The Last Banquet (16 page)

‘A man can dream . . .’

‘Dream on that instead.’

He follows my gaze to where one of the bride’s cousins sits across the aisle, and she blushes and looks quickly away as he smiles. They spend the rest of the service throwing glances when each thinks the other isn’t looking. At the meal that evening their chairs are empty and neither can be found. Four months later Jerome marries his slight, dark-haired girl at a service in Mont Saint Michel. Eugenie’s waist is already thickening and Jerome is convinced she will have a boy. He tells me her pregnancy is a secret. He also tells Charlot, who tells me and then sulks when he discovers I have the secret before him. Emile knows already through his wife, Eugenie’s brother having married one of Thérèse’s cousins. Eugenie’s family are old, Jerome is at pains to tell me, noblesse d’épée rather than noblesse de robe. And he dotes on her. Charlot and I doubt it will be enough to keep his eyes and hands and cock from roving, especially when Eugenie’s stomach begins to swell, but she looks at him with real fondness and we decide she’s probably the forgiving kind.

The abbey at Mont Saint Michel is on a rocky outcrop reached at low tide by a causeway. Stone walls run round the base of the island making it a fortress. Indeed, it once withstood an English siege and was both rich and famous in its time. Now it is near dilapidated and a handful of monks hover at the back of the cathedral like unhappy ghosts. Jerome’s family have been patrons of the abbey for centuries, and with the death of Jerome’s father that spring he inherited the title his elder brother would have had, had he not been killed in the siege of Prague the previous winter. Jerome is now comte de Caussard, and Mont Saint Michel’s best hope of money to rebuild the abbey roof and pay for candles to burn in front of its altar. A choir has been borrowed from Rennes cathedral and shipped to the island, along with the local bishop to perform the service. We meet, attend the service, eat our feast and sleep on the island. ‘Tradition,’ Jerome says.

‘One so old,’ Charlot mutters, ‘that no one can remember it.’

Jerome scowls, and is swept away by Eugenie who rushes across to find out what is wrong. It is those awkward minutes before a feast when the lower tables are settling themselves and those at high table wait to go in. ‘We’re teasing him,’ I say. Whereupon she looks so appalled that Jerome grins, uniting himself in complicity, and lets Eugenie drag him to the far side of the room to talk to the abbot. The only difficult moment comes when Virginie and Emile meet, her nod so cold he blushes.

‘Why me?’ he demands of me later.

‘You set the bet.’

‘And you all took it.’

‘Not me. And not Charlot, obviously.’

Emile looks mutinous until I stare at him and he glances away, realises Virginie is watching and his mouth tightens still further. ‘Jerome took it.’

‘Jerome’s Jerome,’ I say.

It was a stupid thing to say. I should have still been angry with Jerome, had been angry with Jerome, brutally angry at the time, with the fury of a young man who thinks no one should touch, or even think of touching, or have ever touched, the woman he loves except him. But Jerome was Jerome. Even then at his own wedding his eyes noted the women around him. Not hungrily but contentedly, like a lion in the grasslands lazily confirming it lives in a world where there will always be another meal.

I followed Emile across the room to where he’d gone to sulk. ‘Make your apologies,’ I said. ‘That’s all it will take. Say you were younger. You were stupid. You wish to say sorry and hope she can let bygones be bygones. We all make mistakes . . .’ Instead of understanding, he shook my hand from his arm.

‘Have you suggested Jerome does the same?’

‘He didn’t set the wager.’

Emile’s face grew cold. ‘No. He simply took it. Apparently, that’s entirely different. Obviously, it’s a difference you can’t expect people like me to understand.’

This time when he walked away I let him go and watched him join Thérèse, who stood in a window overlooking the darkening sea, her dress a little richer and a little more showy than any other. Marriage had made Emile rich. In time the death of his father-in-law would make him richer still.

‘You were right to let him go . . .’ Charlot pushed a glass into my hand and grinned at my expression as I took a sip. ‘Apple brandy,’ he said. ‘Finer than the best cognac.’ His voice mimicked Jerome’s exactly. ‘To go with the magnificent feast.’

The last hundred and fifty years might never have happened given the food Jerome served his guests. Perhaps in Normandy it didn’t. Louis XIV would have been appalled. But Henri IV would have recognised the meal instantly. I was surprised Jerome let us have forks and didn’t make us eat with our knives off rounds of gravy-soaked bread. What the food lacked in subtlety it make up for in quantity. A whole ox, roasted over a fire pit, was dragged in, still on its spit, on a cart made for that purpose. Whole boars and whole deer, endless pike roasted in long clay pots and herons on wooden platters. It was a feast in the old style and as tasteless and poorly cooked as anything I’d eaten since leaving the academy.

‘Your face,’ Charlot said.

‘Don’t encourage him,’ Virginie hissed.

‘The bread is good,’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘That’s all you have to say?
The bread

is good?
’

‘Freshly baked, good yeast, not too much salt. With a slight sense of oil in the aftertaste, like an echo from a low note.’

Virginie sighed and Charlot grinned. ‘You deserve each other.’

We watched him slip away towards a door into the courtyard. It was possible he was visiting the latrines or else simply wanted air. ‘His turn next,’ I said.

‘His turn?’

‘I’m married, Emile’s married, now Jerome. Charlot’s turn surely?’

‘After my father dies . . .’ Her look was considering, on the edge of comment. We had been married two years, nearly three. We were happy in bed and in each other’s company, and happy enough together not to grudge the other solitude if it was wanted. I suspected that Virginie was pregnant again, but she had still to say, and after the miscarriage of our last child I would wait rather than ask. ‘Charlot is hard to know.’

‘I know him better than anyone,’ I said, hurt. ‘Better than me?’

‘Well, better than anyone but you.’

‘And I know him not at all.’ Virginie shrugged. ‘I doubt sometimes that he knows himself. My brother will not make a good husband. And he will make his match only after my father has died. It is their final battle. The first of my father’s desires for him he has been able to refuse.’

‘Your father has someone in mind?’

Amusement crossed her face. ‘Of course he has someone in mind. He probably had someone in mind before Charlot was born. My brother’s revenge is his refusal to marry while my father is still alive.’

‘Revenge for what?’

She shrugged away my question as if it was irrelevant, unless she simply thought the answer was obvious, and told me what I’d already guessed. She was three months pregnant and hoped we could return to Chateau d’Aumout more slowly than we’d travelled on our way here, as the travelling made her sick and she feared for the child. We made love slowly that night, with her sitting above me and moving gently, as her doctor had suggested for the previous pregnancy after she’d crossly dismissed his idea that I take a mistress and leave off troubling her until after the birth. It made no difference. We lost the baby at five months, as we had lost the one before. We lost the one after that in the sixth month and I began to wonder if Jean-Pierre was to be our only child. The doctor insisted Virginie’s body needed a rest and this time we both listened. In the privacy of my study the doctor opened his leather bag and pulled out a scrap of leather, resting it on the desk in front of me.

‘This is among the finest made.’

Reaching for his offering I unrolled it and looked at the ribband around the lower edge and the crude stitching at the top. Maybe my face revealed my thoughts, as it often did, which had been a frequent nuisance at school and remained one still.

‘I can assure you it is of the best quality.’

I thanked him for his kindness, assured him my comptroller would pay his fees promptly and showed him to the door.

He bowed. The man could find his way out. He had been here often enough. That evening, as supper was finishing, I told Virginie I would be going to Paris for a week and asked if could I fetch her anything while I was there? It was as if I’d said I was leaving her forever. She abandoned her chair, pushing past a footman who only just stepped back in time, and fled the room, her feet hard on the stairs. Her sobs as I made my way along the corridor to our room were as loud as I’d ever heard.

‘Virginie, open the door.’

‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’

I considered putting my shoulder to the door and decided the wood was too thick and the hinges too heavy for that to do anything but bruise my muscles and my pride. It would be absurd to send for a man with a hammer and I felt ashamed for even thinking of it. ‘Virginie,’ I said. ‘Please.

Let me in.’

There was a heavy silence and I was listening for her refusal when the key turned in the lock and she opened the door a fraction. ‘I hate you.’

‘At least tell me why.’

‘You know why.’

‘You want to come to Paris too?’

‘And help find you a whore? Marseilles must be full of them. Why do you have to go to Paris? Or have Jerome or my brother shared their dirty little secrets? Have they told you where to find the best brothels and gaming dens?’ ‘This is absurd . . .’

‘Don’t you dare call me absurd.’

She beat her fists against my shoulders but let me pull her close and suffered me to hold her after a slight struggle.

Her mouth was open and her face twisted to an ugly mask as she sobbed into my coat. Like all her dark moods the storm was fierce but brief. The face she raised to me was tear-streaked but calm.

‘If you must,’ she said.

‘If I must what?’

It was, she told me later, my apparently wilful stupidity that convinced her I had no idea what this argument was about. Except that by the time she raised her face for me to kiss her gently on the lips, I did. It seemed Dr Albert had told Virginie we should have no pregnancies, but her previous reaction to his suggestion that a mistress might lighten her load had dissuaded him from telling her how we could achieve this, while sharing a bed and remaining man and wife. She’d assumed I’d agreed to take my comfort elsewhere.

‘And what was
I
meant to do?’

Pushing her back on the bed, I lifted her petticoats and put her hand between her thighs, folding one of her fingers inside her. ‘I believe this works.’

Virginie swiped at me with her free hand and then pulled me close to kiss. She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see me watch, kept her finger where it was and finally bit hard on my shoulder to muffle her cries. When she was done and her breath returned she opened her eyes and swiped at me again for grinning. Then allowed me to take her finger and suck it clean. She tasted salt as tears and I could tell everything she’d eaten in the previous two days.

‘And you?’ she asked.

I rolled her onto her front and rode the crease of her buttocks, wiping her clean and curling up behind her when I was finished, my arm folded so my elbow rested on her hip and I could cup one beautiful breast.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I always will.’

I left for Marseilles the next morning, having agreed with Virginie that Marseilles would be as good for what I wanted as Paris, being a port and near Italy, a place Virginie believed libidinous and licentious; both qualities likely to encourage trade in what I sought. I kept from her that what I wanted was not the thing, but a man who knew how to make the thing. I travelled quietly, in as much as a man who travels in a coach and four with his arms gilded on the side and his coachmen in livery can travel quietly. The mayor heard of my arrival within the afternoon and offered me the use of his house. I had to explain my presence in his city was a matter of delicacy and I’d be grateful for his discretion. He bowed himself out of my chamber, which was the largest on the upper floor of the hotel I’d chosen, and left still offering me any assistance I might need. If he left also with the idea my visit to his city was officially unofficial then that was his choice.

The city stank so richly I spent my first morning simply losing myself in tiny back streets as I hunted down the source of the smells. Strange fruit were piled high on barrows in a market peopled almost exclusively by Moors and other sorts of North African. I bought two or three of each fruit, asking for and noting down the name and making notes of the taste, texture and consistency. Wild-looking goats hung in a window, throats cut and bodies gutted, but unskinned and still with heads and hooves. I asked where they came from, meaning the country, since I didn’t recognise them as French, and my question was misunderstood. I left with the name of a market in the port area. The first recognisably French man I asked for directions told me a gentleman like me didn’t want to go to a place like that. So, smiling, I made my other request and he offered to guide me to a brothel he knew where the girls were clean and willing and the price reasonable. Having thanked him, I asked again and he said he knew three men who made
redingotes Anglaise
and I told him to take me to the best.

We parted ten minutes later outside a workshop that stank of sulphur and rotting meat and he took his coin and my thanks. I wondered if he was one of the mayor’s men sent to keep an eye on me and decided it didn’t matter. Inside a small Italian scowled, noted the quality of my clothes and found a smile instead. Light streamed through a glassless window from a squalid courtyard behind and a brazier in the yard billowed yellow smoke while a boy thrust one hand into the smoke and kept his head turned away. Seeing my gaze, the Italian told me I’d come to the right place, he made the best
baudruches
in the world.

‘I need you to teach me how . . .’

His gaze was unreadable as I looked round his grimy workshop. I’d gutted enough animals to identify the entrails in a bucket as sheep. The yellow smoke was sulphur, its stink unmistakable. A second bucket full of milky liquid rested on a bench, with short lengths of small entrail floating on its surface, and a long knife honed thin from sharpening showed I’d interrupted him in the middle of scraping a section of entrail clean. There is little enough space between cooking and chemistry, and this obviously combined both.