An Appetite for Violets (24 page)

‘At last, the viper’s meat,’ said the count, tucking into round pink scollops of meat.

‘Vipers?’ I replied, chewing happily. I should have wagered a year’s pay they were some bird disguised in a powerful sauce. ‘They are good,’ I said, helping myself to a further portion from the salver.

‘After what your uncle said of you, I am surprised to find you such a – vigorous eater. Yet how intriguing is a woman’s lust for food? Your husband eh, I’ll wager he has not the vigour to match you?’

I gawped up from my dinner plate. Lord, I had forgot I was supposed to be a married woman.

‘I dare say he has vigour enough,’ I mumbled.

He raised his brows at that. ‘Ha! Then why abandon him so quickly? Have you had your first taste of the flesh – but not yet been fully satisfied?’

His brandy-clear eyes fixed upon me, and mightily unnerved me.

‘I am sure these are birds of some sort,’ I said, hoping to distract him. He spiked a portion, stuck it in his mouth and chewed slowly.

‘Damn the wretch, you may be right. Oh, to suffer a gentleman cook so full of his own greatness.’ He got up and bawled ‘Renzo!’ down the hatch.

‘Where are my vipers?’ commanded the count a few minutes later, as the cook bowed before him. ‘I cannot eat this womanish stuff.’ Wearily, he shoved his plate aside.

The cook stiffened, and then fixed his square-jowled head very still. I knew that look, it was the one I used when Lady Carinna or Mr Pars scolded me. But the cook had at least the pluck to protest. ‘Your Excellency, I strive always to experiment, to improve your dishes. With this dish I try—’

‘Try what? To disobey me? Damn you man, and your experiments. I pay you a king’s ransom to put vital powers in my food. What do I care for the taste?’

Signor Renzo recomposed his face from startled affront back to rigid blankness ‘There are the vipers,’ he said coldly, pointing at the discs of pink meat.

I stared open-mouthed at him, for the meat had no fishy tang. I had read in
The Cook’s Jewel
that snakes taste like frogs, which I remembered well from France.

‘Are you certain?’ I asked. ‘These are breasts of doves, I think. And surely the flavour in the sauce is something else entirely. It sits on the tip of my tongue. What is it?’

Signor Renzo blinked but did not change his empty expression. ‘My Lady, a cook’s greatest treasure is his secrets.’

I could not believe it, the arrant knave refused to tell me his receipt.

‘You forget, Renzo, a cook’s secrets belong to his master,’ the count barked.

While these two bickered I forked up another morsel from the count’s discarded plate and let it roll about the tip of my tongue. There was a fragrant flavour to the sauce that ebbed and flowed with a hint of the sea. Then I remembered my visit to the confectioner in London with Mr Loveday. What had he said? ‘All my village destroyed for that stuff.’ How could I forget it?

‘Sir, I believe I know it.’

The cook gave me a right affronted look. The count wasn’t having it, neither.

‘My dear girl, you English have many virtues, but I am afraid gastronomy is not one of them.’ That curious flavour all the while blossomed on my tongue as deep and strange as a flower of the ocean. I had sniffed it again at the
farmacia
in Turin. The cook looked down on me with bottled scorn.

‘Is your secret ambergris?’ I asked with the sweetest of smiles.

It was a pleasure to watch the coxscomb make a crestfallen little bow.

‘Your Ladyship, I surrender to your palate.’

‘Ha! Don’t look so furious, Renzo,’ goaded the count gleefully. ‘Lady Carinna is too well mannered to tease you. But she has caught you out! You will live to regret this.’

It was then that I realised the consequences of my teasing the cook. For all his puffery he was a fellow servant, and I had got him into trouble.

‘Such strong ambergris,’ I added, ‘that it quite masked what I now detect is the flavour of the vipers.’

The cook bowed to me, with a spark of complicity in his eye.

‘Humph,’ the count snorted. ‘I wonder. My dear Carinna has an exceedingly soft heart towards her servants.’

Dismissed, the cook left us, but after furiously quizzing a footman at the door, he looked back at me with a puzzled stare.

‘Signor Renzo,’ I called out to him, making him jump to attention. ‘Is the vipers’ brew ready? I must leave soon.’

That made the fellow scowl and trot back to his kitchen. And I had a wicked thought – that I could soon get a liking for telling others to do my bidding.

Once he had left, the count grasped my hand and started up a horrid pleading. ‘Carinna, you cannot leave me.’ And as he did so, he slid his arms around my waist and tried to kiss me.

I backed away. ‘Do you not know the saying,’ I said modestly. ‘Do not make me kiss, and you will not make me sin?’

His eyelids drooped so he looked like a lovelorn sheep. ‘How delicious a thought. To sin again! As for your pretty little fingers—’, and he took one of my grindstone hard hands and laid it on his chicken-leg thigh.

Suddenly I could not be doing with all these false airs. ‘You are a right old lecher, in’t you?’ I said.

That twinkle lit his eyes again. ‘But so easily pleased!’

I am sorry, but I could not help myself. Daft clout that I was, I laughed out loud, forgetting all my hoity accents. What a sorry old rogue that count fellow was, no different from any arse-tickler in a country tavern.

‘Carinna, name your price. I will give it,’ he said in an earnest wheeze.

I batted his arm away. ‘Leave me be.’

‘Impossible. And I do have—’

‘The key,’ I butted in. ‘And I am now quite fag— fatigued. And I assure you, I will not stay here with you,’ I said, very steady.

‘Well,’ he said in a penitent tone, ‘perhaps it is a little soon. The truth is, a few kisses in company will suffice. My brother arrives here next week. My proud, puffed-up younger brother.’

I sighed, finally understanding something of an old man’s vanity. ‘Are you saying that a little public mumbling will do the trick?’

He nodded enthusiastically.

I set my weary brainbox to work and judged the affair quite innocent.

‘Very well,’ I told him carefully. ‘I agree to dally with you in public.’ He nodded gingerly. ‘Only an appearance, mind! If you give me the key at once.’

He was as good as his word. And once his footman appeared with a large iron key and a bottle of viperine wine from that bumptious cook, I thought only of reaching the villa and hoped Carinna need never be any wiser of the small price I’d paid.

XXVI

Villa Ombrosa

Being Lent, March 1773
Biddy Leigh, her journal

Mackeroni Pie

Boil your mackeroni till it be quite tender and lay it on a sieve to drain away. Then put it in a tossing pan with a gill of cream, a lump of butter rolled in flour and let it cook about five minutes. Put in a little shred of sage leaves if you like it. Pour it on a plate and lay over with parmesan cheese and toast with a fire-hot salamander till enough. Send up on a warm plate for it soon grows cold.

As made by Biddy Leigh in the Italian manner, 1773

They were all sat up waiting for me when I got back to the lodging house. What could I say, but protest that the count had kept the key from me?

‘Have you been drinking spirits?’ Mr Pars asked, after sniffing loudly near my face.

‘Well no one told me I must drink only tea,’ I grumbled.

‘Save your breath, Biddy,’ snapped my mistress as she made for the door. ‘Pars, fetch the driver. Get on with it!’

So, still in my fancy duds, I had to stuff myself back in the carriage. Then we were off, trotting down black lanes with only the carriage lamp to spy the way.

It was three in the morning when we got to the villa, and I was near passing out with weariness. The first thing we saw was an iron gateway as tall as a house that creaked like a tormented cat when it was forced apart. Before us lay a long driveway planted either side with black shrouded trees; as we passed between them their dry leaves seemed to bend and whisper like two rows of hissing gossips. Peering out of the window I nearly jumped from my skin to see a pale body crouching on the lawn. But as the carriage lamp shone over it, I saw it was only a statue, an ugly pockmarked watcher that soon sank back into the night.

From what I could see it was a grand house, its front flat and pale in the moonlight, its windows shuttered. Then we all lumbered out onto the gravel, and the lamp was unhooked. For a long while Mr Pars struggled with the key and cursed the rusty lock. Then he forced it at last and the door swung back and we all crowded inside.

From my first sight of it I did not like the place at all. Had we come all this way for this? Candles were found and slowly the villa came into view in broken parts – a chilly front parlour, a musty dining room, a hall. The kitchen was mighty disappointing. There was a fireplace and a rickety oven, but none of the new-fangled charcoal burners I’d grown used to in France. It also had a taint of vermin; and soon enough I felt the soft leather tickle of a cockroach crawling over my thin stocking. The whole stinking pit needed scrubbing and scouring before I might ever think of cooking there. Groping in the pantry I found only two pans, and both were black with rancid grease.

Then there was naught for it but to unload everything and let the driver get off to his lodgings before we all fell asleep on our feet. I still weren’t happy, even when I claimed a spanking little chamber at the back just over the kitchen garden, with whitewashed walls and greying lace at the window. I slept badly; waking each hour to fret at the shadows cast by heaped trunks and draped furniture. How, I asked myself in the fuddlement of half-sleep, could Carinna have chosen this unwholesome place to bear her child?

*   *   *

Next morning all looked brighter, but also more filthy. There was the stink too, that my cook’s nose told me was dirt that had festered in the very boards. I found a clean water pump in the kitchen yard and got a fire lit, so we at least had hot tea. After serving up a few stale rolls, me and Mr Loveday got the driver to take us marketing over in Ombrosa village, which was a queer sort of place built of ancient grey stone. To get there we must take a long white road as far as an ancient chapel with a ruined tower, and then take a cobbled road up the hillside.

At the top of the hill stood a gateway so old that the carvings in the stone were near worn away by time. Beyond we entered a maze of alleys all set about with shuttered windows and ancient double doors of rotting wood. The village seemed mighty hushed and watchful to me. We were strangers of course, and there was no hope of passing unnoticed with Mr Loveday’s dark face, which got many a long stare Yet when at last we found the market in a cobbled square it was better than I feared. My fancy kept returning to all those fine dishes that puff-headed cook Signor Renzo had prepared. No, I decided, I would not stand over a roasting fire in the Italian heat to make the charred roasts so famed in England. I wanted to try dainty Italian fare, and bought spicy Bologna sausage, pink papery hams, hard white bread, and chalky cheeses. I also bought the makings of a Mackeroni Pie I had seen made at an inn, and a new sort of green stuff named
brockerly
that proved a good deal tastier than cabbage. As for the wines, they looked well enough and cost but a penny a bottle.

But come dinner time, both my mistress and Mr Pars told me they wanted to dine alone. Then Jesmire said she’d dine in her room as well. I looked with frustration at the vast table in the dining room that Mr Loveday had polished like a mirror. I had fancied practising fine dinners all in the continental style, but I wondered if our company would ever eat together again.

An hour later, as I was clearing my mistress’s dinner away from her chamber, Mr Loveday ran up the stairs like a lunatic.

‘Lady Carinna, a coach and six come through the gate. I think it that count fellow.’

For a moment we all stood gawping at each other in fright. Then, like a right flotherhead, Jesmire walked in, and, dropping the box she was carrying, wailed triumphantly, ‘I knew it, you will both be found out!’

‘Shut up! I can’t think,’ screamed my mistress, who was sitting bolt upright in her bed. After a moment she said to Mr Loveday, ‘Can you not hold him at the door?’

He looked at me sheepishly. ‘What you think, Miss Biddy?’

They all looked at me. ‘My Lady,’ I said, ‘I have a horrible feeling he will insist on seeing me.’

‘You stupid girl,’ she started up. ‘Have you encouraged him?’

‘I have not!’

‘Shush,’ hissed Mr Loveday, who had gone to the window. ‘He just below.’

‘I haven’t time to dress,’ I bleated. Indeed, I had my worst gown on, with an apron of sacking pinned over it. I looked at my mistress and she looked back at me – I think we both knew the answer the very same second.

Lifting the bedclothes she heaved herself out and traipsed to the door.

‘Get in,’ she said, pointing at the frowsty bed.

‘And Jesmire?’ said I.

‘Come with me Jesmire, and hold your tongue. See to the door, Loveday.’ Then turning to me she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘Get rid of him!’

*   *   *

I scarcely had a moment to cast off my apron and throw a silk morning gown over my servants’ duds. Then I unpinned my hair, for I’d had it all tightly wound beneath my cap, and lay down like a corpse inside the feather bed.

In a twinkling I heard a clatter on the stairs, and the count burst through the door in a flash of satins and frills.

‘My dear girl. What did I say? Did I not tell you to stay with me? This place is a hovel.’ Then he sat very close on the edge of the bed and grinned like a fool. ‘I have a gift for you,
carissima.
’

I tried a simper and a nod. ‘You are too kind.’