Simmer Slopes

Simmer Slopes announced itself with sound before smell this time, which made a nice change — a low, constant, rolling glug-glug-glug, like the world's largest pot of soup deciding to have an opinion about it.

"That's not a smell island," Felix said, sounding faintly betrayed, as they climbed off the boat. "Sweet islands are supposed to smell like something."

"Give it a minute," said Alex, and he was right, because the wind shifted and the smell arrived a moment later — not sweet exactly, more like the memory of sweet, dark and rich and slightly smoky, the way the very bottom of a pan smells after something good has been cooked in it for a long time.

The Copper Works turned out to be less a building than a cluster of enormous black cauldrons set into the hillside, each one taller than a house, joined by a lattice of pipes and ladders and little wooden walkways that crossed between them at odd, confident angles. Steam rose off the whole hillside in slow, drifting columns, catching the light gold before it thinned into nothing.

Treacle met them at the bottom of the nearest ladder, wiping enormous hands on an apron that had clearly given up trying to stay clean sometime around midsummer. "You'll be the ones the shaping folk sent," they said, not a question. "Word travels faster over water than most people expect. Come up, then — mind where you put your hands, everything up here bites if you're not paying attention."

Felix was up the ladder before Alex had finished testing whether it wobbled.

It did wobble, slightly, and continued to the whole way up, along with the wooden walkway that crossed from cauldron to cauldron high above the hillside. Felix crossed it at a run, delighted by the way it bounced faintly underfoot, like a very long, very warm trampoline that had given up trying to be springy. Alex crossed it more carefully, one hand trailing along the rope rail, testing each board with his weight before trusting it with the next, and arrived at the top a full minute after Felix, entirely unbothered by having done so.

"You could've hurried," Felix pointed out.

"I could have," Alex agreed, "but then I'd have had to find out which boards were rotten by falling through them, instead of by looking."

• • •

The view from the top of the nearest cauldron stopped even Felix mid-sentence for a full three seconds, which Alex would later describe as a personal record.

Below them, a slow amber tide churned and rolled, thick ribbons of it folding over themselves again and again, throwing off little bursts of steam wherever the surface broke. It didn't look like liquid, exactly. It looked like something halfway between water and stone, deciding very slowly which one it wanted to be.

"That started out as sugar," said Treacle, following their stares. "Plain, ordinary, dry-as-anything sugar, same stuff you'd spoon into tea. Melt it down proper, cook it low and slow, and it turns into that. Ask me, it's the best trick in the whole business, and I've watched it happen ten thousand times and it still gets me every morning."

"Can we touch it?" Felix asked, already leaning further than was strictly wise.

"You can touch THAT," said Treacle, steering him firmly toward a cooling-trough at the cauldron's rim, where a thinner river of syrup ran off to gradually cool and thicken, "and not the actual pot, unless you fancy a very short, very hot adventure."

The cooling-trough turned out to be its own kind of wonderful. Fresh off the boil, the syrup was thin and quick, running like honey through their fingers; a little further along the trough, cooler, it slowed to something closer to treacle; by the far end, cool enough to touch properly, it had gone thick and stretchy, almost chewy, and pulled into long amber threads that hardened as they cooled, like they were watching time itself happen in slow motion.

Felix planted himself at the exact midpoint of the trough and refused to move, on the grounds that this was, scientifically, the best spot, since he could reach both the drippy end and the chewy end without getting up. Alex pointed out that this meant he could reach neither end particularly well. Felix said that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

Further along, where the trough narrowed toward a grate, Treacle showed them how the very last of the cooling syrup — too thin to shape, too thick to pour properly — got scraped up and tipped straight back into the nearest cauldron to start the whole slow journey over again. "Nothing wasted," Treacle said, with the particular satisfaction of someone explaining a rule they were proud of. "Never has been. Same syrup can go round three, four times before it's finally ready to leave. Patience, mostly. That's the whole trade, if you want the honest version of it."

"It's the SAME stuff," Alex said slowly, testing a thread between two fingers, watching it stiffen even as he held it. "Just — at different ages."

"That's exactly it," said Treacle, sounding pleased, the way people always sound when someone's finally understood the thing they love best. "Same syrup, three different moods, depending how long you let it sit and how cool it's got. Shaping folk want it one way for pulling, biscuit folk want it another way entirely for glazing — pours smooth, sets with a shine. Different jobs, same pot, if you catch it at the right moment."

Felix, who had been quietly comparing the taste of all three stages without waiting to be invited, announced with some authority that the middle one was best, on account of it being "chewy AND drippy, which is basically two sweets for the price of one."

• • •

It was the quiet that gave it away, in the end — not a missing bench this time, but a missing sound.

Felix noticed it first, mid-gesture, still holding up his three fingers from explaining the syrup stages. "Hang on," he said, lowering his hand slowly, "why's it only glugging over THERE, and THERE? That's just two. There's loads of pots not doing anything." He said it the way he said most things — bluntly, before he'd quite finished thinking it — but it stopped Treacle's easy patience cold all the same.

"Eight, on a good week," Treacle admitted, patience cooling by exactly one degree, the way a kettle does the instant before it stops singing. "We're down to three because we've had precious little raw sugar coming through to boil in the first place. Been stretching the same batches for going on a fortnight now, cooking them longer and thinner just to make them stretch further — which isn't really how any of this is supposed to work, if I'm honest with you."

"So the syrup problem isn't a syrup problem," Alex said, working it through out loud, the shape of a riddle already half-forming behind his eyes. "It's further back than that."

"The whole way back, probably," said Treacle. "And it's not just us feeling the pinch of it, either. Strawberry folk usually get a fair share of our raw sugar too, for their jam — can't set a jam properly without it, or so they've told me often enough. Sent word back last week saying they'd have to go easy on this year's batches. Didn't sound happy about it. Can't blame them."

Felix's mouth, for once, had nothing funny in it. "So it's the shop. And the biscuit people. And now jam too."

"And whatever's actually wrong is happening even further back than here," Alex finished for him, quietly. "Where does your sugar come from, before it gets here?"

Treacle pointed with one enormous thumb, out past the last cauldron, toward a low green smudge of land on the horizon that neither boy had noticed until exactly that moment. "Canebrake Grove, out that way. Same family's tended it longer than anyone can properly remember. Never known them late with a delivery in all that time — not once, not ever, till now." A pause, and something almost gentle crossed Treacle's broad face. "Hope nothing's wrong out there. Hope it's just a delay."

"We'll find out," Felix said, already halfway back down the ladder, all his earlier fright about heights apparently forgotten in the face of an actual mission.

Alex lingered a moment longer at the rail, looking out at that low green smudge of land, turning something over that he didn't say out loud yet. Then he followed.

P.S. — Felix spent the entire boat ride to Canebrake Grove attempting to explain to Alex, using only hand gestures, the exact difference in chewiness between all three stages of syrup. Alex understood approximately none of it and enjoyed all of it.

P.P.S. — "It's a bit like a chain of people passing a bucket," Alex said, mostly to himself, watching the green smudge of land grow slowly larger. "If the person at the very start of the line stops passing the bucket along, everyone after them ends up with dry hands. Probably not even their fault, whoever it is. Probably just — dropped it, or got stuck, or something." Felix, who had stopped listening two sentences earlier in favour of watching a fish, agreed with all of it anyway.