A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel (16 page)

By the time Rose, Sage, and the animals filed up the main path toward the fountain, it was four in the afternoon, and the sun was bearing down so furiously that most of the visitors had started to trickle toward the exit.

Rose perched on the lip of the fountain as Sage unhooked Gus from the BabyBjörn. She motioned for the cat to join her.

Gus looked mildly taken aback. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten my adversarial relationship with water? You’ll forgive me if I wait over by the DRY shrubs.”

Sage sat beside Rose. “When’s she gonna come out? Do we have to wait until it’s dark? Like with lightning bugs?”

“I’m not sure,” Rose answered. “Maybe if Jacques plays something on his flute?”

“Worth a try,” Jacques said from her sweatshirt pocket. He pulled out his tiny flute and piped the familiar strains of the “
La Marseillaise
.”

As the last note faded away, Rose felt a cold breeze on the back of her neck. She turned to find a ghost standing in the water, a furious-looking woman with powder-white skin, a toothpaste-white wig of hideous curls, and a frilled dress that pinched her mercilessly at the waist, then puffed out into a skirt as wide as the giant trampoline in the Bliss backyard that Sage loved jumping on.

“How dare you play that revolutionary anthem
here
!” the ghost said.

As nicely dressed as the woman was, there was something odd about her head. It was sitting crookedly on her shoulders. Then Rose remembered how Marie Antoinette had died: she had been beheaded.

The ghost gazed at Rose and Sage, and then spied Jacques leaning out of Rose’s sweatshirt pocket.

“A mouse!” she screamed, and disappeared beneath the surface of the water.

“Would you mind sitting this one out?” Rose asked the mouse.

“I am universally despised,” Jacques moaned, before ducking deep into Rose’s sweatshirt pocket.

After a moment, Marie Antoinette rose cautiously from the water. “Has the mouse gone?”

Ty put a restraining hand on Rose’s arm. “Leave this to me,” he whispered. “I can make any girl blush.” He slipped off his shoes and swung a bare foot back and forth through the water. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mind if I come in? It’s so warm out here, and I’m all sweaty.” He adopted a pose that he called “The Young Yachtsman,” which involved pulling on an imaginary rope. “I’ve never been in the presence of a queen before. It’s . . . thrilling.”

But instead of blushing, Marie laughed—softly at first, then building to full snorts. “Are you trying to flatter me? You, a scrawny boy? Am I on a television prank show?”

“Hey!” Ty said. “I’m not scrawny!”

This only made Marie laugh all the more. She grabbed her sides and rolled about in the fountain, not touching the water at all.

Sage splashed in, too. “We need you to blush!” he said. “We’re in a baking competition, and we need—well, it’s a long story. But we need to capture your blush.”

Marie Antoinette stopped laughing and looked serious for a moment. “I wish I could help you, young master. But the last time I blushed was in seventeen sixty, on my fifth birthday. Since then I’ve seen just about everything and done just about everything else. I am—how do you say?—shameless! Nothing will make me blush!”

“Oh yeah?” Sage said. He climbed onto the ledge of the fountain. With his chest held high, he cupped one wet hand and slipped it into his armpit. Solemnly, he lifted his elbow up in the air before slamming it back toward his chest.

It was so loud and disturbing a sound that it sent a flock of pigeons squawking up in the air.

But Marie Antoinette only moved her shoulders back and forth, which was as close as she could come to shaking her severed head. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve farted before major heads of state. It doesn’t even make me
laugh
anymore.”

Ty and Sage both looked to Rose, but she was plumb out of ideas.

Just then they heard an angry howl coming from behind them on the garden path. Suddenly the transparent form of Ourson hurtled into the clearing, sailed over the ledge of the fountain, and fastened his hands around what was left of Marie Antoinette’s neck. “How could you say ‘Let them eat cake’?” he roared. “We were starving! All seven of my sisters died while
you
were hosting wine-and-cheese receptions!”

The ghost of Marie’s severed head slid from her shoulders and slipped softly into the water.

“Ourson!” Rose scolded.

Shamefacedly, the ghost stepped away from headless Marie Antoinette. “I did not mean to do that!” he said. “I didn’t know it would fall off!”

Rose pointed. “Find her head and put it back!”

The ghost looked thoughtful as he sank into the water and swished his insubstantial hands around. “It is
very
slimy, this fountain!” he said. “Why do they not clean it?”

Rose put her hands on her hips. “Just do as you’re told.”

“Ah-ha!” He rose up out of the water, and in his arms was the startled-looking head of the dead queen. Ourson held it out to her body and placed it in her hands; then she set it in place, but backward.

“I really should find some way of fastening it permanently,” she said as she twisted it around the right way.

Rose squinted at the ghost and gasped. There could be no mistake. The ghost’s cheeks were very faintly red.

“Sage!” she cried. “Ty!”

Sage grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket, stumbled through the water to the ghost’s side, and gently blotted at Marie’s cheek. Ty was right behind him with a blue mason jar. Sage turned and dropped the hankie in, and Ty sealed the jar shut.

Marie Antoinette seemed not to have noticed. She was staring at Ourson. “I never thought about it!” she said to him. “All those parties . . . I thought
everyone
was having parties. I’m so sorry for your sisters, . . . you handsome, brutish, devastatingly handsome young man!”

Ourson lowered his hands and stepped back. “And I am sorry I beheaded you.
Again
. I suppose you didn’t deserve to have your head cut off. In a way, you were merely an accomplice.” He bowed. “An exceptionally beautiful accomplice, I might add.”

Suddenly there was a shriek from the other side of the fountain. Just across the pool, peering at them through the harsh sun and pointing, was a portly, mustachioed guard.

Rose turned back toward Ourson and Marie Antoinette, but they had disappeared into the water.

“That water is terribly dirty!” the man shouted. “Get out!”

Rose realized that the guard wasn’t pointing at the ghosts but at her and her brothers. She sloshed to the ledge of the fountain and pulled herself out. “Sorry!” she yelled back. “We were hot.”

Rose turned to Sage, who was carrying the mason jar with Marie Antoinette’s blush-stained handkerchief inside. “Let’s get this to the hotel. Hopefully Balthazar will be finished translating the last recipe. And I need to change my pants.”

Back at the Hôtel de Notre Dame, Rose and Sage knocked on Balthazar’s bedroom door and cracked it open about a foot. Inside, he was hunched over the Booke, consulting various tables and indexes and maps and charts and lunar almanacs.

“We got the queen’s blush,” she announced proudly. “Do you have the Ravishing Rugelach recipe?”

“You’re kidding!” he said. “Whose cheek did you get?”

“Oh . . . just Marie Antoinette’s,” Sage said proudly.

“I’m impressed,” said Balthazar. “Now, as for the Ravishing Rugelach, I finished translating, but we’re gonna have to pick a new recipe for the ROLLED category. This one is impossible. Though at least the main ingredient is in Paris.”

“Why?”

Balthazar handed Rose the sheet of paper. “Read it and weep.”

Rose looked over the recipe:

Ravishing Rugelach, for Matrimonial Merriment.

It was in 1645 that the baker Jean ValBliss did make a pilgrimage to the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris with his fiancée, the ravishing Anais Amembert, whom he intended to wed on the steps of the cathédrale. But when he did arrive, he did find that a plague had overtaken the land. Jean and Anais proceeded with their wedding, and together did bake these rugelach to serve to their guests, whereupon the town was filled, for a single afternoon, with pure Bliss.

Jean and Anais Bliss did cut one staff of
butter
into a bowl with one fist of
white flour
, two fists of
sugar
, and one fist of
soured cream
. Afterward he did add the
rolling midnight chime of the Notre Dame Bourdon bell called Emmanuel.

“We have to collect the midnight chime of the bell at Notre Dame Cathedral?” said Rose. “How hard could that be?”

A snort came from Rose’s front pocket. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread!” warned a tiny voice.

Rose reached in and scooped out Jacques. “I made the mistake of trespassing in Notre Dame at night once, and I shan’t do it again.”

“Why?” said Rose. “What’s so awful in there? Is the night guard mean?”

“There are
several
night guards,” said Jacques. “But they’re not human. They are gargoyles. Hideous, monstrous, vengeful creatures who rule over the cathedral like it’s their own kingdom.”

“Well, what else are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“I haven’t figured it out yet,” Balthazar said, “but I should know by the end of the evening. Your parents already called and said they’d be out all night chasing an inchworm’s shout.”

“Is that hard to capture?” Sage asked.

Balthazar scowled. “Have you ever tried to rile up an inchworm? They’re the most reasonable things in the universe.” He looked back down at the sheet of paper. “Let me work while you three get some dinner, and then we’ll figure out what recipe we can substitute for this one.”

“How long is that going to take?” Rose asked impatiently.

“Not that long, I think!” Balthazar said with a sparkle in his eyes. “You know, I didn’t really want to come to Paris, but now that I’m here, with all of you impossibly young people, I feel about a hundred years younger! I mean, have you seen how fast I’ve been translating these recipes?”

“You mean faster than one every six months?” Gus called in from the living room.

“What was the last thing you translated, cat?” Balthazar shouted back.

“Why do you two fight all the time?” Rose asked.

“Isn’t that what best friends do?” Balthazar whispered. “I couldn’t live without that cat. We just like to . . . challenge each other.”

Rose read the recipe for Ravishing Rugelach once more.

“Why don’t we just use this?” Rose asked. “It can’t be
that
difficult to get past a couple of gargoyles.”

But Balthazar shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Gargoyles? They’re like the opposite of inchworms. If there is something
more
vile and unreasonable in the world, I don’t want to know what it is.”

“They’re that bad?” Rose asked.

Jacques shuddered. “The
worst
.”

W
hile Sage and Ty played video games and Leigh snored, Rose paced around the room, sighing heavily and talking to herself.

“It’s come down to me and Lily and Wei Wen, and he is like a master architect of baking. If the category is ROLLED, Lily is going to make a Jittering Jelly Roll, according to what Jacques saw. I have to make something incredible enough to get me through to the finals. What is Balthazar doing in there? He said he was feeling sprightly! We need another plan! Fast!”

“Calm down, Rosicita!” said Ty.

“You don’t understand the pressure I’m under!” she screamed. “It’s my fault that the Booke is gone! And it’s up to me to fix it. Me alone.
Me
!”

“With all due respect, Rose,” Sage said, “it was all of our faults that the Booke got lost.
I
gave Lily the key to the fridge. And
Ty
was the one who wanted to break the Booke out in the first place ’cause he wanted to impress Aunt Lily. And if
Mom and Dad
hadn’t left, we wouldn’t have had a problem. So it’s not just your fault.”

“But I was the one that trusted her,” said Rose. “I was the one who ate up her praise and then almost left you guys to join her on her psycho roller coaster ride of fame.”

“You almost left?” said Sage. “What do you mean?”

Rose bit her lip. The whole nine months since Lily had left, Rose hadn’t shared what had really happened. She was too ashamed to tell her family that she had actually considered leaving them forever to be on some stupid TV show. “I mean, figuratively. Let’s check on Balthazar’s progress.”

But when Rose looked in on him, Balthazar was hunched over his Sassanian version of the Booke, snoring. He hadn’t even begun to translate another recipe.

“Old men have to sleep sometime, I guess. Okay, that’s it!” Rose said. “I don’t care how dangerous it is; we’re going to Notre Dame to get that chime!”

“Rose, I don’t want to go,” said Sage. “The last time I was on the roof of a Parisian landmark in the middle of the night, I almost didn’t come back down. What are the chances that ROLLED will be the category tomorrow? One in a million.”