"And four," Leo said, reading from the notebook, surprising them all, "he has to keep losing at chess honestly. The witness insists."
"Granted," Poppy said, "on all of it. Permission is granted." She signed the drawing in full β POPPY LANE β in purple, and Leo signed beneath as witness, first with an X, then, indignant at the smallness of it, with his whole name too, and Poppy stamped the document with the biscuit stamp, hard, twice, for the seal.
Adrian shook her hand gravely, as one signs a treaty. Then the court dissolved, and he was hugged whether formality liked it or not β and June, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway the whole time in her dressing gown with her hand over her heart, said, "Well. That's the paperwork done," and laughed, and cried, exactly in that order.
Chapter 25: The Second Cake
The order was written in June's book in her calm, round hand, on the page after the wedding cakes and the christening sponges: Serra β 61st β five tiers β the cake again.
A year ago she had written a line almost identical to it with her hand shaking so badly she had blotted the ink, a widow with a debt ledger and a six-year-old and one impossible order standing between her family and the street. This year the radio was on. This year there was an apprentice to read the weights back to her, and a second oven holding its heat like a held note, and Leo at the counter doing his homework in between duties as Minister of Quality, a post Poppy had created for him and enforced with the full majesty of the bakery's constitution. The cake was the same cake β lemon and almond, the syrup, the white chocolate, the five rising tiers of it β made this time by unafraid hands, and June understood, somewhere around the third sponge, that this was the actual commission. Not a cake. The same cake, again, with the fear gone out of it. Dominic Serra, who understood symbols the way other men understand weather, had known exactly what he was ordering.
Poppy piped the roses.
She had her own apron now, with POPPY across the front in June's embroidery, and a stool of her own, and a piping bag she treated the way knights in Leo's chapter books treated swords of inheritance. The roses were the work of the whole last day: hundreds of them, buttercream, blush and ivory, laid out on trays in ranks. She worked with her tongue caught between her teeth, in the absolute concentration that was her birthright, and every fourth rose, on average, failed inspection β too tight, too loose, one that she declared "smug" β and the failures were eaten by the Minister of Quality with a gravitas that fooled no one, since his job description had been written by the accused.
"That's the twelfth failure," June said mildly, not looking up from the fondant.
"The Ministry," Leo said, with dignity and a pink moustache, "takes its work seriously."
The flavours were a map of the two years, if you knew how to read a cake. Lemon, because the first cake had been lemon, and some things you do not improve, you honour. Almond, because Dominic's late wife had baked with almond, and June had found the note of it on an old estate menu that Leo had carried down to her like scripture. And this year the syrup held a spoonful of the Don's own dessert wine, sent down in a bottle labelled in his hand β FOR THE CAKE. NOT FOR THE COOK β which June had laughed at, and used anyway, both ways.
Assembly took the afternoon: dowels cut and set true as fence posts, boards, the crumb coat, the long patience of chilling and smoothing. June moved around the rising cake the way she had once moved around it like a bomb technician, except that now she hummed, and the humming was the whole story of the year in one sound. When the last tier went on and the thing stood β five storeys of it, serene, gleaming faintly in the bakery's kind light β she laid both palms flat against the counter and looked at it for a long moment, and Poppy, reading her the way children read weather, said, "It's the same one, Mama. But standing in a different house." And June, who had not cried over the first cake until much later and in private, laughed instead, out loud, in her own shop, in front of witnesses.
It travelled to the estate like royalty.
Adrian had built a level wooden cradle for the floor of June's van, lined and braced, a small engineer's act of devotion she pretended to find excessive and secretly found perfect. The bottom tiers rode stacked and doweled; the crown tier rode apart, in state, in its own box. A Serra car went ahead of the van and a Serra car came behind β not as guards, not anymore, but as an escort, hazards blinking in the late sun, and June drove at twenty miles an hour down the valley road with her hands at ten and two and Poppy in the cab beside her with one palm flat against the dashboard, helping, holding the whole enterprise steady by force of personality. Farmers waved. A dog ran alongside for a field's length, in honour. Nothing wobbled. Nothing leaned. In the mirror, June watched the escort cars keep their patient distance, and thought: a year ago, men in cars like that were the thing I was afraid of. Now they're slowing down traffic so my cake can have a smooth road. The world does not change all at once. It changes at twenty miles an hour, with its hazards on.
The gates were open before the van reached them β both leaves, standing wide, the way they had not stood for the Serras' own cars in sixty years of caution β and the man on the gate, who a year ago had searched June's delivery van down to the flour sacks, touched two fingers to his cap as she passed and said, "Mind the turn by the fountain, Mrs. Lane. Take her wide." She took her wide. Poppy waved out of the window like royalty indeed, and the staff of the feared Serra estate stood along the drive in the evening light, not watching for danger β just watching for cake.
At the estate, four men carried the cake in like a sedan chair, the way they had been instructed, in silence, at a pace Poppy set with a raised hand from the steps. The stand waited in the great hall β the same stand, mended and reglued after its catastrophe, and June, setting the crown tier true at last, ran her thumb once over the repaired leg without thinking, the way you touch an old scar that no longer hurts.