The Last Banquet (2 page)

‘That my father owed them money.’

‘They told you not to go inside?’

I nodded in answer. They’d told me my parents were sleeping. Since my father had already told me I was not to go in because he and my mother would be sleeping this had been no surprise. That the villagers had gone in and returned carrying my parents’ few possessions had been strange. But most things I asked about came down to ‘That is how it is’, and I imagined this was the same.

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘In the stable if it rained. In the yard if it was fine.’

He thought back and maybe it hadn’t rained in his last few days but it had rained on at least two of mine and I’d been grateful for the shelter the stable offered. Its roof leaked, because every roof in the house leaked, but the horse slept in the corner that got most of the wet and I liked the company. Before the vicome climbed to his feet, he said, ‘He is le Régent. Call him Highness.’ He was looking at the old man who stood supporting himself on the neck of his horse, watching us in silence while everyone else stayed back.

‘And bow,’ the vicome said.

I bowed as ordered, the best bow I’d been taught and the old man smiled sadly and nodded his head a fraction in reply. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘Stolen by peasants,’ the vicome answered.

‘Do we know their names?’

The vicome knelt again and asked me the same question – despite the fact I’d already heard it. So I told him who’d come to the house and the old man nodded the answers towards the brown-coated servant to say he should pay attention. The servant spoke to one of the soldiers who rode away with three others following after.

‘Your name?’ the sullen young man asked me.

‘Philippe,’ le Régent said.

‘We should know his name.’ The young man’s voice was as sulky as his face. ‘He could be anybody. You don’t know who he is.’

The old man sighed. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘Jean-Marie,’ I replied.

He waited and then smiled indulgently and I realised he was waiting for more. I knew my name and I knew most of my letters, I could count to twenty and sometimes to fifty without getting any of them wrong.

‘Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout, Highness.’

He looked at the vicome at the last and the vicome shrugged. I could see that the old man was pleased and that the vicome was pleased with me. The boy called Philippe just looked furious but that was all he’d looked since I first saw him so I ignored it.

Le Régent said, ‘Put him on the baggage cart.’

‘We’re taking him with us?’ the vicome asked.

‘Until we reach Limoges. There must be an orphanage there.’

The vicome leant forward and spoke too quietly for me to catch the words but the old man looked thoughtful and then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘He can go to St Luce. Tell the mayor to sell the manor and the horse. He can remit the money direct to the school. Make sure they know my interest in the child.’

Bowing low, the vicome sent a soldier for the mayor.

The soldier and the mayor returned but – before they did – the other four soldiers who’d been sent into the village earlier came back with the first three of the men I’d named as taking things from the house. They were hanging from trees before the mayor even appeared at the bottom of the road. I tried not to look at them kick and when the vicome realised I was watching he sent me to sit in a cart and stare in a different direction.

I couldn’t see them with my back to the trees.

Their protests were loud enough for me to hear though; and their begging, when they realised protests were not enough. Finally they cursed the world and its unfairness and insisted my father owed them all money. This was not in doubt, apparently. It was the taking of what had not been declared theirs that was the crime. Besides, my father was noble and the law distinguished between those who were and those who were not.

The not, hanging from the trees, had better clothes than me. In one case the man kicking his heels had leather shoes instead of the wooden sabots peasants usually wore. But he was still a peasant, bound to his land and owing duties to his lord. The villagers could be taxed and beaten and thrown off their fields and tried with the most perfunctory of trials. Those things could not be done to me. Nor could I work, of course. Unless it was my own land and I had no land. I understood now that my parents were dead.

Tears would have been right, perhaps sobbing . . . But my father was a sullen and silent man who whipped me without thought, and my mother had been the shadow at his side, no more effective in protecting me than a real shadow.

Even now I would like to miss them more than I do.

All I could think about, as the cart trundled away from the manor that was soon to be sold, was the miraculous taste of the blue cheese I’d been allowed earlier. And the only thing I mourned was leaving my father’s horse behind. It was old and lame and fly ridden, with a moulting mane and a ragged tail, and was believed by everyone else to have a foul temper, but it had been my friend from the day I first toddled unsteadily through the open door of its stall and plonked myself in the straw at its feet.

‘Don’t look back,’ the vicome said.

From his tone I knew they were still hanging villagers. A line of kicking shapes throwing shadows on the dusty road. Shadows that stilled in order, like a slow rolling wave on the irrigation ditches when the water is released.

The vicome was Louis, vicome d’Anvers, aide to the stern-faced man, His Highness the duc d’Orleans, known to everyone as le Régent. Until February that year he’d been guardian to the young Louis XV. Although he looked impossibly old to me he was forty-nine, more than twenty years younger than I am now. He would die that December, in the year of our Lord 1723, worn out by responsibility, childhood illness and the disappointment of having his power removed.

As for my parents. My father was a fool and my mother starved to death rather than steal apples from a neighbour’s orchard and disgrace the name of the family into which she’d married so proudly. There are two ways to lose your nobility in this absurd country of ours . . . Well, two ways before self-elected committees began issuing edicts banning titles and taking away our lands.

Once these mattered but soon they will become so obscure as to be forgotten.
Déchéance
– failing in your feudal duties. And
dérogeance
– practising forbidden occupations, roughly engaging in trade or working another’s land rather than your own. My father had few duties, no skills to speak of and had sold what little land he inherited for enough coin to buy my brother a commission in the cavalry. Dying in his first battle, my brother wasted the sacrifice and was buried next to some mud-filled ditch in the Lowlands, and promptly forgotten. He was dead before I was alive.

1724
School

M
y next real memory is a year later. What happened between leaving my parents’ house and joining St Luce was too predictable to make firm memories. The sun rose and the sun set and an old woman who lived in the school’s gatehouse fed me twice a day in between, once in the early morning and once before dusk, and in return I fed her chickens and took care of myself during the day. The meals were poorly cooked and monotonous but filling and frequent enough to keep me fed and my body growing. Tossed corn brought the cockerel and chickens running. The cockerel was old and vicious and soon for the pot. The hens were safe so long as they kept laying and I lied occasionally, saying I’d tripped and dropped this one’s egg or forgotten to put out the previous night’s food, which was why that one had not laid. Maybe the old woman even believed me.

When eggs were plentiful I took the occasional one and let the richness of its yoke run down my chin before wiping the yellow away with my hand and licking my fingers. Winter yolks tasted sourer than summer ones. Autumn yolks were rich with burnt earth and sunshine. Spring yolks tasted different again. They tasted of spring. Everything caught and killed or plucked from the ground or picked in spring tastes of spring. You can’t say that for the other seasons.

She called me her strange one, barely slapped me when she found me stealing food. What tastes the old woman’s cooking didn’t provide I found for myself. The crab apples growing up the side of the gatehouse were sour, the grubs that bored through them sourer still. The beetles in her yard were less sweet, the cheese in her shabby kitchen hard and waxy, without the imperial blue veins of roffort or its rottenly glorious smell. In my days at the St Luce gatehouse I tasted whatever I had not tasted before: cobwebs and earwigs (dusty, and spit), spiders (unripe apple), dung, the chickens’ and my own (bitter, and surprisingly tasteless). I ate new laid sparrow’s eggs and tadpoles from the brook. Their taste was less interesting than their texture. Both were slimy in different ways. The old woman helped look after the boys at St Luce and had the task of fielding me until I was old enough to go myself, which moment soon arrived.

There were men who liked small boys more than they should, she warned me. And boys could be cruel to boys in that way and others. I would have to stand up for myself. She could look out for me but I would have to be brave. There had been discussion about making me wait until I was seven. But almost seven was fine the headmaster said. I should call him sir. I should call everyone bigger than me sir, except the servants; they should call me sir. ‘You understand?’

She had wiped my face and washed my clothes and forced me to eat a bowl of porridge. It was only when I saw the bundle with my other clothes, a slightly smarter jacket, a different pair of breeches, that I realised this was my last morning feeding chickens. Tonight they would have to wait until she could feed them herself.

‘Courage,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Her face wobbled as she looked at me and she paused as if she might kiss or hug me goodbye. She spoke well and knew her letters, but was poor enough to need to work and the gatehouse was small for all it was clean. And the food . . . Perhaps she didn’t care for food; the same dishes again and again, the same tastes. She looked at me and I looked at her and eventually I understood I was to walk to the school on my own.

Picking up my bundle, I headed down the drive and found it was further to the school than I thought. After a few minutes I turned to discover she was still stood in the gates at the top of the road, so I waved and she waved back and then I turned my face to the school and kept walking, with my bundle swinging at my side.

The wind was warm for early autumn and the track dry and the grass slightly yellowing. The cow parsley was bare, waiting to be made into whistles or blowpipes, both of which I’d discovered for myself. The chestnuts on both sides of the drive were rich with conkers and I took the largest I could see and polished its gleaming swirls before dropping it in my pocket. Another and another fat conker lay on the road in front of me and I took those as well, stuffing my pockets until they were bulging.

The boy who came towards me had his hand out. ‘Give,’ he demanded sharply.

Such was my greeting to a school where I knew no one; after a year in a gatehouse with a woman who was neither family, friend, servant nor mistress. I was to learn later that the drive was out of bounds and a dozen pupils had watched me approach, dressed in clothes that I didn’t know represented their school uniform, and wondered where I’d come from and how severely I’d be punished for going beyond the courtyard. For now there was the outstretched hand.

‘I’ll hit you.’

Silence, while I looked at him.

He was my species but the only boys I’d seen were at a distance. I played by myself from necessity, and sat alone when I couldn’t be bothered to play. The woman in the gatehouse hadn’t suggested I find friends and I’d felt no need of them. The idea I might want to share my conkers with him was absurd.

‘I warned you.’ Watched by his friends, he made good his promise and I rocked back, hands to my already bleeding nose as someone started laughing.

‘You want the conkers?’

‘Uuu wan da conkers . . . ?’ His voice mocked the pain in my nose, my split lip, the trouble I had speaking.

‘Have the conkers.’

Closing my fingers round a handful, I threw them as hard as I could straight into his face and then punched him hard while his eyes were still shut. He rocked back as I’d done and I punched again, harder, splitting my knuckles. The boy was some inches bigger and obviously older but he sat down hard on his bottom and cowered back to stop me hitting him again.

‘You, boy, your name . . . ?’ I turned to see an old man shambling from a door that had been shut seconds earlier. St Luce had rusting wrought-iron gates to the forecourt, with an arch through the main building that led to a courtyard beyond. ‘Well?’

‘Jean-Marie.’

A boy laughed, a different boy from before, falling into silence when the old man glared at him. ‘He’s young. He doesn’t know our ways. You will give him two weeks’ grace. You understand me?’

‘Yes, headmaster.’

‘Your family name?’ He said kindly.

‘D’Aumout, sir . . . Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout.’

He was asking so the others would learn it I realised many years later. Dr Morel was the old headmaster and the new headmaster’s father. In his seventies, and looking impossibly old to me then, he put an arm around my shoulders and steered me under the arch through the school and into a dark courtyard overlooked by rooms on all sides. A smaller arch led through to whatever was at the back of the building. ‘You’d better come too,’ he said over his shoulder to my attacker, who followed after us like an unwilling shadow. ‘Duras,’ said the boy, sticking out his hand.

I stared at it.

‘You have to shake.’

‘You hit me.’

‘You still have to. That’s the rules.’

I took his offered hand and he nodded. ‘Emile Duras,’ he said. ‘I’m in the second class.’ The old man chose that moment to turn and smiled to see us shaking.

‘Don’t be late,’ he told Emile. ‘But first show him to class.’

‘Which one, sir?’

‘You can read?’ the man asked me.