The Last Banquet (11 page)

We grinned at each other.

‘What do you think of Virginie?’ he said. My face must have betrayed something because he scowled darkly. ‘She’s not that bad.’

‘She’s not bad at all,’ I said hotly.

His scowl became a grin. ‘You like her,’ he said. ‘I told her you did.’

‘You don’t mind?’ I said, remembering Virginie’s warning and wondering if this was some test. Charlot finding out where my loyalties really lay. But his face was open and his smile looked real enough.

‘Of course not. You’re my friend and she’s my sister . . . That said,’ Charlot produced two glasses from his coat pocket, the glass very slightly green, the stems thinner than a child’s little finger, ‘if you hurt her we’ll have to fight and I’m the better swordsman so I’ll probably kill you. Regretfully, of course.’

He filled both glasses, handed me one and raised the other.

‘Your health. My health. Virginie’s happiness.’

I felt he believed we’d settled something without my quite knowing what. Charlot’s father, however, disagreed. When the duke called me to his study the next day it was to say two things. The first – that in saving the lives of his two younger daughters I had put him forever in my debt. He regarded me as a son and I would have his patronage for life, provided I did nothing to disgrace it. No small thing, even in 1734, when dukes no longer took their dukedoms to war or fought kings for territory. The second – Virginie was out of bounds. I was too young to know how women worked but her gratitude would make her believe she loved me. He trusted me not to take advantage of this.

Inventing Old Recipes

A
fter a supper almost as formal and uncomfortable as the supper of our first evening at Chateau de Saulx, we set off next morning in the gilded carriage that collected us from the academy at the beginning of our holiday. Virginie is not at the steps to see me off. My last memory is her sitting red-eyed and silent at supper. She ate little and asked to be excused early, the duke granting permission before the duchess could refuse.

Charlot is silent for the first fifty miles. Not fury or sulking, it takes me a while to realise he’s embarrassed. ‘My mother can be obstinate,’ he says finally. ‘I shall not stop asking you to come.’

‘Has she told you to stop?’ I ask, feeling sick.

My friend shakes his head crossly. We travel more miles in silence. ‘What you should understand,’ he says as our coach slows on the approach to an inn, ‘is that my sister can be obstinate too.’ We eat rabbit stew that I don’t bother to tell him is probably cat, and drink a bottle of bad red wine I enjoy far more than the fine Bordeaux of our previous evening. Charlot takes the innkeeper’s daughter upstairs and returns an hour later.

‘How was she?’

‘Flea-bitten.’ He mimics a line of bites from shoulder to hip.

‘But . . . ?’ I say, seeing the grin on his face.

‘Beautiful. And willing. And bubs so big they bounced when I rode her.’ He’s drunk enough not to notice the half a dozen men watching as he jiggles his hands up and down in front of his chest, among them the girl’s father.

I suggest we go back to the carriage.

‘So,’ I say, helping him in, ‘how much did you tip this beauty?’ If the figure he tells me is true he could probably have bought the entire inn for that. He could certainly have bought her attentions for a year.

‘You should have had a turn.’

I shake my head and take my place on the leather seat beside him. Above us, the coachman cracks his whip and our change of horses pull away with a jangle of harness and clatter of wheels on brick.

‘Why not?’ Charlot asks.

Something in his voice gives me pause, and Virginie’s warning about his jealousy comes into my mind, and I feel disloyal for putting the words of a girl I barely know over my faith in a friend. But what I want to say seems inappropriate.
Because all I would have seen is your sister’s face
is not something you can say to a girl’s older brother. When I look up from my thoughts, Charlot is watching.

‘I love your sister.’

He sighs. ‘Oh gods . . . I thought it might be something like that. She’s pretty enough in a plain sort of way, there are certainly prettier. Margot for a start, although I don’t suggest you fall in love with her. She collects hearts the way my father collects boars’ heads. Break it to me gently. What is it you love about my sister?’

Her taste – orange water and soap, salt from sweat and a musk like the ghostly trace of a single sliver of truffle in an overflowing tureen. I can hardly say that either, so I simply repeat my original declaration.

‘I just love her.’

‘This is bad,’ Charlot says. He sees my hurt and punches my arm lightly. ‘Idiot, not like that. It’s bad because Virginie will run you ragged if you let her. It’s not enough simply to love her. Jerome says women are like horses, they need a bridle.’

‘Charlot . . .’

He buries his face in his hands. ‘Gods, now you’re offended on her behalf.’ It helps that he’s drunk enough to be talkative and not so drunk that he’s argumentative or wants a fight, and I’ve seen Charlot in both those states, often. ‘Believe me,’ he says. ‘She’s trouble. I’m not saying you shouldn’t love her . . .’

‘Can I ask you something?’

He looks at me owlishly, and I realise that at least half of the look is pretence. ‘Ask away,’ Charlot says. ‘I can always refuse to answer.’

‘Why don’t you mind?’ He waits for more and I fill the silence, wishing I had simple questions to which he could provide answers rather than have to lay it out in all its nakedness, but the question needs answering. ‘We’re friends, she’s your sister, that’s complicated, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Virginie is a marquise, the daughter of a duke. Not just the daughter of a duke, the daughter of the duc de Saulx. I’m nobody. Your mother minds. Your father probably minds. Why don’t you mind?’

‘You’re my friend. You saved her life.’

He says it so simply that tears come to my eyes.

‘And don’t assume my father minds,’ he adds. ‘My mother is far more concerned with these things. My father can afford to be . . .’

‘More generous?’ Of course he can. Amaury de Saulx is rich beyond counting, one of the premier peers in France and has the ear of Louis XV. More to the point, he is said to have the ear of the young king’s new mistress. In fact, he is the girl’s godfather, guardian and first cousin combined. Still, it is interesting that Charlot would stress that it is his mother behind this. ‘Madame la duchess sometimes changes her mind?’

‘My father has been known to change it for her.’ With that, my friend settles back into the corner of our carriage, shuts his eyes and retreats into gentle snoring, apparently exhausted by the unexpected seriousness of our talk, the wine he drank at luncheon and the success of his tussle with the flea-bitten girl.

We arrive at the academy later that evening and find ourselves clapped into the courtyard. The colonel has read the duke’s letter aloud to that morning’s assembly. Had it been taken badly by the boys his reading of the letter would have been an act of savage cruelty and my remaining days would have been blighted. As it is, everyone basks in our glory and we are heroes.

I’d been wondering about cooking the wolf ’s heart when Virginie came knocking at my door. And cook it I do, with the colonel’s amused permission, removing it from the salt in which it has been packed for our journey. The recipe is my own and perhaps, with hindsight, over-complicated.

Pickled wolf ’s heart

Half a tablespoon each of yellow mustard seed, black mustard seed, coriander seed, peppercorns, cloves, celery seed. A quarter tablespoon of dill and fennel seed, mace and shredded bay leaf. Crush all together firmly. Rinse the heart in water, cut six diagonal slits and fill each with a clove of garlic. Mix cider vinegar with water, two parts to three, add a sliced onion and the spices, well crushed in a mortar. Simmer until the meat is soft, remove from the pan and slice finely, then return to the water and simmer slices briefly. Let stand for a day. Serve cold with bread and pickled cabbage.
Tastes like dog
.

The boys in my study treat eating the heart as a ritual. A warrior’s ritual from the darker days when magic ruled France. Charlot lights a white candle and sets it in the middle of a table he moves from the wall to the middle of the room. Jerome – altogether more practical – produces a jug of dark beer.

‘You first,’ Emile says, pointing to the pickled heart. I take a sliver, chew it and think instantly of the night we hung Dr Faure’s dog. The garlic is complex, the cider vinegar sweetly sour, the mustard seeds hot and the clove smoky. But under it all is dog. The taste is unmistakable.

‘Bravo,’ Charlot says.

He is the only other boy to eat it on its own. Everyone else, including Jerome, eats their slivers on bread, or mixed with sour cabbage, or on bread with sour cabbage. Emile eats his on bread with sour cabbage, liberally coated with mustard and washed down with beer. The point is he eats it. We become the boys who dined on wolf ’s heart. The colonel smiles at us. The instructors nod as they pass. We are Richelieu. Our reputation grows.

Charlot is for the cavalry and believes war an art and that art is in his blood. Hadn’t one of his ancestors been a Marshal of France? ‘A successful one,’ he reminds Jerome, whose own family provided a general who lost half of the Lowlands. Emile will be one of life’s quartermasters if he goes into the army at all. Famous for the neatness of his camps and the efficiency of his supply lines. I tell Charlot war isn’t an art any more than cookery is – at least not only an art. It is a science as well. I learn triangulation, theoretical mathematics, cartography, siege warfare, the strength and weaknesses of star forts, even how to manufacture gunpowder. Charlot can flaunt his art. I intend to win my battles with science. Charlot thinks it hilarious.

We study, we practise, all of us. In the end all the colonel’s teaching comes down to a few words . . . Fight to the end, die well, make those around you do the same. We know – how can we not – that anything is forgiven those who sin elegantly; while gaucheness sours even the noblest deed. So we fence with our wits and our blades, using both alike on friends and enemies. Afterwards we laugh and joke and scold, and worry we should have done better. The academy has no need to police us, we do that for ourselves. And looking back, I can see how even our rebellions are foreseen and required. Only Emile flounders. My friends whisper about blood outing. I wonder now if he was simply more intelligent than the rest of us.

Charlot and I go drinking in taverns where the tables serve to keep enemies apart as much as the wine and noise bring friends together. In the Hog, an inn so squalid even the owner won’t eat there, Charlot meets a series of local girls who take his silver in food and wine and little gifts in return for letting him finger the underside of their petticoats, always promising him more next time. I sit in a corner – that after enough nights, on certain days of the week becomes my corner – and try to guess that night’s meat. The rabbit is undoubtedly cat, the beef is probably horse, the mutton is too greasy to be anything but mutton, although so tough the sheep obviously died of old age.

All of it is cooked terribly with hastily fried onions and sour gravy. Students eat there, lost in their philosophy and rhetoric. Mostly the Hog is used by thieves and bankrupts, moneylenders and poets, highwaymen and cutthroats too, if one believes the rumours. Prosperous townsmen and the God-fearing avoid it for the place of pox and sedition it is. Charlot, of course, adores it.

‘Somewhere else,’ I beg him.

‘What’s wrong with the Hog?’

‘The noise, the stink, the people, the whores . . .’ He grins at me. ‘Good girls all,’ he says. ‘Don’t believe nasty rumours.’

I sigh. ‘The food is terrible.’ He asks if I’m serious and I watch his face fall when I nod.

‘But who can I go with?’

‘Jerome, Emile, Armand, Marcel . . .’ I name the first four classmates who come to mind.

‘Jerome’s too serious. Emile would wet himself. The others are idiots. Besides, we’re brothers in arms . . .’

We continue to go.

1736
The Hunt

W
inter came and Charlot asked if he could bring me home for Christmas but his mother refused. Well, she wrote that she felt it was inappropriate.

Spring came and Charlot asked if he could bring me home for Easter. This was also refused. As was summer.

It was, he told me, with a heavy heart that he wrote at the beginning of the following summer to ask if I could join him at Chateau de Saulx. An answer came two weeks later, written in the duke’s hand. Charlot could bring home three friends, the duke assumed one of them would be me. This last was written in haste and with a slightly different ink at the end of the letter, below the swirl where the duke signed himself Papa.

Jerome was Charlot’s first choice to join us. Emile his second. Poor Emile looked stunned at the invitation, then embarrassed himself with the fulsomeness of his thanks, and then retired to a corner of our study to write home. Who knew what his letter actually said? But the gist of it, that he’d been invited to stay at Chateau de Saulx by the future duke, was enough for his father to send a purse of gold so Emile could dress appropriately and pay his way in such company. Charlot laughed, telling Emile that we’d travel in our uniforms and dress, for the most part, like gardeners and huntsmen, since we’d be spending our time hunting and fishing. But that if Emile wanted to have a smart coat made then his own mother would undoubtedly approve.

We set off a week after the letter arrived, the four of us crammed into the coach that had carried Charlot and me two summers earlier. The leather was slightly worn, the gilt a little tarnished, the coat of arms on the door less bright than I remembered. It was still enough, however, to turn heads on the road. We stopped twice. Once just before Dijon, and again on the Dijon–Lyon road. At the second inn, Charlot looked out for his innkeeper’s daughter. She had a baby in her arms and another in her belly. I have no idea if she recognised him, but after one glance Charlot shot me a look that said say nothing about her to the others. The service in the inn was surly and the atmosphere bitter. On the road peasants spat as we passed. Last winter had been hard, plague sweeping the south. Spring had been no better and the rains endless. Those who lived close to the land already knew this year’s harvest would be terrible. Poaching was on the rise and, as always happens, punishments became more severe. Where first-time offenders might have been whipped, they were sent to the arsenal at Marseilles to serve in the galleys. Where repeat offenders might once have been sent to the galleys, now they were hung. Not always after due process.