The Last Banquet (5 page)

And me? I tunnelled happily though the darkness of midnight woods towards a shimmering ribbon of shallow river that edged the school grounds. One more dead dog for its cargo? Barely worth anyone’s notice and miles downstream by morning. Extracting my lock knife, I flicked out the blade and cut a strip from the beast’s back, washed the meat in the river and wrapped it in dock leaves. I would grill it over an open fire, away from everyone’s gaze come morning. In my head, as dry leaves crunched underfoot and an owl’s sudden hoot lifted my soul into my mouth, I was already asking Dr Faure’s wicked-eyed daughter if she wanted to share.

What the Chinese eat

E
mile declared himself in love with the goose girl. A ragged child of twelve, if that, who dreamed and dawdled her way along the lanes with her stick and her brood, only hurrying them when she crossed school land. We caught her once where the road passed under the shadow of the oak trees, and demanded a kiss as the price for passing. But she gripped her staff like a Gaulish queen and her geese clustered around her, honking in agitation, and we let her pass unkissed for her bravery. Emile claimed he kissed her later. No one believed him, not even me and I was his best friend.

She was a princess in hiding, he said. Lots of goose girls were princesses in hiding or the bastard daughters of wicked dukes. Emile’s flights of fancy were few and quickly over, but he turned this one into a long and twisting fairy tale that he told himself in corners, his head nodding in agreement to something he’d just said. The others allowed him his strangeness. He’d judged Dr Faure’s dog and found it wanting. Emile was small and strange and common and far too brash in how he displayed his intelligence, but he was ours. We were the best, the bravest, the fiercest, the most proudly foolish year the school had seen.

And we were bound by a lie, all of us. The morning after Dr Faure’s dog was tried, convicted and executed for the sins of its owner, the headmaster appeared in our classroom and asked if anyone had heard anything strange the night before. His gaze swept across our attentive faces so blandly I wondered if he suspected us but kept his suspicions to himself. Dr Faure stood behind him, face pale and mouth tight. He’d been having trouble meeting our eyes since classes began that morning.

We shook our heads, glanced enquiringly at each other, put on a very pantomime of innocence and ignorance. ‘What might we have heard, sir?’ Marcus took the lead and that was as it should be. After all, he was class captain.

‘That,’ the headmaster said, ‘is a very good question. Dr Faure’s dog has disappeared.’ Maybe I imagined the headmaster’s eyes settled on me. Although why they would not settle on Emile, since he was the last boy Dr Faure had beaten . . . ? ‘It disappeared from a locked courtyard to which only I and your master have the key.’

‘Witchcraft,’ a boy muttered.

The headmaster scowled and thrust his hands in his coat pockets, leaning slightly forward as he told the boy not to be so ridiculous. It was bad enough the scullery maids thought such things in this day and age. Witchcraft was rare, and serious, a sin against God and punishable by death, but nothing like as common as servants seemed to think. He expected better from us. The boy he berated apologised, and I caught the boy’s smile as the headmaster looked away.

‘Did anyone hear anything?’ I risked.

He stared at me long and hard. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Dr Faure’s daughter sleeps in a room overlooking the courtyard and she heard nothing. In fact, she slept the sleep of the angels . . .’ His mouth twitched at the words, which had to be hers. Theologians doubted that angels slept at all.

‘Could it have escaped?’ Marcus asked innocently.

The headmaster turned to Dr Faure as if inviting him to answer. When Dr Faure stayed silent the headmaster shook his head. ‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘The walls are three storeys high and the roof is steep. Unless, of course, it sprouted wings.’

‘Like an angel,’ Marcus said.

‘Indeed. Should you discover anything I’m relying on you . . .’

‘Of course, sir.’ Marcus said. ‘We’ll organise a hunt this afternoon. I’ll divide the class into teams. You can rely on us to search everywhere.’

‘I’m sure I can.’

‘It could have been worse,’ Emile muttered. The entire class stilled and the headmaster turned to look at him. Dr Faure stared hardest, his face a stern mask as if his suspicions were confirmed. ‘Obviously, a missing dog is sad. Its vanishing from a locked courtyard serious. But it could have been much worse. It could have been a member of Dr Faure’s family. Say, his daughter.’

‘Indeed,’ the headmaster said slowly. And he said it in a very different way to the way he’d used the word earlier. The joke had gone out of the room and our classmates were shifting uneasily on their benches. The headmaster let himself out of the room and Dr Faure set us a page of Latin to translate and retired to his thoughts. A brooding presence hunched in a high-backed wooden chair at the front of the room. The meat was in my pocket, still wrapped in leaves, and I wondered whether to toss it into the privy and remove the night from my memory. But I had not tasted dog, and for all the beast had not deserved to die, that scowling brute in the chair at the front had deserved punishing more than we ever had. Emile translated the Latin quickly and cleanly, and since we shared a book, I simply copied his. I could have done it myself but it would have taken me twice as long, and my thoughts were on Dr Faure’s daughter, my namesake, Jeanne-Marie.

Her grandfather is a cloth-cutter, her grandmother a Basque, those people who straddle the border between France and Spain and keep their own customs and speak their own language. ‘My uncles and cousins made cheese. Well, their wives probably,’ Jeanne-Marie mutters crossly. ‘They do all the work.’ We’re jammed in a doorway, arms around each other and noses touching. ‘You can kiss me,’ she says. A minute later she sighs at my efforts and pushes me away. Perhaps she’s already been kissed by someone better. Perhaps she’s simply disappointed by the thing itself. She sucks her teeth.

‘Now you can kiss me,’ I say.

She grins, mood changing quick as the wind. Stepping closer she raises her lips to mine. I’m stood on the lintel; otherwise I’d have to raise mine to hers since she’s half an inch taller. The kiss is soft, growing harder. Her mouth opens for a moment at the end. ‘That,’ she says, ‘is how you do it.’ I insist we do it again to make sure I understand. We kiss ourselves from spring into summer and through an entire winter beyond. We kiss ourselves into the following spring, and the only person who doesn’t know is Jeanne-Marie’s father. Perhaps her mother also. Although the woman looks at me with a mixture of amusement and worry.

A year to the day I first kiss her, Emile is five rooms away telling Dr Faure he hasn’t seen me, but will be sure to tell me the headmaster requires my presence the moment he does. Emile says this with such politeness Jeanne-Marie’s father doesn’t know if he’s being mocked. It is the same politeness with which Emile has asked, every day for a year, if there’s any news of the missing dog. Dr Faure has come from asking Madame Faure if she knows where Jeanne-Marie is. Luckily he doesn’t put her absence and my absence together and come up with my hand under his daughter’s blouse, her ribs sharp as twigs and a slightness where her breasts are budding. ‘The fat boy in your class has bigger tits than me. It’s not fair. My mother has udders like a cow.’

I say it’s hard to believe they’re related.

‘That’s because we’re not. I was found in a basket in the reeds. My mother, my supposed mother, found me when she went to the river to wash clothes.’

‘That was Moses,’ I tell her, grinning. ‘And Pharaoh’s wife went to the river to bathe not wash clothes. She had servants for that.’

‘I’m serious,’ she says. ‘My real mother was a princess who loved unwisely . . .’

I grin at her words. So obviously overheard. ‘Why didn’t Madame Faure give you back? Surely that would have been sensible?’

Jeanne-Marie steps closer and rests her forehead against mine, her words a garlic-soaked whisper. ‘She tried. But my mother’s enemies gave her gold. Thousands of livre to keep me . . .’ She pauses, aware she’s spun her story into a corner, and adds, ‘It was stolen, almost immediately. By bandits.’ ‘Unlucky,’ I say.

‘Tragic.’ She grins at me. The bell is being tolled laboriously by one of the junior boys for luncheon and our stolen time is at an end.

‘My princess.’

She accepts my bow with a curtsy and skips away humming. Even Emile telling me the headmaster requires me isn’t enough to destroy my secret happiness. I tell him that, like his goose girl, Jeanne-Marie is another noble orphan stolen from her rightful parents. ‘Do you believe her?’

I look at him. ‘Do you believe your goose girl?’

He grins. ‘As much as you believe your beloved namesake.’

That’s when I know I’ve done him wrong and he has kissed his goose girl.

‘You should hurry,’ Emile says, ‘There are men with the headmaster. He calls one of them sir.’ He watches me scurry away and goes to his lunch at the long table in the refectory, where we sit on benches and the older boys steal from the younger and our bowls are emptied as swiftly as if biblical locusts fly in one window and out the other, barely pausing to feed. Others will eat my lunch.

‘So here you are.’

I bow and risk a glance at the headmaster’s companions.

‘These men are here to see you.’ The headmaster notices their amusement at his words and amends them. ‘These men are here. They have asked to see you. This is . . .’ He indicates a magnificently dressed comte whose name I miss because I’m looking at the man in the middle, who is staring at me intently. The man to his other side is a colonel, in uniform for all he’s retired and head of a cadet academy.

‘And this . . .’ The headmaster names the third man last. ‘Is the vicome d’Anvers.’ It’s obvious the vicome is the man who matters, despite being younger than the colonel, and being outranked by the comte. The headmaster looks to him for approval.

‘This is the boy?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘He looks well and stands straight . . .’ A buffet catches my shoulder and rocks me on my feet. ‘Stands firm enough. Looks one in the eyes when angry. Is he intelligent?’

‘We have several cleverer. A fair number who are not. He manages Latin well enough. Can tolerate a little Greek. Knows his map of France, and his map of Europe. Mostly he’s interested in botany.’ How does the headmaster know this? Unless Dr Faure has told him, but why would the headmaster be asking about me? Nothing in his or the vicome’s face give me an answer to that.

‘What do you want to be?’ The colonel’s voice growls like gravel under a wheel. ‘Let’s start with the obvious question.’

‘No,’ says the vicome. ‘If I might rephrase that? Boy – if you could be anything, what would you be? No job is forbidden. Simply tell the truth. That,’ he adds, turning to the colonel, ‘is how you judge a boy. By the measure of his dreams.’

‘A cook,’ I tell them.

Everyone except the vicome scowls. ‘You are noble,’ the comte says. ‘Try to remember that. Choose again.’ His tone is so contemptuous the colonel comes to my defence.

‘Come now. No doubt the meals here are sparse and repetitive. What would any sensible boy think of, if not food? It’s all they fuss about at the academy.’

Vicome d’Anvers snorts. ‘At his age my interests were . . .’ He pauses, searching for the perfect phrase. ‘Let me just say – it was not my stomach that hungered.’

The comte shoots him a reproachful glance.

‘Tell me,’ the vicome says, obviously not finished with the subject. ‘Are my dear friends right? Is it hunger that makes you dream of having the run of a kitchen and the keys to the larder? Is this fantasy driven by a surfeit of winter vegetables, poor-quality bread, a simple lack of meat?’

I want to tell him food was plentiful enough, for all it is repetitive. And though recent bad harvests mean the peasants starve as often as their animals, vegetables and flour still find their way to our kitchens. As for meat . . . My recent understanding with the cooks that saw any ‘rabbits’ I caught exchanged for the occasional
sou
means meat has started to turn up in our stews. I doubt the cooks really believe I bring them rabbit, but a skinned, gutted and beheaded cat is indistinguishable in looks, taste and texture.

‘Well?’ demands the vicome.

‘I’m interested in the science of taste,’ I say as seriously as I can.

‘There,’ he says triumphantly. ‘The boy’s a natural philosopher, who naturally wishes to go about his experiments in the laboratory of his choice. So,’ he says to me. ‘What is your favourite taste?’

Fresh sweat from the edge of Jeanne-Marie’s hairline when I am kissing her neck. Although her tongue after she’s eaten oranges comes close. In Jeanne-Marie, my search for the next taste and my hunger for the secrets of the other sex come together. I could not tell then if the search and the hunger would remain entwined or separate again. ‘Roquefort,’ I tell the vicome. He smiles somewhat sadly.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

‘No, my lord. Forgive me.’

‘You were eating beetles, with your back to a dung heap and a smile on your face. It was summer and a horse was in the stall behind you.’

‘You were with le Régent?’

‘I was his aide.’

‘The other man . . . ?’ I remember the youth who scowled and growled and wanted as little to do with a dung-stinking, beetle-eating boy as possible.

‘He died,’ the vicome says flatly. ‘An accident.’

‘He didn’t like me.’

‘He liked very little. There were reasons, but none that need concern a boy of your age. All the same his death was regrettable.’ Vicome d’Anvers speaks to me seriously, as he might speak to a grown man. Although perhaps keeping his sentences short, his words simple and his wit under control.

‘Am I going to have an accident?’

The vicome lets a smile pull at the side of his mouth. ‘Unlikely,’ he says. ‘A careful boy like you. We’re dining here tonight. You should join us. No doubt the cooks will excel themselves.’

‘You want him at the table?’ The headmaster sounds horrified.