineteenth-century molds, gleaned from a lifetime of dedicated flea-marketing. Deep among the chocolate tree trunks was also a chocolate rider on a white-chocolate horse, a prince approaching, perhaps to ride down the black hen and be cursed, perhaps to beg a boon. Magalie and her aunts never told the story; they only started their visitors dreaming.

She gave three-year-old Coco a violet-trimmed bit of vine that the child had begged for and studied their bearer of bad news. La Maison des Sorcères’ eat-the-witches’-display-day was Claire-Lucy’s biggest-business day of the month.

“You haven’t heard who’s going in where Olives was?” Claire-Lucy insisted. Her soft mouth was round with horror, her chestnut hair frizzing with its usual touchable fuzz all around her head. “It’s Lyonnais!” She stared at the aunts and Magalie, waiting for them to shatter at the reverberation of the name.

Lyonnais.

Magalie’s cozy tea-shop world was not crystalline or fragile, so it didn’t exactly shatter on its own. It was more as if a great, Champagne-glossed boot came down and kicked it all open to merciless sunshine.

Magalie had been wrong. So wrong. Perhaps Superman could come through and leave her world untouched. But Lyonnais . . .

She looked at her aunts in horror. They looked back at her, eyebrows flexing in puzzlement as they saw her consternation.

“Lyonnais,” she said, as if the name had reached out and tried to strangle her heart. She stared at Aunt Geneviève. Aunt Geneviève was strong and rough-voiced and practical in her way. She knew how to fix a constantly running toilet without calling a plumber. She was tough-minded. But she didn’t seem to get it, her eyebrows rising as the intensity of Magalie’s dismay seemed to build rather than diminish.

“Lyonnais!” Magalie said forcefully, looking at her Aunt Aja.

Aunt Aja was as soft-voiced and supple as a slender shaft of tempered steel. Her dimpled fingers could press the nastiest kink right out of a back. Wrong-mindedness had no quarter around her. Her gentle strength seemed to squeeze it out of existence, not by specifically seeking to crush it but by expanding until foolishness had no room left. Her head was on so straight, the worst malevolence couldn’t twist it. But she looked at Magalie now with a steady concern that crinkled the red bindi in the middle of her forehead. Concerned not because Philippe Lyonnais was opening a new shop just down the street but because she didn’t understand Magalie’s reaction to it.

“Philippe Lyonnais!” Magalie said even more loudly, as if she could force comprehension. “The most famous pastry chef in the world! The one they call le Prince des Pâtissiers!” Was it ringing any bells at all?

Aunt Geneviève tapped her index finger against her chin, a light coming on. “That young man who has been stirring things up with his macarons?”

She spoke the word macarons lovingly, the way any Parisian would. Bearing no resemblance to the chewy, coconut-filled American macaroon, the heavenly sandwiches of air and lusciousness that were the Parisian macaron were the test of a pastry chef’s quality. And, according to all reports, Philippe Lyonnais did them better than anyone else in the world.

“The one who stopped by here the other week?” Aunt Geneviève continued.

What?

“Weren’t you around when he came in, Magalie?” she asked. “He seemed a bit rude to me, acting as if he didn’t have time for us. And he certainly takes up a lot of room in a place,” she added, not entirely with disapproval but not with any intention of yielding her own space, either. “Still, he’s quite cute. If he can improve his manners, you might like him.”

She gazed at her niece speculatively. Geneviève had originally been confused to learn that Magalie leaned toward the opposite sex in her preferences, since her vision of taking on her niece as apprentice hadn’t included any male accoutrements, but she had long since resigned herself to it. Perhaps all the more readily because Magalie didn’t accessorize herself with males very often.

“Mmm.” Aunt Aja made a long sound that meant she foresaw trouble where Aunt Geneviève saw fun. “There was a lot of lion in him. And he is a prince,” she warned Aunt Geneviève apologetically, hating to have to point it out.

“Oh.” Geneviève looked disgruntled.

Magalie gave her a sardonic glance. In the whole history of the known world, there had been no mention of a romantic attachment between a prince and a witch. Lots of battles, yes, lots of arrogant royals reduced to toads, but not much love lost.

Which had suited Geneviève just fine for herself. But, given her niece’s insistence on the male gender for her romantic attachments, it galled her that any member of that group—even a prince—might consider himself above Magalie.

“Philippe Lyonnais, the most famous pastry chef in the world, is opening another branch of Lyonnais right down the street from us.” Magalie tried spelling it out in small words to see if that helped.

Geneviève started to frown.“You know, that is kind of nervy,” she told Aja. “He could have more respect for our territory. I wouldn’t go open a salon de thé right next to him.”

Why . . . yes, Magalie thought. That was a nice way of thinking of things. “But I don’t think it took him nerve,” realism forced her to admit aloud. “I don’t think it took him any more nerve than walking on a bug he didn’t see.”

Aja smoothed her long burnt-sienna tunic over her salwar pants. Her eyebrows crinkled. “Why didn’t he see us?”

Aunt Geneviève finally had the right focus, though. She stared at Magalie in gathering outrage. “You don’t think it took him nerve to open a shop within our territory? You don’t think it took him courage? You think he just did it without even noticing us?”

Magalie nodded. “I think he probably reviewed all the other shops on the island and his market base and decided there was no threat to him here.”

Geneviève’s mouth snapped closed, and within the bubble of her complete silence, Magalie could almost see her aunt’s head explode.

Aunt Aja traced the embroidery on her tunic soothingly. “I would not, of course, threaten anyone,” she said. “I mean him no harm. However, it’s perhaps better for a prince to learn young that looking before one steps is basic self-preservation.”

Geneviève laughed in a way that put Boris Karloff to shame. “I won’t ‘threaten’ him, either. He doesn’t deserve the warning.”

Magalie took a hard breath. Neither woman seemed to have noticed that the reason he’d treated them like a bug was because he could. He could steal their entire market base simply by opening up shop. He wouldn’t have to compete with them. With five generations of pastry chefs behind him, he had been up against his own family heritage and every other pastry chef in Paris since he was born, competing with the whole world, and he had bested all of them. “I’ll go talk to him.”

It might as well be her. At least she had enough understanding of what was happening to be pissed off at the right thing.

Both her aunts frowned at her. “Why would you want to warn him? I hope you aren’t going soft, Magalie,” Geneviève said. “It’s not because he’s cute, is it? I can’t see any good come from letting a man—especially a prince—take advantage of you just because he’s cute.”

“And no threats, either, Magalie,” Aunt Aja said gently. “Remember karma: the fruit you harvest grows from the seeds you plant.”

Aunt Geneviève snorted. “If anyone tries to boomerang a threat back at Magalie, I’m sure we can make him regret it.” Aunt Geneviève believed in karma about like she believed in bullets: they might exist for other people, but they would most certainly bounce off her.

Aja gave her a reproachful look.

“Enfin, Magalie can make him regret it,” Geneviève disavowed quickly. “I’ll just . . . help.”

Claire-Lucy clapped her soft hands together. “Can I watch?”