The Pâtissier

PART ONE: A LEGEND TO BELIEVE

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A troubled widower once told me that therein a true legend bristles something powerful, but only if kneaded between man's doubt and conviction. For the heart of man molts away its pride to a past only transposing and teasing in its possibilities of hope, like a swallow netted in the latches of gauze and brume, unsure of where to go, as trussed within and unsettled as the shiver of its splintered notes...

Indeed, I am going to tell you the legend of The Pâtissier.

Nestled in the upper-class neighbourhood of 1905 London, the shadow of a man grazed the windows of a famed pâtisserie that only opened to guests at a certain hour. Smoke burgeoning like night-blooming cereuses from its chimney only, and only when the softly throbbing flare of the moon's aureole disentangled into the beams of dawn. Pale webs that interspersed themselves as interlocking little fires across the northernmost estuary: a townlet called Brackenspire.

    Such a man was pursued in the wake of certain desperation, in the birth of tragedy, by the highest esteemed of bureaucrats and businessmen — his name, as if something of a frail ghost, strung too delicately in the whispers of the Edwardian Era's philosophers, scientists, and culinarians alike.

    It was even found imbued along the ink's crooks and falls etching the pages of the alchemists' letterings. Les talents esclaves, some called them, who found themselves chattels to more obsession than true passion in dissecting and pulling apart the delicacies that enthralled the generation. Unlaying every film of pastry brittled and kissed by gold praline to its fringes, thinning to needles every caramelized hair, and cladding with crème fraiche every sheet of mille-feuille as if molten brass would bleed from the pores of its crust.

    There were some who rumoured that he was a Japanese expatriate whose culinary skills had led him to the financial capital of the world, where the demand for finer, rarer confectioners framed an environment for business greater than that in his home townlet. Several contested that he was indeed the late Queen's chocolatier who had apparently, never been seen by a single soul in the Royal Kitchen — only smelt in the sweet breeze that toned the air in his passing. Some said that he was leading an underground revolution, and others that he was indoctrinated in the ways of The Bushido — the Japanese samurai code.

    But if amongst the quagmire of spurious anecdotes and mendacious narrations there was anything that held true to the light, it was that which The Pâtissier swore upon oath concerning the true power of his delectables:

    "As for disease, to bleed against the fractured shell of a glacé cherry will cure it—

    As for thirst, only the sweetest nectar of the black marred treacle will quench it—

    As for hunger, only the soft, honey-dribbling folding of buttermilk strudel between the gums will satiate it—

    And as for the curse, it is only belief in the wonderfully light crackle of my quesillo that would numb its sting for future generations."

    This was his promise, The Pâtissier's pledge to every customer who would filter through the inscribed marble doors on the edge of Knightborne's Crest Park Street: a pâtisserie square in the heart of London of which no one knew the origins of, but those lucky ones who emerged from it always called it by a name strange, unknown, to the previous visitors...

    It had been seven months since it received its last customers: a pair of old costermongers who had been permanent occupants of the streets for a good fifteen years, now — bearing the name the name Le Chalet de Rasotére when they exited the pâtisserie and shared their story of marvel: Fernandez, a man mocked for his slurred speech and chronic deafness, completely cured of his ailments by the hand of this enigmatic Pâtissier.