On Monday, Christmas and Lincoln sat together at the long wooden table in the centre of the shop. The air was intoxicatingly thick with the sweet perfume of the bridal white lutchuensis camellias Cheyenne grew on her property and had wrapped in ribbons for sale. The flowers stood in metal buckets on wooden trestles and nodded gently on the current of the air-conditioning. Picked on Friday because Cheyenne said they couldn’t wait another day, they’d kept quite well over the weekend, treated to filtered water and the constant temperature in the shop.
Christmas had just finished booking her flights to France online, the realisation that it was truly going to happen filling her with a rush of adrenaline, excitement and nerves, when Lincoln had tapped gently on the door, the morning sun on his shoulders.
‘How’s Caesar this morning?’ she’d asked, letting him in.
‘Great. We went for a wander around the streets. He has no manners and bowls into anyone and everyone to say hello. He sniffed three human crotches and one dog’s bum, licked a cat’s face, and stole a plastic gnome from a garden and crushed it before I could save it.’
‘Did you knock on the owner’s door?’
‘No. Call me mean but I think the world’s a better place without gnomes, don’t you? They’re creepy.’
Now, having poured Lincoln a cup of freshly brewed coffee, Christmas sat next to him clutching her cup of Piscean zodiac tea, with rose petals, orange peel, lavender and a dash of ginger, designed to complement the Piscean traits of compassionate femininity combined with a fiery disposition when provoked, or so the aqua box claimed. According to the description, Christmas should be a deeply romantic type, highly intuitive and emotional, but wearing an armour of wariness and independence to protect her from being hurt. She had to admit, it wasn’t far off the mark. And it was really lovely tea.
As she sipped it, her mind drifted naturally to envisaging the types of recipes in which she could use the herbs in this tea. Medicinal herbs combined with medicinal chocolate.
She eyed the botanist in the room. It was so obvious, she’d nearly missed it. Lincoln was the perfect person to talk to about her hopes for developing healing uses for chocolate.
He passed her a sheaf of papers. ‘This is a sample chapter that my editor—sorry, our editor—Jeremy has already seen and which he thinks is a bit dry. Maybe you could have a read and see what you think.’
Christmas replaced her teacup on its matching saucer and read the chapter, while Lincoln got up and wandered around the shop. He was awfully distracting with his long limbs moving about the space so freely. He didn’t look like the kind of person who had any tension in his body at all. He stopped to pick up a bundle of antique French love letters from a display. Penned in the late 1800s, the paper yellow, the ink faded but readable (if you could speak French), they were tied together with tightly woven raffia string, a paper-thin pressed flower tucked under the knot.
‘Where’d you get these?’ he asked.
‘I found them in an antiques shop. I thought they were so lovely. So intimate. Two people’s lives captured forever there on the page. Although I can’t read the words I think you can feel their passion on the page.’
‘It’s incredible,’ Lincoln said, holding the papers carefully in his large hand. ‘One day we won’t have anything like this anymore. Everyone just texts or emails now and the messages get deleted willy-nilly.’
She snorted. ‘Willy-nilly?’
He grinned and shrugged.
She returned her attention to the pages. When she’d finished reading he joined her once more at the table, swinging his legs over the bench seat. He held up a bar of imported Rococo Earl Grey dark chocolate. ‘Does this have real tea in it?’
‘Yes. They grind the tea leaves to a fine powder and add bergamot oil to it. I’d like to offer a lot more chocolates like that—ones that combine unusual elements like herbs. It’s a small percentage of my overall chocolate stock but it’s the part I love most.’
‘You should always do what you love.’ He pointed to the pages. ‘What are your thoughts?’
‘Well,’ she said, pushing the manuscript to the side, ‘I always think the key rule of writing is to deliver your message as simply and directly as possible and speak from the heart. There’s a lot of passion here, I can tell, but it’s a bit, I don’t know, stuffy.’
‘Stuffy?’
‘Yes. Like a lecture.’
‘That’s no good at all. Do you think there’s hope for it?’ He fiddled with the pen in front of him, nervous.
‘Absolutely! Why don’t you tell me, right now, in your own words, some of the things you’d like to get across, and I’ll see how I can help.’
Lincoln slipped his thumb under the wrapper of the Rococo bar and began to prise it open. He caught her watching him. ‘Don’t worry, I intend to buy it.’ He smiled.
‘Oh, no, I wasn’t worried about that.’ The truth was that she was thinking it was rather seductive watching him unwrapping that bar of chocolate, and a rush of heat had swept up her body from her toes. To distract herself, she jumped up and went to the iPod player sitting on the apothecary chest. She searched through the menu while Lincoln spoke.
He bit into the chocolate. ‘The thing is,’ he began, his words slightly muffled, ‘sustainability is what it’s all about. Oh my God, that’s so good!’ He licked his finger. ‘I’m not normally into flavoured chocolate. I’m a bit of a puritan like that—I think in general you should simply appreciate the diversity of chocolate itself, getting the true rustic flavour of the cacao bean, whatever country, region, estate and tree it came from. I’m not a fan of uniform, mass-produced products where the true flavour is smothered by sugar and milk and vanilla. But this!’ He shoved another chunk of chocolate in his mouth. ‘Have you tried this?’
Christmas laughed. ‘Of course I have. Rococo is one of my favourite suppliers. They inspire me.’ She settled on The Best of Edith Piaf, and the charming lyrics of ‘La Vie en Rose’ came tumbling out into The Apothecary.
‘What you just told me,’ she said, sitting down again, her mind back on the job, ‘that’s great information and it’s something I’m passionate about too.’
‘Really?’ He cast his eyes around the shop at all the marshmallows and jellies.
‘Confectionary sells. But the real fire in my belly is for my consultations. Because I believe that chocolate can be a bona fide medicine. And I want to find out how far I can take that. As you would know, the rainforest is renowned for producing medicines and I’m sure it’s no accident that cacao grows in the rainforest. And what you’re talking about here,’ she motioned over the manuscript, ‘is the kernel of that truth. We just need to make it sexier.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Sexier?’
Christmas felt her ears redden but ploughed on regardless. ‘Tell me more about sustainability.’
‘Sustainability of cacao production is the key to long-term economic benefit, but this is always in conflict with the short-term needs of corporations to make a profit. What I’ve seen is that so much of the sustainability concern around cacao is actually at a social level. A cacao farm is typically only a couple of acres in size, run by the family who owns it. They work really hard, for a handful of dollars a day, and it’s all manual labour, every single step. Unlike other crops, no one’s yet come up with reliable, effective ways to mechanise the farming, so the whole industry relies on paying wages to the workers on the ground, and it would simply cost too much to grow it in a developed nation with appropriate remuneration, even if one had the right climate.’
His eyes drifted off to the corner of the room as if he were recalling what he’d seen. ‘In Ghana, the workers sit in a circle and chant to urge each other on to work harder while they split open the pods with machetes, pull out the beans, put them in a pile and cover them with banana leaves to ferment for five days or so.’
He looked back at her, enthusiasm animating his hands. ‘Cacao’s a cash crop, which means all their hard work doesn’t
even result in food they can eat, and the trade price for cacao is set by a global stockmarket thousands of miles away. The farmers receive paltry financial rewards for their efforts, and given this and the high labour investment necessary to grow cacao, the younger generations are turning away and leaving the farms. And fair enough. But that means the farmers are ageing and so too are the cacao trees.’
Christmas frowned. ‘Sounds dire. Is it really possible we’d end up in a world without chocolate?’
‘I think it’s unlikely. But at the same time, I think we’re going to see some big changes. Attempts have been made to create faster-growing types of cacao trees, but all that happens is that those trees take more nutrients from the soil and more water from the water table than can be replaced in time for new crops. And the newer, faster-growing varieties don’t live as long as the traditional trees either. At the same time, if the farmer can actually produce more cacao with these new varieties, the world trade price actually falls. So they’re forever chasing their tail.’
Christmas took a deep breath. ‘Heavy stuff.’
‘Yes, it is. Can I get another coffee?’
‘Sure.’ She led him to the coffee machine, which was her tool for providing fancy coffees for anyone who wanted more than the free plunger coffees on offer, and switched it on to heat up the water. They leaned with their backs on the apothecary chest and gazed at the rows of shiny chocolates lined up in the glass cabinet in front of them.
‘Do you know, many of the farmers who grow cacao to supply the gigantic chocolate trade have never even tasted chocolate?’ Lincoln said.
‘You’re kidding? That’s outrageous. I just want to post them a box full right now!’
‘Many of them say they just grow the beans for their broker but have no idea what the white people do with them after that,’ he explained. ‘Chocolate is one of the few gourmet foods where the ingredient is grown thousands of miles from where it’s processed and consumed.’
Christmas considered her own part in chocolate’s journey. Her beans certainly racked up a lot of frequent-flyer points on their travels, and hers was one of the smaller supply chains in the world. At least she didn’t then export her chocolates again, like so many of the huge chocolate companies.
She mentally adjusted her PR hat and tapped her brain for ideas on how to convey this information in a way that would be easy for readers to grasp. ‘I’ve got it,’ she said, snapping her fingers.
‘What?’
‘A way to combine all this heavy, political but ultimately important stuff about cacao production with wonderful pictures and stories about chocolate.’
‘Go on.’
‘We can follow a bean, a single bean, from its life in the pod, on the branch on the tree, on the farm, region, country, et cetera, and onwards to market, the trader, the ship or plane or whatever it travels on, through processing and on and on until it’s eaten.’
Lincoln rubbed his beard thoughtfully. ‘I can see how that would work.’
‘We could create a travel diary and postcards.’ She smiled. ‘Stamps in its passport. Send it to trade shows and chocolate-tasting competitions.’
‘It could provide commentary about prejudice in the bean community between different countries of origin and different varieties,’ Lincoln said, nodding as the ideas started to flow.
‘It could look into its family history,’ she said.
‘It could build a family tree to follow the genetics of the bean families. There’s been some amazing work in the past five years on rediscovering heirloom bean varieties and even three completely new strands of cacao in the Amazon. It’s a fascinating field.’
‘Could there be species we still don’t know about?’ Christmas asked, her attention arrested.
‘Sure. Anything’s possible.’
‘And would it be possible for those species to have different chemical properties?’
‘Of course.’ He tilted his head. ‘Why?’
‘I’m holding out for the discovery of a super bean, one that has unrivalled health benefits.’
‘Chocolate as medicine,’ he said.
‘Exactly.’
‘I love that.’
She grinned at Lincoln. When he was excited his blue eyes blazed. She found herself wondering what his personal story was. Why someone who was obviously nice, intelligent and good looking was single.
She turned away and focused on making the coffee. They had a lot of work ahead of them and they’d need to get started quickly if they were going to get the manuscript up to scratch before she left for France.
Their plan was straightforward. They divided up the manuscript into botany-related areas for Lincoln, and created new sections for Christmas to write, focusing on the artisan techniques she used herself—such as sourcing, roasting and grinding cacao beans from scratch; creating raw chocolate from a few simple ingredients; tempering chocolate; and lashings of recipes from her own repertoire. They would swap sections and help each other, Lincoln concentrating on content and Christmas on improving his words to make them more friendly. They wanted the majority of a full draft put together before she left for France, and that would leave them about six weeks after her return to re-draft and edit it before their submission deadline in September.
Phew!
She felt lightheaded just at the thought of all this extra work. But perhaps it was a just what she needed right now to keep her mind free of distractions, because, she reminded herself firmly, there was no room for romantic dreams in her life.
Rule number ten.