The Last Banquet (6 page)

‘A bad precedent, you think?’ The vicome pulls a handkerchief from his sleeve and flaps it vaguely. ‘You’re probably right. He can serve the wine. You know how to serve wine, don’t you?’

I shake my head.

‘Then I suggest you learn . . .’

I am sent from the room with instructions to wash and make myself as presentable as possible. I will be sent for when needed.

What I remember most about that night is the food. A pike was dressed in hot vinegar that turned its scales to the blue of a gun barrel. Its cucumber-and-black-pepper sauce had the texture of cream and smelt of spiced grass. The fish itself tasted of river weed and should have been soaked to remove its muddiness. I discovered its taste when I returned to the kitchens to fetch another bottle of Graves and helped myself to a sliver of pike from an abandoned plate. They ate rabbit next, three of them, stuffed with chestnut forcemeat and roasted. Since I hadn’t delivered any of my rabbits to the kitchens that week I imagined this was the kind that hopped around fields rather than hunted on the school roofs or infested the ruined village beyond the stream. Pudding was a mess of cherries in brandy, mixed with broken honeycomb and meringue. The taste was sour and sweet and wet and dry and close to perfect. The pike had returned to the kitchens almost untouched, the rabbits had been mostly eaten but this simply vanished. I had to scrape the plates with my finger to taste it at all. Our visitors had eaten with forks, using the forks and scraps of bread to separate the fish and rabbit from their bones. I resolved to try the method for myself.

‘The kings are much alike,’ the colonel was saying as I returned with brandy and glasses on a tray. I wondered which kings and listened harder, discovering that he meant ours, the young Louis XV and the king of China. Although listening more carefully still, I wondered if he meant the Chinaman and Louis the Great, the man still called the Sun King. The colonel’s voyage to China seemed to have occurred long before I was born.

‘Vast empire, absolute ruler, troublesome family . . .’

The headmaster seemed worried by the last comment and glanced pointedly towards me. ‘Listening, are you?’ the colonel said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Wise man. You can learn a lot by listening. Any questions so far?’

‘What do they eat, sir?’

Vicome d’Anvers laughed.

Taking a glass, the colonel smiled. ‘Can’t tell you what their king eats. Never met him. Doubt any foreigner has. His subjects, however, eat dog, cat, snake, chicken’s feet, eggs soused in horse urine and buried in the dirt to rot for a hundred days, sea cucumbers, insects, lizards, goat’s embryos. It’s hard to find something they won’t eat . . .’

Hearing this I wondered if I should have been born Chinese.

‘His subjects ascribe medicinal qualities to their food. This for calmness, that for strength.’ Looking down the table to where Madame Faure sat prim-faced beside her husband, he smiled. Her primness was at odds with the ampleness of her overflowing and barely-covered bosom and the colonel had been glancing in that direction all night. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘snake is believed to impart vigour in men. And cat is believed to impart agility. Together in the same dish called Dragon & Tiger they are believed to make a man both insatiable and subtle in his matrimonial duties . . .’

Madame Faure blushed and her husband scowled. The headmaster simply looked at me, decided I had no idea what the colonel was talking about and was thus too young to have my ears scandalised and joined his guests in their laughter. The evening broke up shortly afterwards, with Dr Faure’s wife excusing herself first. I fell asleep half an hour later, wondering how hard it would be to catch a snake. And woke to the cockerel’s crow, wondering if I should cook the snake by itself or with cat.

You’re no better than Emile’s goose girl, I told myself as I watched them ride away. No different to Jeanne-Marie, a schoolmaster’s daughter, for all I loved the taste of her lips and the secrets she hid inside her blouse. You were not found in the reeds floating in a basket. No Pharaoh’s wife plucked you from the waters. No princess pushed you into the current further upstream. Idle curiosity brought the vicome here. You are Jean-Marie d’Aumout, scholar – child of nobles so destitute they starved to death.

But what if ?
said the voice in my head.

What if . . . ?

The Thorn Bush

J
eanne-Marie vanished the following week. There was little secret about it. She climbed onto a cart beside her mother, and the carter whipped his horse and they lurched forward as the shafts of the cart engaged with the leather harness straps. Gone, in an echo of hooves from the arch and a shuffle of gravel on the drive beyond. Dr Faure watched them go, his face impassive: then set us some Caesar to translate and five pages from Montaigne to précis in no more than three hundred words and no less than two hundred and fifty . . .

It was a long time since Dr Faure had flogged anyone. He clipped us round the ear, threw books at our heads, kicked chairs from under us as the temper took him, but no one had been forced to stretch across the table in full assembly and bear their buttocks to the willow twigs. For all that the school ran as well as it ever did. The headmaster controlled the masters, the masters controlled the upper school, the upper school controlled the lower. It was, Emile told me, a very microcosm of the French state. He read in corners books he hid from masters and took from a locked cabinet in the library. He’d forced the lock, and for that he would surely be beaten, but the cabinet was in the darkest corner and everybody knew it was locked and the lock looked fine at a glance. Inside, the wood was splintered and the brass bent. The only damage outside was a dip where Emile’s knife pushed so hard against the cabinet door that the edge bruised. I was there when he did it.

‘Emile . . .’

He’d jumped at his name, not sure if he was furious or relieved to see me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. At which, I’d nodded at the knife in his hand and the halfforced lock and told him I could ask the same.

‘Freeing knowledge.’

He scowled when I laughed. But how could I help it. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.

The first plate we turned to in the first book showed a baby being extracted from between a woman’s legs with a hook. We assumed the baby was dead. The second showed an arm being sawn off. Emile shut the book with a snap and slid it into its gap on the right-hand side of the top shelf. It had a fraying leather spine like every other book in the cabinet. We both memorised its position and knew we’d be back for another look later.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Well enough.’

Jeanne-Marie and I had been friends for more than a year. It was not just the kissing and my hands under her blouse I missed. I’d grown used to talking to her. She was the person I could say things to I couldn’t say to anyone else. Emile still saw his goose girl. It was rumoured they’d been seen together in the woods flattening bluebells as she laughed and fought off his closer attentions. He never mentioned her to me. It was a kindness.

Most of my spare time I spent in the kitchens, the vicome having suggested to the headmaster that I be given the run of them. After the head cook had recovered from his fury that anyone outside the kitchens should dare tell him what to do, he granted me one half of an insufferably hot and extremely small room next to the great oven. I still brought the man rabbits, although fewer than the previous year, and anything else I caught that he might use. He no longer paid me in greasy sou, having decided access to his kingdom was payment enough.

My recipe book grew week by week as that spring turned to summer and the harvest was brought in. Rats from the rubbish dump tasted sour. Rats fed on grain from the new harvest had a cleanness that required only frying in butter and a few leaves of shredded mint to make palatable. I gave some to Emile and told him it was chicken. He didn’t doubt it, although to me it tasted more like owl. I killed a sleeping grass snake and stewed it with cat as the colonel said the Chinese did. The effects on my subtlety and vitality, if any, were minimal. The hiding place for my journal was obvious. It lived beside the first book we’d taken from the locked cabinet, its spine worn and shabby enough for the book to fit happily among its brothers.

It was while writing notes on a disappointing dormouse recipe that my life changed. The sauce had curdled, the clove spicing was entirely wrong, the taste was as sour as if I’d been chewing crab apples. I was wrestling with my foul humour when I looked out of the library window and saw a cart trundling down the drive towards the gates. The carter sat on a plank at the front, and behind him, on trunks, were Madame Faure and Jeanne-Marie, who looked a little more like her mother than when she left six months earlier. No one knew why they’d gone. A sick grandmother was the sensible suggestion. The most popular was that, having been bedded by the colonel, Madame Faure threw a hairbrush at her husband and left, taking her daughter with her. And here they were, almost inside the gates and headed for the arch into the main courtyard. I was hurtling down the back stairs, the grand stairs being forbidden to pupils, when I realised I could hardly burst into the courtyard and simply embrace Jeanne-Marie.

Dr Faure looked round as I stumbled to a halt in front of the cart.

‘The cases,’ I said. ‘I thought you might need help carrying the cases.’

‘Why not?’ Dr Faure said. He signalled to a couple of other boys and between us we wrestled the luggage from the cart and onto the cobbles, having first stepped back to let Madame Faure and her daughter down. Jeanne-Marie passed me by without a glance. She was nowhere to be seen when we finally laboured the first of the cases into the smaller courtyard and up the outside stairs that led to her raised door. The school was old, and this bit the oldest; built in the days of rebellions and civil wars, when it was dangerous to have a door at ground level. We lugged another two cases up those stairs, listing in whispers what could be in them to make them so heavy, our hissed inventions growing wilder with each step. The lead-encased corpse of Madame Faure’s lover was our last suggestion before we staggered through the door and found Jeanne-Marie waiting.

‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

The others took one look at her scowling face and left with their half-completed goodbyes trailing after them. ‘Jeanne-Marie . . .’

She stepped back as I stepped forward. ‘You owe me a cat,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ve thought about it and I don’t mind the dog. But you owe me a cat.’

‘You said it farted and its fur stank.’

‘Don’t be rude . . .’ She sounded almost grown up when she said that. Her face was rounder, her hips a little wider, her blouse had filled to reveal a definite curve. Impatiently, she pulled the coat she was wearing over it tighter. ‘You understand? You owe me a cat.’ She turned to go and my stomach tightened.

‘Wait,’ I begged.

She kept walking.

‘What kind of cat?’ I asked desperately.

Jeanne-Marie turned back and I could see that question hadn’t occurred to her. Thought pulled at one side of her lip and she looked for a second as I remembered her. Searching inward, asking herself questions. When her eyes refocused she looked a little kinder, as if the answer itself made her smile. ‘A kitten,’ she said. ‘I want a kitten.’

‘I know exactly where to find one.’

She looked at me, considering. Was this a trick? How desperate was I to keep her talking? Later, I wondered if her harshness to me was a game. Or simply a way of saying don’t think we go back to where we were. Or maybe she really did miss having a cat and believed I should provide one having been responsible for the death of the other. ‘Where?’

‘Beyond the ruined village.’

‘You know that’s out of bounds.’

I nodded, and interest entered her eyes. She smiled for the first time since I saw her on the cart and let go the coat she’d gripped tightly around her. ‘You go then,’ she said. ‘Bring me a kitten and we can be friends again.’

I shook my head. ‘You must come too.’

‘Why?’ Jeanne-Maire asked.

‘So you can make your choice.’

It was an answer she liked. ‘When?’ she demanded.

‘Tonight . . .’

She shook her head. ‘My mother’s tired and my father will want to talk about my grandmother.’ She saw my question and said, ‘She died.’

‘Your mother’s mother?’

‘My father’s. He had his work so we went.’

‘Was it hard?’

Her glare said it was.

‘My parents died,’ I told her. Hoping for forgiveness.

‘I remember. You said they starved.’ Jeanne-Marie considered that and decided it counted. ‘Tomorrow night. Where do we meet?’

‘By the bridge.’

The bridge is what the goose girl used to scurry for before we stopped trying to ambush her. The land our side of the bridge is school grounds and we could rightly demand a toll. After the bridge was common belonging to the village. Well, so the village said. The local baron disagreed but was too lazy to go to court over scrub and marsh and thorn. Had it been forest he’d have asserted his rights years ago. Tonight’s moon lights the bridge’s weathered handrails and glitters on the shallow stream, revealing gravel at the bottom and a single stickleback hanging in the water like a miniature pike.

Jeanne-Marie is there before me. ‘You’re late.’ ‘How did you get out?’

‘Through the back door from our quarters.’

That part of the school has doors at ground level so all she had to do was keep to the shadows as she headed for the gardens and across the inner field towards the bridge. ‘I left through my dorm window,’ I tell her. ‘Walked the ledge around that side of the tower and climbed down the guttering.’

She agrees this is more difficult. ‘Where are the kittens?’ I take her hand, and though she doesn’t fold her fingers in mine, she doesn’t pull away either, as I lead her across the bridge and along a bank that separates two water meadows that have returned to marsh. We walk in the shadows of willow trees along the way and cut across a patch of drier ground towards the ruined village. No one knows when it was ruined or why. Maybe plague passed this way. Maybe soldiers. Most of the walls are broken at hip height, and the highest only rises to my shoulder. There’s a rotten door leaning drunkenly from a broken frame, and we slip into the ruins of a house and out through the back into a field beyond. I want to stop in the ruins, kiss Jeanne-Marie and feel the new ampleness inside her blouse but common sense stops me. The kittens are the key. Without the kittens we can’t go back to where we were.