Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Reading Group Guide copyright ©2004 by Warner Books

  All rights reserved.

  This Warner Books edition is published by arrangement with Black Swan, Random House New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2813-0

  Cover design by Brigid Pearson

  Cover photos: © Claudia Kunin/Corbis (woman); G. K. & Vikki Hart/Getty Images (cow)

  Contents

  Praise For

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Q & A with Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Discussion Questions

  Sarah-Kate on Sarah-Kate

  A Preview of "By Bread Alone"

  PRAISE FOR

  BLESSED ARE the CHEESEMAKERS

  “This novel has it all: surprises, mystery, humor, love, and information on cheesemaking. I highly recommend this book . . . Enjoy it with a glass of merlot for ambience.”

  —Lebanon Daily Record (MO)

  “A fine tale of two modern lovelorn souls . . . BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS has wit and charm.”

  —Exclusive Magazine

  “You’re bound to smile as you read this over-the-rainbow story . . . Could this be the next Chocolat?”

  —Kerrville Daily Times (TX)

  “A whimsical, heartwarming romp through life, love, disappointment, and redemption. Don’t wait. Get the book, find a comfortable chair, make a plate of cheese and crackers, and sit down to enjoy Lynch’s special brand of blarney about Coolarney.”

  —Wichita Falls Times Record News(OK)

  “A terrific story.”

  —FictionAddiction.net

  “A warm and sweet romantic novel . . . even a little spicy.”

  —MostlyFiction.com

  “Whimsical . . . wistful . . . a lot of fun. There’s a bit of mystery, a hint of the supernatural, a touch of romance, a few surprises, and a bellyful of farce.”

  —BookLoons.com

  “Captures elements of fantasy and hope . . . entertaining.”

  —TheBookHaven.net

  “In engaging and humorous style, Lynch . . . enlivens the narrative with eccentric, loquacious, and comical characters . . . The pace of this heartwarming novel is brisk, and the background detail so colorful that the reader will henceforth eat cheese with a new appreciation for its magical properties.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  For Sandy Lynch and Mark Robins

  with all my love

  “What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”

  Monty Python’s Life of Brian

  Handmade Films (1979)

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You can’t hurry cheese. It happens in its own time and if that bothers you, you can just feck off.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) Radio Archives

  The Princess Grace Memorial Blue sat on the table in front of Abbey, screaming to be eaten.

  Abbey, as always, was smiling her dreamy smile, her eyes half closed and her head slightly thrown back, as though she were preparing to blow out a candle and make a wish. Well, it was her twenty-ninth birthday, after all, and there would have been candles, too, had not the Princess Grace been a particularly fussy cheese, inclined to expel a pungent foul-smelling aroma if fiddled with in any fashion. Actually, this pernicketiness was what made her so special. She was made with fresh Coolarney milk hand-expressed at daybreak every April 19 and she was treated like royalty from the first tweak of the first teat to the last crumb on the last tongue. She insisted on it. She was that sort of a cheese.

  Her creators, Joseph Corrigan and Joseph Feehan, better known as Corrie and Fee, could not take their eyes off her. They’d been making the Memorial Blues just one day a year ever since Grace Kelly (with whom they were both in love at the time) broke their hearts by marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco on April 19 in 1956. The resulting cheeses were wildly sought after and cherished throughout the world, but nowhere as much as at home.

  “She’s a fine feckin’ thing,” Fee said, licking his lips in a mildly lascivious manner, his cheeks rosy with anticipation as his fat round bottom bounced in its seat.

  “She’s all right,” agreed Corrie, raising his eyebrows in a show of appreciation. Abbey looked on, smiling.

  Princess Grace stood taller than the average Coolarney Blue. Her flesh was palest blond, the exact shade of her namesake’s hair in her heyday, and her veins were a perfect mixture of sky blue and sea green, silvery in some lights, black in others, depending on her mood.

  Her fans had been sitting in the smoking room for nearly two hours, just watching and waiting for her to reach the perfect temperature. The room was their favorite and, unlike almost every other in the rambling, gracious home, was out of bounds to the many Coolarney House comers and goers. It needed little sun, which was just as well because little sun was what it got. Two whole walls were devoted to shelves, overflowing with magazines and books, some of them over one hundred years old. The other walls were painted a rich dark green and the woodwork, too, was varnished extra dark, giving a somber, hunting lodge sort of appeal.

  Corrie was in his brown leather La-Z-Boy rocker recliner, Fee in his overstuffed patched brocade armchair. Between them, on a little round table with unmistakable altar overtones, as befitted this and every cheese-eating occasion, sat the glorious Grace and, of course, Abbey.

  At seventy-three Corrie bore the same uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart that he had as a younger man (although the girls commented on this less now that Jimmy was mostly a memory, long since replaced by Mels and Harrisons and Brads). His eyes were sparkling blue, his gray hair thick and slicked back with some ancient odor-free hair cream. He’d been six feet two once upon a time, but admitted now to a stoop that he blamed on the years spent bending over the cheese vat, which had shortened him by a couple of inches. Always impeccably dressed, he was wearing a pale blue woolen sweater over a crisp white cotton shirt and a dark brown pair of ’50s-style high-waisted trousers.

  Fee, on the other hand, was wearing a desperate pair of pond-scum green corduroy pants, belted around his not insubstantial middle with an old piece of twine. His checked brown shirt and gray cardigan matched only in the number of holes that happened in the same spot, giving the impression that at some stage, many years earlier, he had perhaps been poked all over with a giant sharpened pencil.

  Fee was as short and stout as Corrie was tall and lean, and should they be standing close together, as they often wer
e, from a distance they looked for all the world like the letters d or b—depending on which side Fee was standing.

  “Twenty-nine,” Fee said, shaking his head in Abbey’s direction, his voice tinged with a peculiar sort of amazement. “You wouldn’t credit it.”

  Corrie nodded in agreement, and looked from Abbey to the Princess and back again. God knew he loved his cheeses, but what he felt for Abbey at that precise moment, or any moment she occupied his thoughts, no dairy product of any kind, even an impeccably flawless gem like Princess Grace, could ever hope to match. Yet still he felt sad. He poked at the fire’s glowing embers and concentrated on the loud tick-tocking of his grandfather’s clock as they waited in companionable silence.

  “It’s time, Joseph,” Fee said finally, when he knew that it was, and he sat forward in his chair and reached for his cheese knife.

  “For Grace?” Corrie asked, surprised. He’d have thought it another while away yet, but Fee was the expert, there’d be no argument there.

  “For a lot of things,” Fee said cryptically, sucking a wedge of the Princess off the blade of his bone-handled knife and forcing it up against the roof of his mouth. He pushed his tongue against it, soaking up its perfect texture and exquisite flavor.

  “Right so,” said Corrie, gently moving in to slice a chunk out of Grace with his own stainless-steel knife. He’d known Joseph Feehan for seventy-three years and for the first sixty-five had tried to make sense of what he said. More recently he had given up, realizing that it made no difference to the outcome and anyway it was part of Fee’s charm. And Fee needed all the charm he could get.

  Corrie raised his knife, sporting its perfectly balanced creamy blue wedge, in the direction of Abbey and toasted her.

  “Happy birthday, Abbey,” he said. “I hope you’re enjoying it and please God you’ll be with us for the next one.”

  Abbey kept smiling her dreamy smile, eyes half closed, head slightly thrown back.

  Corrie tucked his melancholy away and surrendered his senses to the touch and taste of Princess Grace. How she lingered on his lips! How she sang to his saliva! How she tap-danced on his taste buds! When the last tingle of the first taste had melted away to nothing, Corrie turned to his granddaughter, reached across the table and picked her up, planting a kiss on her smile. He looked at the photo awhile, tracing with his smooth cheesemaker’s finger the lip-shaped smudge his kiss had left on the glass in the frame, then he sighed and put Abbey back on the table.

  It’s time all right, Fee thought quietly to himself as he reached for another wedge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Once upon a time, before the world was run by men in fancy suits, ‘grass roots’ meant just that. Grass roots. With cheese, that’s where it all begins. You can’t make good cheese with bad grass.”

  Joseph Feehan, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  A month or two later, across the Atlantic in New York City, another Princess Grace was living a far less fêted existence. Sure, she was sitting in a state-of-the-art refrigerator in a $7,000-a-month loft apartment in fashionable SoHo, but her only companions were two bottles of Budweiser and half a pizza that had gnarled and twisted almost beyond recognition.

  The Princess oozed annoyance. She emanated anger. She fumed. Literally. She fumed. And when a good Princess turned bad, it was an eye-watering experience. She’d been sitting there in her waxed wrapper inside a brown paper bag from Murray’s Cheese for nearly three months now, and it had taken this long to permeate all the layers. Now, her time for being tasty was over. Now she was just plain evil.

  In the bedroom down the hallway Kit Stephens, oblivious to this, opened his eyes and felt the bashing of a thousand tiny hammers against his skull.

  “Go away,” he growled to himself. “Leave me alone.”

  The banging continued. It was still dark in his room, but then that was what three walls of mind-bogglingly expensive blinds straight out of the pages of Wallpaper bought you in Manhattan. It meant nothing. It could have been midday for all he knew (although he hoped it was not). The mere thought of moving his arm to look for his watch, however, made him heave.

  Searching the bits of his brain that weren’t being hacked at by pickaxes, he tried to recall the events of the previous night. There’d been martinis, a lot of them, after work at China Grill, he could remember that. Then there had been some inedible muck at one of the ethnic restaurants that Manhattan was full of these days. He could vaguely remember crashing through a Korean place to the secret bar at the back and, Jesus, had someone been doing lines there?

  Kit moved his head ever so slightly and looked at the other side of the bed. Someone was in it. And it wasn’t Jacey. Jacey had long blond hair, a model’s body and the face of an angel. Whoever this was had short black hair, a model’s body and a face he couldn’t see because she was lying on her stomach, turned away from him. Actually, thought Kit, almost raising his head off the pillow despite its condition, her shoulder blades were exquisite and the back of her neck . . . Ouch. The back of her neck just ached to be nuzzled and kissed.

  A lump rose in his throat as he thought about the back of Jacey’s neck. He closed his eyes again and stopped almost raising his head. Would he ever get used to waking up without her? Or worse, waking up with a complete stranger and wondering how the hell she got into his bed? It hadn’t happened often, but it had happened. He looked over at the beautiful back of whoever she was and felt nothing but an overwhelming sadness tinged with shame. He was feeling a lot of that lately.

  Kit took a deep breath, rolled onto his side and swung his legs out of the bed, his head spinning with the movement, despite trying, as he was, to sit up in slow motion. Carefully he stood up, waiting to see how the contents of his stomach would cope. Almost immediately he felt rebellion from down below and, staggering to the bathroom, he fell to his knees on the tiled floor, clutched the toilet bowl like an old friend and horked up half of Ethiopia’s annual food supply.

  Classy, Kit thought to himself as the retching started to subside. Real classy. With a groan he let himself slide down to the floor until his face hit the tiles and, comforted by their coldness and hardness, the room spinning slowly around him, he passed out.

  “Hey, buddy. You. Buddy. Wake up!”

  Coming to sometime later was hardly a more enjoyable experience. The girl who had been in his bed was now standing over him, nudging his shoulder with her foot. She wore metallic purple nail polish and had a silver ring on her second toe.

  “Jesus, I thought you were dead,” she said, standing naked with her hands on her snakelike hips, looking down at him. “You got any cigarettes? Beer? Blow? Anything?”

  Kit slowly pulled himself up to a sitting position and leaned back against the wall beside the toilet, suddenly irrationally embarrassed by being naked in front of this strange woman.

  “Yeah, right.” The strange woman snorted derisively at his modesty, then turned around and sat on the toilet.

  Kit rested his head on his knees and listened to the tinkling sound of her bladder being emptied.

  “Don’t worry,” she said in a bored tone, her hand flailing around beside him looking for the toilet paper. “We didn’t do it or anything. Just talked about your dead wife for two hours.” She wiped herself, sniffed, stood up and flushed the toilet as what she had said sunk into Kit’s addled brain.

  Jacey was dead? The little hammers had stopped banging but Kit was suddenly being deafened by another sound: his heart beating louder and louder and louder inside his chest. Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. If he said it enough times, maybe . . . He threw on the brakes. The little men with hammers were easier to bear than memories of Jacey. He hugged his knees even closer to his body, and although he really, really didn’t want to—especially in front of this girl, whoever she was—he started to cry.

  “Jesus,” said the girl, by now washing her hands. She looked at him in mild disgust, then snatched a towel from the heated rail and threw it at his
feet before turning to inspect her pretty face in the mirror. “Hey, where did you get that coke anyway?” she said, zooming in on an imaginary spot on her flawless skin and inserting a casual tone to the question that was far from genuine. “It was pretty good.”

  Kit picked up the soft, warm towel she’d thrown at him and buried his head in it, soaking up the comforting clean smell and rubbing the velvety fabric up and down against his cheeks, sobbing as noiselessly as he could.

  “So, would it be okay if I, like, helped myself to your stash before I go?” the girl said. Kit looked up and saw she was twisting her hips at him like a little girl asking for candy. Her pubic hair was waxed into a tiny little Brazilian runway, which for some reason depressed him even further. He felt disgusting. Disgusted. With himself.

  “Okay,” the girl said, after he collapsed into his towel again. “Whatever.”

  She padded out of the bathroom. Sometime later, Kit had no idea whether it was five minutes or fifty-five minutes, he heard the door to his apartment open and close and he knew she was gone.

  What’s happening to me? he bawled into his towel, but he couldn’t bear to answer himself. Instead he thought about his breathing, then, when he had controlled the sobbing, he crawled into the shower where he let the hot water deal with his hangover and his tears.

  Half an hour later he was dressed and shaved. It was past eight o’clock and he had already missed the seven o’clock trading meeting, not for the first time in recent weeks. He would have hundreds of messages waiting from clients and e-mails mounting by the moment. George would be pissed.

  Kit looked at himself in the hallway mirror. Apart from the dark circles under his eyes, he thought he looked okay. The square, handsome face looking back at him showed little sign of a late night binge or, worse, he cringed, a crying jag. But as he stared at the green-eyed image of himself, Kit felt the thoughts he hadn’t wanted earlier attempt another ambush on his brain, and the weird feeling he’d been having so often started to creep from his groin through his gut and up to his chest.