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Jacob looks around the airy space and scratches his head. “Well,” he says, almost nervous, “this ain’t where I ever expected to set up shop. But if you’re sure…”
“Ain’t nobody going to stop us now,” Queenie says, dropping her handbag on the single drab table with a firm thud.
“The permits are all worked out with the Ministry of Magic,” Newt says, setting the thick file down beside Queenie’s handbag. “You’re quite allowed to do whatever you want.”
Tina squints at the smudged windows. She runs her fingertip along one of the counters, grimacing at the smear of gray dust. Jacob winces. This building has been empty for years, and the idea that it’s his now… “This place needs a lot of fixing up before it’s fit to serve food to anyone.”
“Then let’s get to work,” Jacob says, rolling up his sleeves. “This bakery won’t wait for us.”
Cleaning is easy, when there are four pairs of willing hands. Newt brings out Dougal the Demiguise, who’s good at holding buckets and passing rags. They split into teams: Queenie and Jacob tackle the kitchen together, while Tina and Newt work themselves to the bone in the main room of the bakery. Tina uses magic to clean, mostly; Queenie prefers to scrub everything by hand. Together, they clean the glass cases, scrub rust from wire racks, and polish the floors to a hard shine. Newt climbs a precarious ladder to get at the lighting fixtures, wand clamped between his teeth; Queenie nearly crawls into the oven to get it spick-and-span. By the end of the day, the whole place is clean from top to bottom.
They sit on the floor, since there are no chairs yet, and eat dinner laughing and talking. They keep all the lights on, and outside Jacob can see people looking in on them as it gets darker. They must look warm and cozy in here, out of the frigid January night. Soon, people will be able to come in out of the cold and get hot, delicious baked goods, fresh out of the oven. He almost can’t wait for that.
The next day is occupied with buying equipment and setting out the rest of the plan. Lucky for Jacob, he’s done this once already; it’s old hat. The others follow his lead, letting him explain how things work and why they want it. They need two more ovens. He doesn’t have any pans, let alone special cake pans or pie tins, and he needs rolling pins and so on. And then there are the special orders for bulk things, and the visits to the local groceries for all the sundry goods he’ll need. The wizards who populate Diagon Alley are visibly curious, and Jacob is grateful to the others for fending off prying questions. Word spreads quickly that a “Muggle” is setting up shop, and spectators arrive in droves.
A break in the activity occurs when Newt starts bringing house-elves by for interviews. They’re odd little things, with goggling eyes and bat ears. Loyal only to a specific family, these poor souls got accidentally freed by people who didn’t know what they were doing or were cut adrift from their families for making mistakes. “I think they’d love to work for you, Jacob, they really would,” Newt says. “House-elves need things to do, and these poor creatures have been mistreated by just about everybody.”
“Of course I’ll hire ’em,” Jacob says.
So he ends up hiring four house-elves—well, “hiring” is apparently the wrong word, since the odd little things won’t take wages but will take gifts—to work in his bakery. It takes a bit of compromise, but Jacob finally gets them to call him “Mister” instead of “Master” and everybody is satisfied with the arrangement.
If Jacob had his way, the bakery would have opened without significant fanfare. Instead, all of Diagon Alley (and, it seems, half of Wizarding Britain) shows up. It’s all hands on deck and Jacob is very glad that Newt and Tina haven’t left the country yet. Newt fetches and carries with single-minded determination. Tina and Queenie, between them, keep orders moving with relentless efficiency. This leaves Jacob free to work the kitchen all day. Even if it’s embarrassing, Jacob is flattered that every time he makes an appearance in the storefront he’s greeted by applause. By the end, he’s half covered in flour, he thinks the smell of cinnamon will never leave his nose, and his fingertips are permanently stained from berry juice, but he’s possibly happier than he’s ever been.
The next day is less chaotic, and so is the day after that, and the day after that, until things settle into a kind of routine. The presence of a Muggle baker on the street is no longer so remarkable. Regulars appear, coming in every day or every other day or every Saturday, depending. It’s not long before Jacob is familiar with virtually the whole population of Diagon Alley.
The young Ollivander, just up the street, holds a standing order for a box of assorted goods every day. He’s an eclectic man, always looking like he’s half in another world. He’s younger than Credence, even, and already a famous wandmaker. He comes by just before closing every day to pick up a box of whatever’s left by the end of the day. He’s thin as a rail and Jacob always slightly over-fills the box because he doesn’t like seeing young men look underfed.
Every morning, a runner from the Leaky Cauldron comes to pick up enormous boxes of scones, which confuse the hell out of Diagon Alley until the miscommunication gets cleared up. The scones Jacob makes are American-style, cakey and dense and sweet; what the wizards around here expect is apparently something more like a damn biscuit: light, crumbly and buttery. A Scottish witch takes pity on him and gives him her scone recipe; it’s good, but it isn’t his. Besides, the proprietor of the Leaky Cauldron has already decided that he likes Jacob’s scones well enough. The American novelty draws customers.
There’s more baked-good miscommunications to come. It starts with the scones and continues through the profiteroles (which should be filled with a nice whipped cream and end up full of pastry cream, after the third person demands to know what’s wrong with them), the cupcakes (that everyone calls fairy cakes, until they take a bite and get confused about why the icing is buttercream not glace and the cake is butter instead of sponge), and the biscuits (which Jacob expects to be scones, are cookies, and then turn out to not be real cookies at all because they’re hard and they crunch).
He’s not even going to start with the puddings.
Except that he does.
Jacob was raised in a world where “pudding” usually meant a sweet custard, almost always a dessert. Where it wasn’t something that you baked. And now he’s in England, where they call damn near everything a pudding. Yorkshire puddings like what he calls popovers, black puddings that look like blood sausages, steak-and-kidney pudding that really should be called a pie…the list goes on and on.
But, of course, Jacob adapts. He wouldn’t be able to call himself a baker if he didn’t, and he takes pride in his work. Things like rolls, croissants, filled pastries, and cheesecakes have universal appeal, even if Jacob’s using his grandmother’s recipes. He’s really good at eclairs, and those are exactly the same on both sides of the pond. Marmalade stars are a surprise hit—the crumbly pastry is far more in line with British tastes than Jacob’s chewy soft oatmeal-raisin cookies. The sweet buns, too, the same kind that Jacob’s grandfather had adored, are popular. Newt wheedles Jacob into making English-style iced buns: “Trust me, everyone will love them”, he says, and they do. When he’s finally sorted out the difference between English and American baked goods, Jacob introduces chrustki to the bakery. He can’t find an English-equivalent word for the little hollow pastries with icing sugar, but no one minds. Between all the new and the old things, he has more than enough to keep him busy.
Newt and Tina stay in London for the first two months, helping. They’re all very happy, for a while, to keep their heads down and enjoy the calm. 1927 wasn’t so long ago, after all. Tina’s once-broken arm still hurts every once in a while. Queenie still wakes up sobbing from nightmares brought on by listening to Grindelwald’s terrible thoughts. Newt’s nocturnal habits have gone straight to insomnia: Jacob finds him awake in the kitchen at three in the morning sometimes, having never gone to bed the night before.
In the end, they’re all right. The bakery is warm and safe. It’s easy for Jacob to forget a lot of things, when he’s there. Trenches, and exploding shells, and factories, and the deadly not-shape of the Obscurus, and the broken bodies of two of his friends. They’d survived, but the images remain. And it’s nice having the people he loves safe in front of him, where the real people can banish the memories.
But Newt has the worst case of wanderlust ever seen on this planet. And Tina isn’t about to let him run off on his own again. Therefore, in the middle of March, they depart for parts unknown.
“Well, not really unknown, it’s just the middle of the Arizona desert,” Newt explains, at the end of the farewell dinner they eat in Queenie and Jacob’s flat. The table is square, and Jacob sits across from Tina, with Queenie on his right and Newt on his left.
“America? Really, honey?” Queenie asks.
Tina shrugs. “Do you really think anyone’s going to notice us? The maps say the desert’s pretty damn big,” she says through a mouthful of bajaderka. Jacob usually reserves those for the family—all the baking leftovers of the day, from cocoa to butter to sweet milk, rolled into a ball of cake the size of a kitten. If Tina eats one, and nobody gets the rest out of her reach, she’ll eat all of them.
“Well, nobody’d be happy to see you there,” Queenie says.
“They’ll be all right,” Jacob says, squeezing Queenie’s shoulder. “Our man Newt—he knows how to get in and out of just about anywhere.” He knows she can hear the uncertainty in his head, but—it’s the reassurance that matters, right? She turns a wobbly smile on him, and nods silently.
Newt cocks his head. “I remember getting caught an awful lot, our last few adventures.”
“Well, you’ll do better without Graves handcuffed to you making a bull-headed mess of everything,” Jacob says with a shrug. “Bet you’ll miss my expertise, though!”
“Oh, I will, I’m sure,” Newt says. His smile’s there and gone, but it gives Jacob a good feeling to know he’d brought it round, if only for a moment. “Don’t know what we’ll do without you.”
“It is odd going off without all of you,” Tina says, wiping crumbs from her mouth and leaving them on the cuff of her shirt. “I don’t like it very much, if I’m going to be honest.”
Queenie swallows hard; her hand, sitting beside an upturned fork, clenches. “I don’t either.”
There are two people Jacob knows who can turn on lights with a smile or stop a whole room with a frown. One of them is a young man with a bleeding shadow and the other one is the woman sitting to his right. No one dares to move, for a second, while Queenie stares at the tabletop. Jacob knows that he’d do anything for the woman, has done anything for her, because there’s no one else who could have gotten him to leave New York, do the things he did last year. Tina’s her big sister. Credence adores Queenie like the big sister he never had. In another world, it’s Graves who’s on Queenie’s arm, not Jacob. And Newt—he’s a little less loud about it, but he’s spoken to Jacob about it, and he’s in the same boat as the rest of them.
“Well, we can’t help it,” Jacob says, after the worst of the moment is past. “Guess we’ve got to split up sometime.”
“I don’t think Diagon Alley would recover from you leaving,” Tina says, summoning up a smile.
Jacob puffs himself up with deliberate comic pride. “Of course not! Who would mess up their scones for them if I wasn’t here?”
That makes Queenie laugh. They’re able to move on. To forget everything. Jacob doesn’t like remembering. No one does, really: but Jacob has made a study out of being unaffected by it all. He prefers to live in the moment. None of Graves’ melancholy or Tina’s constant backward glances for him: it’s all right now. The bakery is what matters. Tomorrow he’ll get up and bake. He’ll send off American scones to the Leaky Cauldron and the stock boys from Flourish and Blott’s will come in and get their morning orders. The house-elves will be busy, Queenie will manage the counter, and Jacob will poke his head out every once in a while to make sure things are running all right.
He and Queenie bid Newt and Tina good night. They’re going down to the port tonight, to smuggle the suitcase aboard their ship under cover of darkness. When they leave the bakery, heading out of Diagon Alley, the building feels very quiet. It’s only the two of them, Jacob and Queenie, for the first time. They’ve never just been alone.
“Hey,” Jacob says, taking Queenie’s hand, “why don’t we go upstairs and put on some music?”
“I’d like that,” Queenie says softly. She bends over and pulls off her shoes, dangling them from her fingers by the heels. Without them, she’s a bit shorter than Jacob. He kisses her on the cheek and goes up to the flat.
The lights are low, and it’s still very quiet. Queenie is almost soundless as she moves through the apartment, and Jacob feels a touch adrift. He puts on music, while Queenie gets comfortable, and then takes off everything but his shirt and pants and suspenders and socks. Might as well be comfortable, now there’s nobody but Queenie to see him.
She comes out of the bedroom and he looks up from the table and smiles. God, she’s an angel. An angel in lavender silk pajamas with no makeup on, and she couldn’t be more beautiful. Queenie shakes her head at him, but comes across the room and kisses him anyway. She smells like the vanilla of her perfume and, faintly, like the castor oil from her homemade makeup remover concoction.
“You’re a good man, Jacob,” she tells him, drawing back a bit and looking at him carefully.
“Not as good a man as you are a woman,” he says sincerely.
Queenie’s smile is droll. “I think you’re a flatterer.”
“I’m not!” Jacob says, and at her look he shrugs. “Well. Maybe a little. But can you blame me?”
“Darling, I couldn’t blame you for anything,” Queenie says. She looks him in the eye. He feels the uncomfortable prickle on the back of his skull that means she’s really looking into his head. “Not one thing, you hear me? I couldn’t be prouder to be here with you. You got dreams and you got a heart and you don’t let anything stop ’em.”
Jacob smiles at her. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. She’s the first person in the world to ever really get inside his head. Even if his thoughts are sometimes a little lewd, around her. Queenie giggles at that, tumbling down onto the sofa, pulling him down beside. They sink a little, on the threadbare cushions. Queenie scrambles into his lap, folding up, light as a bundle of feathers. Her curls tickle his nose and he sneezes, doesn’t get out an apology before she’s accepting and reassuring that it’s all right, really.
They sit there together, not really talking because they don’t need to talk much, not like this, when there’s no one else around. Jacob thinks about tomorrow, about the early morning start, the house-elves’ squeaky greetings as he comes in for the morning rush. Another ordinary day in an endless string of ordinary days.
Well—not ordinary. Because he’s here, isn’t he? Working on Diagon Alley in the company of wizards, magic always in the air. Living with Queenie, who’s the best woman he’s ever known. Owning his own bakery, so popular that there’s never a dull moment. Jacob Kowalski has had every one of his dreams come true. And he couldn’t be any happier if he tried.