John Saturnall's Feast (23 page)

‘Who is there?’

‘Mister Bunce, Master Scovell. I've brought the boys you wanted.’

Another pause followed in which John and Philip exchanged looks.

‘Send in Mister Elsterstreet.’

Mister Bunce beckoned to Philip. John waited with Mister Bunce in the gloomy passageway. After a short while the door opened again. Philip emerged and flashed John a look. Then Scovell's voice called once more.

‘Enter, Mister Saturnall.’

A long vaulted chamber reached back to a hearth where a low fire burned. To either side, pots and pans hung from hooks. The Master Cook's quarters smelt of spices and woodsmoke. From the end of a workbench cluttered with little dishes, plates and bowls dangled a horsehair sieve, some long spoons and a stirring lathe. A chafing dish still filled with ashes stood beside it. On one side of the room, tall shelves were crowded with bottles, corked gallipots and papers. Tied in rolls, stacked in piles, bound up in bundles or thrown in heaps and weighted down with pots, the papers threatened to spill down onto the books shelved below. A row of small windows set high in the far wall looked up into a courtyard. A candle flickered above an open book. Standing over the table, Richard Scovell looked up.

‘Come closer.’

John did as he was ordered.

‘I asked myself if you would flag, scraping pots at the trough. Mister Stone tells me no. I wondered if you would wilt before the heat of the fire. Yet it seems not. But you have a gift beyond such qualities. You are not like the others, are you, John Saturnall?’

Scovell eyed him, his face half in shadow. John stared back. ‘They work as hard as I,’ he answered. ‘And as well.’

Scovell smiled. ‘Of course they do. But they are not guided as you are. Tell me, what do you call him? Imp?’

John looked across, baffled. ‘Forgive me, Master Scovell . . .’

‘Sprite? Sayer? The creature that lives on the back of your tongue. That steered your palate through the broth in my copper, naming its parts. There are not a dozen cooks alive who could perform such a feat. Your guide. How do you name him?’

‘My demon, Master Scovell.’

The man nodded approvingly. ‘A cook needs his familiar.’ Scovell glanced at the shelves and compartments stuffed with papers and books. ‘The earth's fruits are without number. No cook could master them alone.’ The man turned back to John. ‘Even Susan Sandall's son.’

John felt his heart quicken. He had been waiting for this moment, he realised. All through the monotony of their toil in the scullery, it had hung at the back of his thoughts. Ever since the Master Cook had looked up from Father Hole's tattered pages.

‘You knew my mother, Master Scovell?’

‘How could I not when she worked but ten paces from here?’

‘My mother was a cook?’

Scovell shook his head.

‘Had she been so minded, no doubt she would have gained that place. But no.’ The man glanced across at the shadowy wall which divided the chamber from the deserted kitchen. Set within the stones, a dark alcove framed a low door.

‘She was hidden away down here. Few knew of her presence. Fewer yet learned her name. No doubt her arts alarmed some pious souls up there. But Sir William would deny nothing to Lady Anne.’

‘Lady Anne?’ John looked at Scovell, puzzled.

‘Of course. Who else would bring your mother here? Her ladyship had never brought a child to term. When she fell pregnant, your mother was summoned here by Sir William. Your mother attended her in her confinement. All was well until the birth. Then Lady Anne began to weaken. Your mother applied every art she knew. To no avail. Lady Anne died. The child alone was saved.’

A moment passed before John understood.

‘Lady Lucretia?’ he exclaimed. ‘My mother delivered her?’

‘She did. But beside the death of Lady Anne, the child's life meant nothing to Sir William. His grief knew no bounds. His gentleman-servants were driven out that night and all those who attended Lady Anne. Even your mother . . .’

A troubled expression clouded Scovell's features. The man glanced up at a high shelf where, half-hidden in the shadows, John recognised a row of galliot pots.

‘I saved what I could from her kitchen; the rarest among her decoctions. Then Sir William nailed shut the gates. The Manor closed.’

So she had been driven out, thought John. But why had his mother refused to return? Why was her resolve so adamant?

‘She disappeared into the Vale,’ the Master Cook continued. ‘She had never mentioned the village of her birth. For a time I believed she might return. But she did not.’ The man looked up. ‘Then you came.’

‘She sent me here,’ John said simply.

‘You have a great gift,’ Scovell said. ‘Your mother was too wise not to recognise it. But your talent is untutored. Now you must bend your gift to its purpose.’

‘What purpose, Master Scovell?’

‘A kitchen demands many talents,’ the Master Cook said. ‘Some are common enough. Mister Elsterstreet and his fellows could master them. Others are rare beyond imagination. A true cook learns them all.’

The man held his gaze a moment longer, his eyes probing as before. There was more, John felt with sudden conviction. More that Scovell might tell. Or more that he might ask. But instead of any revelation, the Master Cook plucked a knife from the cluttered table. The blade was a slender crescent of steel, the wooden handle worn to a shine.

‘Let the kitchen guide you,’ Scovell said. He pressed the handle into John's hand. ‘You will begin in Firsts.’

‘Is it true he's got a woman's hand in a jar?’ Wendell Turpin demanded that evening.

‘I heard it was snakes,’ Phineas Campin offered from across the darkened kitchen.

‘I didn't see any snakes,’ John answered truthfully.

‘What about lizards?’

‘None of those either.’

The questions petered out slowly. John lay back on the pallet, waiting, listening to the straw crunch as Philip shifted restlessly. At last, when all the kitchen boys slept, he whispered the substance of the encounter to Philip.

‘Your mother delivered our Lucy?’ Philip sounded incredulous.

‘Shush,’ John hissed. ‘Or everyone'll hear.’

‘And she worked next door to Scovell,’ Philip said in a curious tone of voice. ‘You don't think, him and your ma . . .?’

‘No,’ John said flatly. The thought had flashed across his mind but something in the Master Cook's bearing told him it was not so. ‘He said Sir William had summoned her. But how would Sir William know my ma?’

Philip thought. ‘Maybe it was Pouncey. There ain't much in the Vale he doesn't know. What else?’

‘He said I had a purpose.’

‘What purpose?’

‘I don't know,’ John told Philip. ‘He said the kitchen would guide me.’ He remembered Scovell's disparaging words about the other boys. ‘Guide both of us,’ he amended hastily.

‘Us?’ Philip's face assumed a hopeful look.

‘I promised you, didn't I?’ John grinned back. ‘We start tomorrow. In Firsts.’

‘It ain't only sallets as get trimmed into shape in here,’ Mister Bunce told John and Philip the next morning, hoisting a basket onto the bench. ‘It's the likes of you too. Understand?’

They nodded.

‘Good. Get to work.’

They washed and peeled and scraped and sliced. They cut stalks and pared roots. John's knife skidded on slippery-skinned onions and hacked at beets, their dull leathery hides toughened by months in the root lofts. Leeks followed turnips. Alf scooped the results of their labours into baskets and hauled them through to the kitchen.

‘Most dangerous part of a knife's the handle,’ Mister Bunce told them both. ‘Know why?’

They shook their heads.

‘That's the part that joins the blade to the kitchen boy.’

The Head of Firsts kept the knives wrapped in linen cloths and the linens wrapped in sacking inside a drawer which he locked each night. They were sharpened every Thursday on a saddle-backed whetstone and polished every other week by Mister Bunce using a cloth and a secret white paste made of goat's urine and chalk, according to Alf When Mister Bunce chopped, the blade seemed to blur. Wafer-like slices flew across the board, each precisely as thick or thin as required. John's fingers might tire or turn to thumbs, but the man's thick digits worked on effortlessly.

‘Look here,’ he called to John as his knife darted in and out of a dice of turnip. ‘We used to call these kickshaws. That's French, that is. Means what-you-like or somesuch. I don't remember exactly.’

Transparent slivers fell to the table. The man's blunt fingers turned the object with surprising delicacy.

‘There's all kinds of kickshaws. Pastries, sweets. You can make ‘em from anything. Even this turnip.’

The knife pricked and prised. At last the man held up a tiny cockerel complete with cock's comb.

‘Used to do a lot of this work back in Lady Anne's day. You try.’

John poked and prodded, the turnip growing warm and slippery. At last he held up a creature that resembled a lopsided pig. Mister Bunce pursed his lips doubtfully.

‘Needs a bit of work, that one.’

As summer approached, maunds piled high with drop-apples were dragged into the vaulted room. John eyed the red and gold-streaked fruits, most hardly bigger than gull's eggs, remembering the sour apples from Bellicca's ancient trees and the scent of blossom from outside the chapel.

‘Fruit ain't like the roots you've been hacking,’ Mister Bunce announced. ‘It don't forget an insult. You have to be careful. You have to roll the blade down or the fiesh'll bruise. Watch.’

Mister Bunce rested his knife point-first on the board and wedged an apple beneath the broad blade. John saw light catch the edge, a curved sliver of silver, then heard a wet crunch. The two halves rolled apart. Another crunch and the two were four.

‘Think you can do that?’

John regarded the small bitter fruit. He took his own knife and held it poised over the remaining half-apple.

‘No, no, no!’ barked Bunce.

John adjusted. And readjusted. It took four attempts before Mister Bunce let him bring the knife down. When he split the apple, Bunce threw up his hands.

‘You felling trees, John? Killing a pig? If you don't cut your own hand off it'll be young Elsterstreet's here . . . ‘

It didn't take an axe to cut an apple, the Head of Firsts told them. The flesh would brown or turn to mush. It was almost dinner when John took up the knife for what seemed the thousandth time and felt his hand follow the line of the cut, felt the blade split the waxen skin and slice through the flesh. The edge rolled down onto the board. Two clean-cut halves tumbled apart. He turned to Mister Bunce.

‘I've seen hedges cut better,’ the round-faced man declared flatly. He regarded the halves, still rocking gently on the board. ‘Mind, I've seen worse too.’

The drop-apples were replaced by golden-skinned Pearmains, then damsons that arrived in bracken-lined baskets. Gooseberries and raspberries came from Motte's fruit cages. Mazzards and bigaroons followed. John and Philip pitted the fat cherries, peeled apricots and eased the stones out of plums. They tweaked the tiny stalks from strawberries, chopped last season's dried quinces for soaking and sliced greengages into translucent panes.

Working together at the benches, John and Philip eased the stones from peaches, cupping the soft fruit in their palms and sliding the knife between their fingers as Mister Bunce showed them. They stoned damsons ready for pickling. Midsummer was celebrated by Mister Bunce professing them not entirely useless. On Saint Meg's Day, the Head of Firsts summoned them.

‘Let the kitchen guide you. That what Master Scovell ordered?’

They nodded.

‘I reckon it's time for you to move on.’

At the benches and tables, before the hearth and over the glowing coals of the chafing dishes, on wooden blocks and marble slabs, John's hands shaped, gripped, chopped and pinched. At the kneading trough in the bakehouse, he and Philip pummelled maslin dough until the dull-skinned clods stretched and sprang. A scowling Vanian showed them how to make the airy-light manchet bread that the upper servants ate, then the pastes for meat-coffins and pie crusts. They baked flaking florentine rounds and set them with peaches in snow-cream or neats’ tongues in jelly. They stood over the ovens to watch eat's tongue biscuits, waiting for the moment before they browned. John mixed the paste for dariole-cases, working the mixture with his fingertips, then filled them with sack creams and studded them with roasted pistachio nuts. In the fish house across the servants’ yard, the two boys scaled and cleaned the yellow-green carp from the Heron Boy's ponds, unpacked barrels of herrings and hauled sides of yellow salt-fish onto the benches and beat them with the knotted end of a rope. On Sundays they filed into chapel, listened to Father Yapp announce the week's fast-days then shuffled out again. Lady Lucretia and the higher members of the Household were long gone by the time the kitchen boys emerged to run down into the fields. Now when John waved his arms at the Heron Boy, the ragged figure waved back, his looming movements mirroring John's own.

Winter approached. John and Philip manned the salting troughs, rubbing the coarse grey grains into collops of mutton, pork and beef and packing them into barrels. A week before All Hallows silence descended on the Manor. For Lady Anne, as Mister Bunce informed them sombrely. Upstairs, the Great Hall was hung with black velvet from floor to ceiling, Gemma reported to Philip. The Household servants wore mourning bands and walked the passageways in silence. Dinner was gruel and supper would be salt-fish. John and the others kicked their heels in boredom. Scovell, John noticed, was not seen all day.

The gatehouse closed on Old Saint Andrew's Day. The first snows fell, cutting the roads, and the yard emptied of all but those ragged men and women who struggled through the drifts for the weekly dole. In the kitchens, the smells of roasting meat and fowl mingled with the sweet scents of great fruit cakes and shivering blancmanges, quaking puddings and hot syllabubs. Mister Pouncey descended with a clinking satchel for Scovell who rang the great copper with his ladle. Once the men had been paid it was the turn of the boys.