thought. ‘In his own words, too.’
The Alchemaster peeled a pear while some crystallised chestnuts were simmering in cream in the saucepan in front of him.
‘I must say,’ trilled Izanuela, ‘this tomato compote is a dream. As for the vanilla foam, you could positively chew the stuff! How do you get it like that?’
‘Many thanks, my blossom,’ Ghoolion replied with a smile. ‘One simply has to beat it hard enough. But that’s just an appetiser designed to loosen your delightful tongue. I’m producing the other courses as fast as I can.’
He removed the chestnuts from the stove and proceeded to mash them with a fork.
‘One day,’ he went on, ‘when the young man was strolling along, sodden with acid rain and lost in his own gloomy thoughts, he passed a patisserie. It was a rare sight amid the ubiquitous rust and soot and metallic greyness of Ingotville: a shop window filled with colourful, cream-topped pastries, chocolate gâteaux, cinnamon rolls, crystallised fruit and glazed tartlets. To anyone else that shop window would have seemed like an oasis in the desert, a starving man’s hallucination, but its effect on our young man was diametrically different. The sight of all those sweet things revolted him.’
Ghoolion tossed some flakes of white chocolate into a saucepan to melt, then added some cream and spiced the result with cinnamon.
‘The young man was about to walk on quickly when he caught sight of his beloved inside the shop, her eyes shining with anticipation as she pointed to the various items she wished to purchase. He was quite convinced he had never seen her look as beautiful as she did at that moment.’
Ghoolion removed the white chocolate sauce from the stove. It smelt tempting.
‘A strange kind of rage welled up in the young man’s breast. He was disconcerted to note that he was jealous of a slice of gâteau. Envious of a strawberry tartlet. Infuriated by a chocolate wafer.
‘“Just wait,” he said to himself. “I shall be able to make her delicacies far superior to that sugary muck in there. I shall become the best pastry cook, the most famous confectioner, the greatest exponent of seduction by sugar in the whole of Zamonia! I shall produce the most delicious puddings and elaborate gâteaux ever devised. I shall create pralines to break a person’s heart. Fondants to fight over. Meringues to kill for. A bitter chocolate velouté that will make her love me to the point of idolatry.”’
Ghoolion broke off because he was removing something from the oven and dishing it out on the plates. It smelt of baked pears and marzipan.
‘I must say,’ Izanuela whispered to Echo, ‘I think he’s doing terribly well. Did you know he was such an expert storyteller?’
‘Yes,’ Echo whispered back.
‘He’s a man of many talents,’ she said under her breath.
Ghoolion served the next course. Baked to a pale golden brown, it was a pear-and-marzipan strudel afloat in a warm sea of melted white chocolate.
‘Enjoy,’ Ghoolion said with a bow.
What impressed Echo most was not the sophistication of the food they were being offered - he was only too accustomed to that - but the fact that Ghoolion was so unpardonably neglecting his real work in the laboratory. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten about it altogether. Tomorrow was full moon, the night he had been working towards for so long, and here he was, telling stories and cooing at Izanuela. To Echo, this was the surest proof of the love potion’s potency.
‘Aah! Mmyummm …’ said Izanuela as she took her first mouthful of the strudel. ‘This is simply in-cred-ible! It tastes like … like …’
‘Like love itself?’ Ghoolion amplified with a seductive wink. ‘That brings me back to my story. It was love that had wrought such a complete change in our young man. His gloom gave way to good cheer, his sourness to sweetness, and Ingotville to Florinth. He realised that he must become an utterly different person if he was to win his beloved’s affections. Ingotville being a place where a man might learn how to cast a cannon but not how to make a perfect crème caramel, he left there and went to Florinth, where culinary decadence was then at its height. The reigning Zaan of Florinth had proclaimed cake-making to be an art form in its own right and nine of his cabinet ministers were former pastry cooks. If anyone wished to achieve success in that field, Florinth was the ideal spot to choose. The cherry on the trifle, so