The Last Banquet (10 page)

‘I don’t need to,’ I whisper back. ‘She’s doing the ignoring for me.’

Virginie’s hearing is obviously good because her neck reddens. So begins a long day that sees us arrive, time and again, after the excitement is done. We see two dead females . . . Grey-coated and lean. A young male wolf the duke’s huntsman says is no more than a year old. Charlot shoots a boar that the duke finishes with a second shot. We only learn this later, from the duke’s servants who are loading the boar onto a litter to be dragged back to the chateau. The hunters have already moved on.

Virginie vanishes twice into the undergrowth, furious that I am there to see and red with embarrassment when she returns. She shouts at Élise, who also vanishes, for not going far enough to be completely out of sight. Élise returns unhappy and we agree . . . Well, Virginie and Élise agree, and I agree with their agreement, that we’ve all had enough and it is time to go home. A shot comes from deep in the forest and we think nothing about it, until there is a second shot and someone shouts.

‘They’ve got him,’ Élise grins. ‘Let’s go see.’

‘We’re going home.’ Virginie says.

‘No,’ Élise stamps. ‘We’re not. I want to see.’

She heads for the shouting and I looks helplessly at Virginie who scowls. ‘I’ll fetch her back,’ I say.

‘You do that. I’ll wait here.’

I catch up with Élise where two paths cross. The oaks make a cathedral above us and I wish the day had been better, that I was with Charlot and the excitement, not trapped with the girls.

‘Where’s Virginie?’ Élise demands.

‘Waiting for us back there.’

‘We haven’t seen anything yet,’ she protests. ‘This is my first hunt and I haven’t seen anything at all.’ Her face floods with disappointment and for a moment I fear she’s going to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘Not sure why you’re sorry. She’s not your sister.’ Élise puts her hand over her mouth at her own rudeness and I have to smile. My smile makes her smile. We walk back in easy silence and then I hear Virginie’s voice, low and urgent.

‘Jean-Marie . . .’ She’s never used my Christian names before.

‘Wait here,’ I tell Élise. Dry leaves crackle underfoot as I abandon Élise and head to where Virginie should be. I have no idea what worries her but her voice sounds anxious enough to make me hurry. In the clearing stands Virginie, and directly in front of her the hugest wolf I’ve ever seen. Blood streams from a wound in its shoulder and its teeth are bared. Virginie is frozen. Half a dozen paces away from the beast at most. She is blocking the animal’s escape.

‘Move,’ I tell her. ‘Step out of its way.’

I’m not sure she even hears. Glancing down, I discover Élise has joined me. ‘I was scared,’ she mutters.

‘Stay here,’ I say. ‘Don’t move again.’

Without waiting to see if she obeys I walk into the clearing, my arms spread wide to catch the wolf ’s attention. Virginie is white with terror, her hands trembling, her feet locked into place by fear. Her eyes – brown and haunting – find mine, and her gaze is so beseeching that I swallow. I’m without musket or pistol. Without even a hunting dirk. All I have is the leather hunting coat I’ve borrowed. The one I’m sliding from my shoulders. The wolf turns at my movement, then turns back. Virginie still blocks its way. The creature glares at her, its hackles rise higher and its lips pull back to reveal fangs.

‘Run,’ Élise shouts.

‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘Step aside.’ Virginie should give the wolf his path – but she backs away and the beast stalks after her. If she runs, and I realise with a hollow gut that she’s on the edge of running, it will kill her.

I yell furiously and Virginie and the wolf look at me together, Virginie in shock, the wolf already dropping its haunches for a spring as I lurch towards it, throwing Charlot’s coat over its head and gripping tight as we roll in the dirt together. Élise screams, voices rise and branches break as people come running. I can hear Charlot shouting but my attention, my full attention, is on the beast trying to free itself.

‘Stand away,’ someone orders.

The duke, I think. Charlot is shouting my name, telling me to let go so the hunters can have a clean shot. I’m too terrified to let go, too terrified the wolf will free itself from the coat and rip out my throat. I can smell its stink and my own fear. My grip tightens without me telling it to and I hear a crack like a branch breaking, everyone hears the wolf ’s neck crack. The animal goes limp and hands begin lifting me away. The duke is pounding my shoulder. Charlot hugs me. Élise is sobbing as she tells the story of how the wolf was going to kill her sister. Some huge man, dressed in green with a beard big enough to house owls, is doing his best to comfort her. Hush falls for a second and I realise Virginie is in front of me. We look at each other and then she steps forward and puts her forehead against mine. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers.

Patronage

M
arguerite came to thank me warmly, telling me to call her Margot and apologising for not taking me seriously. Charlot had had close friends before, usually local boys, but I was different, her family and especially her sister were indebted to me. My courage was astonishing in a boy so young.

I wanted to say Charlot and I were not young – we were sixteen, which was almost adult – but I understood that, to Margot, her brother would always be a child. So I told her the wolf was injured and already dying and I’d only done what Charlot or any of my other friends would do. She smiled at me then, kissed me briefly on the cheek and left a book of Latin poems on a table beside my high-backed chair.

She’d written my name, her name and the date inside. I sat in the window of my chamber that looked down to the bronze huntress, and was dressed in a nightgown despite it being early evening. A blanket covered my gown for decency’s sake. I’d been in bed when Margot knocked but swapped to the chair while she waited to come in. Her mother, the duchess, had already been and gone. Fussing so furiously that I finally understood that, for her, fussing was a form of affection. She might fret over Charlot’s drinking, Virginie’s lack of eating or Élise’s manners, and I had seen her do all of those, but she would never have fussed over me before this.

Élise had been the first to visit me, pushing past a doctor to see what he was doing with my arm. The wolf ’s teeth had bitten through the coat and into my flesh without my realising it. The frenzy of battle was how the doctor described my brief tussle, while explaining how excitement and shock kept the pain at bay. I resisted pointing out that his prodding and pulling and bathing my arm in brandy hurt me far more than the wolf had managed. Only the fact Élise watched gave me the courage to bear the doctor’s ministrations in silence.

Had I known the duke was in his study on the floor below exaggerating my bravery in a letter to the colonel, I might have complained more loudly. Margot was behind the letter. She’d told her father I said any boy at the academy would have done the same. A sentiment, the duke decided, which proved the calibre of the academy’s pupils and the soundness of the colonel’s teaching. The letter was to endear me to the colonel, as killing the wolf had endeared me to the duke.

Having made sure I would live – it was a bite to my arm, I’d told him, not to my throat – Charlot vanished. I discovered later he went to find his father’s huntsman to give orders for the wolf to be beheaded, its pelt skinned, and its head boiled in a copper. The boiling was to be done immediately so I would have its skull to take back to school. Only Virginie didn’t come. Dusk fell and the family went down to supper.

I was dozing when I heard a knock at my door. A young servant scurried in with a tray, put it down beside my bed, dipped a blushing curtsy and scurried out. She’d brought me fresh bread and cheese Élise knew I liked. A glass of wine beside it had been heavily mixed with water so maybe the doctor had given orders I shouldn’t drink until my arm was better. The bread was yeasty and the cheese tart, and I was savouring both when there was a knock on the door between my room and Charlot’s own. This was unlike him since he was given to bursting in without bothering to check if I was naked or pissing in a pot.

‘Come in then.’ The knock came again and, sighing, I slipped from the bed to see if the door had been locked. The bolt was drawn back on my side and since the key was on Charlot’s side that couldn’t be the problem. ‘Such frigging delicacy,’ I said, dragging his door open. ‘How very unlike you . . .’

Virginie stood blinking at me.

My face reddened. ‘I thought you were . . .’

‘My brother? No, he’s at supper, no doubt getting drunk with my father while my mother fusses and my elder sister politely mocks and my younger sister tries to sneak a glass for herself and sulks because she’s not allowed to come up here to play nursemaid.’

‘You didn’t join them?’

‘I’m excused. Mama thought I should rest after,’ she smiled ruefully, ‘the excitement. But I thought I should thank you. I wanted to thank you . . .’

I looked at her properly then. She was two years younger than me. Her upper lip pulled naturally at one side as if in casual amusement at the stupidities around her. Charlot said it was the result of a childhood fall. Maybe that was true. But in my heart she seemed to dance across my cares and dreams so lightly she barely risked breaking their shells.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You’re beautiful.’

Her cheeks reddened and she scowled. ‘Margot’s beautiful and Élise is pretty. I’m neither of those. And don’t you dare tell me I’ll always be beautiful to you.’

‘Any man who doesn’t think you beautiful is an idiot.’

‘Man?’ she said slyly It’s was my turn to blush and she grinned.

She flinched a little when I put my fingers to her cheek, then leant her face into my hand and closed her eyes. You kissed Jeanne-Marie readily enough, I told myself. There had been others too. A girl at a dance the previous winter. That scullery maid at the academy. ‘Your hand is shaking,’ she whispered.

‘Shock. The doctor says it’s shock.’ Carefully I leant forward and kissed the corner of her lip. Her eyes flicked open, but she tipped her head so we could kiss again. The next was slow and soft and gentle, with only the corner of our lips touching. ‘Virginie . . .’ I tasted her name and smiled as she raised her head, her eyes now shut and mouth slightly open.

‘I haven’t . . .’ She stopped. ‘This before. I haven’t . . .’

She wore a silk banyan over a white nightgown. Perhaps she’d gone to bed early. Perhaps she’d simply been told to rest. I had no idea what she was doing in Charlot’s room before she knocked on my door. I only knew she was beautiful and her face was raised to mine. ‘Again,’ Virginie whispered.

I folded my fingers into her long thick hair and turned her head so our lips met properly, feeling her mouth open and tasting her breath. The kiss was deeper than the one before but no less languid. She was in a dream it seemed, a dream that remained unbroken as I kissed her neck. My hand dropped towards her breast, and I let my fingers caress the silk of her banyan, expecting her to pull away, or tell me off, or simply stop my fingers with her own. But she simply shivered and bit her lip as my fingers closed over her breast. We stood like that for a long second, her nipple hard beneath the silk.

‘I should go,’ she whispered.

‘Not yet.’ I pulled on the banyan’s belt to loosen it, and slid the banyan from her shoulders, revealing white cotton with mother of pearl buttons beneath. When I reached for the first Virginie stepped back.

‘Jean-Marie.’

My fingers shook as I reached again. ‘Let me,’ I begged.

She stayed silent as I undid the first four buttons of her gown and pulled it open enough to expose heavy breasts tipped with dark nipples in paler circles. The scent of soap and orange water rose like heat between them. Without even thinking I put my mouth to her nipple and sucked. Virginie’s hand came up to grip my hair and for a second she held me against her, then dragged my head away. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open. ‘You mustn’t,’ she said.

The neck of her gown held shut with her hands, she turned to go and shook me off fiercely when I put a hand to her shoulder. I asked the first thing that came to mind. ‘Why were you in Charlot’s room?’ For a second I doubted she’d answer. ‘To get to your room obviously. There are stairs between our chambers. We used to use them every day when we were . . . younger.’

There was such regret in her voice I suspected she’d been about to say
friends
.

‘Don’t tell Charlot,’ she said. ‘About this. About any of this. Don’t even say I was here. He’ll be jealous. Charlot’s always jealous if I . . .’ She hesitated, a pretty hesitation but real, her cheeks reddened slightly. ‘Want to be friends with his friends.’

‘I thought you didn’t like me.’

She turned away to button her nightgown, turning back as she adjusted the shoulders of her banyan and tightened its belt. ‘I made the mistake of telling Charlot you seemed nicer than his usual friends. That was the first night. He’s been teasing me ever since. It was easier to ignore you both.’ Virginie picked up the book Margot brought and flipped it open, smiling at the inscription. ‘Your name. Her name. The date. For Margot that’s enough. Her view of life is simple.’

‘And yours is complex?

‘More complex than hers certainly.’

I took the book from her fingers and put it back on the small table beside the chair. There was a bed behind us. Was I the only one to realise that? But the moment was gone if it had ever been there at all. The ghost of the moment perhaps.

I was dozing when Charlot came in. ‘How are you feeling now?’ he asked, sounding almost worried. ‘Sorry supper took so long. Mama wanted to talk about the events of the day. She always does if something serious happens.’ He stared round my room looking puzzled, as if a piece of furniture might have been moved or one of the pictures changed. In the end he simply shrugged and turned back for my answer.

‘Well enough.’

‘This might help . . .’ Lifting the flap of his coat, he produced a bottle and half a chicken. ‘I had to beg dear Mama for the wine you did have, and even then she diluted it to ditchwater. This should help put you right.’ He put the bottle on the table and took a bite from the chicken before passing it over. ‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘Hungry work killing wolves.’