John Saturnall's Feast (24 page)

‘Phineas Campin!’ the Master Cook called out. ‘I hear your manchet loaves have grown so light, some were seen floating over the chapel.’

The kitchen boys laughed as a blushing Phineas collected his coins. Adam Lockyer followed whose knifework in Underley's jointing room was such a miracle he would soon be joining the King's Army in Bohemia. After him came Jed Scantlebury who must have stolen a pair of seven-league boots he had taken so many great steps forward, then Wendell Turpin, brushing feathers off his livery, Peter Pears ambled up then the Gingell brothers. Even Coake, Barlow and Stubbs received a few words of praise. When Philip had been congratulated on his escape from the scullery, John's name was called. Adam Lockyer gave him a playful push forward.

‘Ah, Master Saturnall,’ Master Scovell exclaimed. ‘Tell me now, where has the kitchen guided you?’

John looked up. The Master Cook had barely addressed a word to him all year. He had set him on this course with no hint of his purpose. Yet now the man waited expectantly.

‘I do not know, Master Scovell,’ John mumbled, squirming under the eyes of the other boys.

‘Then venture further,’ Scovell said.

The man dropped the warm coins into John's hand.

Christmas came. On the Twelfth Night feast, the kitchen echoed with the horseplay in the Great Hall above. When the snows melted, the roads reopened. A week after Lady Day, Henry Palewick called John out to the yard where, at the back of a string of packhorses, a limping mule regarded John as if he had once done it a grave injustice. Beside the beast, a lean grey-haired man nodded a greeting.

‘They're feeding you then,’ Joshua Palewick greeted John, looking him over. John grinned. He had grown stronger working under the kitchen's regime, the long fiat muscles rising in his arms and legs. The driver clapped him on the back. ‘How's Ben?’

‘The same. How's the village?’

‘Old Holy's sick. The rest of'em ain't much better.’

The driver looked unchanged by the intervening year, thought John, as if time outside the kitchen had remained frozen ever since he had entered the Manor.

‘I hear John Saturnall's a name to reckon with,’ Josh said with a wink to Henry.

‘I'm just a kitchen boy,’ John said, embarrassed.

‘A kitchen boy with Master Scovell's favour.’

‘He doesn't show it,’ John retorted.

The packhorses were unloaded and watered. All around them, carters and porters raised their voices. Across the throng a red-faced Calybute Pardew cried the intelligences of Mercurius Bucklandicus.

‘Monstrous birth in Southstoke!’ the man bellowed. ‘Shower of lizards at Tucking Mill! King's latest quarrel with Parliament! Fear-God and his naked prayer-meet . . .’

‘What's that?’ John swivelled about. Calybute thrust out a pamphlet.

The woodcut in the pamphlet was crude but ‘Fear-God’ stared out with familiar directness, his long hair hanging down on either side of his head. At the sight of Marpot, John felt a slow anger stir inside him.

‘Inside's his wives,’ Calybute said, turning the page. ‘That's what he calls them.’

The women knelt in rows, their ballooning breasts and buttocks drawn in thick crude lines. Marpot stood before them, as naked as they, holding up his Bible. For an instant, Cassie flashed in John's memory. Her white legs as she pulled up her long brown dress to run down the bank.

‘That Marpot?’ Josh asked when Calybute moved on. ‘The one who . . . ‘

John nodded mutely.

‘They say he's preaching out around Zoyland. Him and a whole bunch of bodies. His family, he calls them. Adamites, that's the Bishop's term. His lordship'll have him in the pillory soon enough. Mark my words.’ Josh nodded, turning the mule about. ‘I'll see you next year, John.’

Marpot belonged to a country he had quit, John told himself walking back into the kitchen. Now it was Scovell's voice that rever-berated in his head.
Where has the kitchen guided you?
. . . Instead of the shouts of the villagers, his ears rang with the clang and clatter of pots and pans. Instead of the chimney's old soot, thick fugs of cooking smells filled his nostrils and the wet winding-sheet smell was drawn away like the fat-flecked water that swirled down the scullery drain.

Now, instead of the hut and the meadow, he ran between Henry Palewick's root stores and apple lofts, or the cellars where barrels and tuns stretched away into the darkness. Where he once had fetched herbs from the slopes, now he carried cheeses wrapped in cloths or onions hung in nets from the larders. In Underley's jointing room, John and Philip scraped bristles and scooped guts into Barney Curle's barrow, stripped sinews and trimmed fat. In the main kitchen they minced the meat and in the spice room they watched Melichert Roos season it with ground fennel and mace.

Spring arrived. The feasts resumed. From the Great Hall above Mister Pouncey's nasal voice rang out again, the piercing tones finding their way down the stairs as he called out the places at the High Table.

‘My Lord Hector and Lady Callock of Forham and Artois! Lord Piers Callock of Forham and Artois! My Lady Musselbrooke the Marchioness of Charnley! My Lord Fell, the Count of Byewater! My Lord Firbrough! The Marquis of Hertford!’

At Shrovetide, Sir Hector's threadbare retainers were joined by those of the Suffords of Mere and the Rowles of Brodenham. At Michaelmas, the Bishop of Carrboro and his retinue came. Processions of horses clopped down the drive. In the kitchen it seemed that each household vied to present more hungry mouths than the last. Midday dinner merged into supper and supper was hardly done before next morning's breakfast began. The days spilled into one another, overflowing at last into the final feast when everyone and everything in the kitchen clanged, shouted, crashed, swore, splashed, bellowed and roared.

‘Just like the old days,’ Mister Bunce observed with satisfaction. ‘No one's got time to piss in a pot.’

Yet for all his industry, a frustration grew in John. The kitchen would guide him, Scovell had promised. But for every dish he mastered, a dozen others rose before his mind's eye. Each skill perfected by his fumbling fingers drew a score of new tasks. If the other boys came to him now when their sauces split, or their meats poached to shreds, or their creams thinned to water the more they beat them, it was only because they did not suspect the vistas of his ignorance. The kitchen knew no limit, he thought, watching Colin and Luke baste, or Vanian shape pastries. Falling asleep next to Philip on the pallet, John dreamed of processions of trays that advanced and rose up the stairs on the shoulders of Quiller's serving men then returned empty to be filled, over and over again . . .

He rose earlier than the other boys and was the last to fall back on his pallet. As the light from the hearth faded, the kitchen boys talked. Alf spoke of his sister while Adam and Peter debated the charms of Ginny and Meg. Adam had seen her naked, so he claimed. The boys rose on their elbows to listen. But John's thoughts drifted to the Rose Garden and the white ankle revealed beneath the dark green skirt. The sharp face in the Solar Gallery. Then a resentful confusion rose in him, a welter of feelings boring new channels through his body. His sweat smelt different, he fancied. Dark hairs marched up his belly. Why should Lucretia Fremantle invade his thoughts down here? His voice was changing too, adding its own odd lurches to the din of the kitchen. Then, with Melichert Roos's spice room awash with preserves and the first sides of pork arriving in the jointing room, the banging, clanging, crackling voices of the kitchen fell silent. Lady Anne's Day had come around again.

Once again gruel and salt-fish steamed in the hearth. Once again Scovell absented himself from the kitchens. The dull day wore on. Driven by boredom, John helped Luke and Colin beat the sides of yellow fish. As the wet salt caked the knotted rope, Luke looked up. Mister Bunce stood in the doorway. His gaze found John.

‘Master Scovell wants to see you.’

The long brown bottle. That was the smell. The same stale fumes had lurked under the mint on Father Hole's breath. Scovell sat in a chair by the fire, wearing a black armband.

‘You summoned me, Master Scovell.’

The Master Cook stirred. ‘Step into the light, John Saturnall.’

His voice was steady.

‘You have combed every room, I hear,’ the man said. ‘Busied yourself in every corner. No kitchen boy was ever so hungry for knowledge, my Head Cooks tell me. What have you learned, John Saturnall?’

Firsts, thought John. The spice room, the bakehouse, the jointing room and the cellars. Each with its different arts to be mastered. But the vistas of his ignorance stretched before him.

‘I know less than when I started, Master Scovell,’ John blurted.

To his surprise, the Master Cook smiled. ‘Then you have come far.’ The man hauled himself from his chair and stood by his desk. ‘I said you must bend your gift to its purpose. Do you recall?’

‘Yes, Master Scovell.’ But that purpose was a riddle, John thought. Another one to add to those left him by his mother. In his mind's eye, the steam twisted up from her kettle once more . . . The man beckoned. The smell of drink grew stronger. Drawing near he saw that Scovell's grey-blue eyes were flecked with red.

‘A true cook has one purpose. A purpose your mother understood as well as myself A purpose of many parts. I think you know it, Master Saturnall.’

John looked back, feeling awkward under the man's gaze. What had his mother told the Master Cook? At the back of his mind he heard her voice. Her final riddle.
We keep it for all of them.
He shook his head.

‘I do not know, Master Scovell.’

‘The Feast.’

John stiffened, clenching his jaw to keep the shock from his face. In his memory he heard his mother's voice reciting the dishes, his own words returning across the fire. Slowly, he shook his head. Scovell's eyes narrowed. But then he gazed down into the fire.

‘It was a mere story,’ Scovell said, the flickering light playing over his face. ‘So I believed at first. I was barely your age when I heard word of it. Fanciful tales were told in the kitchens where I spent my youth. Tales of a surpassing feast. Some said it was the one served in Eden. Others that it awaited us in Paradise. Its dishes took in every part of Creation and filled a table so great a man could not walk its length in a day. Tall tales. Yet some among the cooks believed an older truth lay behind them. Such a feast had once been served, they said. A feast so bountiful God himself had forbidden that it be kept. For men should earn their bread by labour in the fields, the Lord had decreed. Their wives should bring forth their children in pain. Such a feast would lead men and women into sloth and greed and lust.’ Scovell gave a rueful smile. ‘That feast led me too, but from kitchen to kitchen. Soon I learned that others believed as I did. Some were learned men. Others were fools. Some were honest. Others possessed no more scruples than a magpie. Only the Feast united them. To serve up the whole span of God's Creation . . . Such a cook might better call himself a priest. So I pursued my quarry through the great kitchens until I received word of a feast kept long ago at a place called Buckland. Here at the Manor I discovered old receipts handed down from the Master Cooks and beyond its walls lay the remains of ancient orchards and gardens . . .’

As Scovell spoke, John recalled the smell of the spiced wine from the Saint Joseph's Day feast. And the fruit blossom drifting through the chestnut woods above the chapel.

‘But the receipts proved mere fragments,’ Scovell confessed. ‘The gardens were remnants. The Feast had vanished, I came to believe. Its dishes were lost. So I resigned myself to its disappearance. Then fate brought your mother.’

He glanced back at the low door then smiled to himself.

‘There seemed no part of Creation she did not comprehend,’ the man said quietly. ‘Simple country woman though she was, she understood the Feast as though it were part of her own nature. I thought my search was at its end. We would keep the Feast again, I urged her. We would keep it together . . .’

Simple country woman,
pondered John. How much had his mother revealed to Scovell? A new light had appeared in the Master Cook's eye. He began to speak of John's mother's knowledge, of the shared understanding that forged a bond between them. Then his shoulders slumped.

‘But we argued. The Feast belonged to all, your mother maintained. When those who served and those who ate came together, only then could the Feast be kept.’ Scovell shook his head, though whether in disagreement or regret, John could not tell. ‘Were we only servants then, I challenged her? Kings built their castles. Bishops raised cathedrals. Yet there were cooks before either. What was their monument?’ He looked up from the flames, his eyes bright. Suddenly part of John wanted to tell Scovell what he knew. Yet another part held him back.

‘The Feast belongs to its cook,’ Scovell declared. ‘So I maintained. But Susan, your mother . . . She would never reveal her knowledge promiscuously.’ A troubled look came over him. ‘It was taken from her. Plucked from her by a magpie. But instead of bright trinkets, this magpie stole words. From a book.’

Magpie, thought John. That word again. His mother's book. As Scovell's eyes searched his face, John remembered the charred pages flaking in the fire.

‘There is no book, Master Scovell.’

The Master Cook held his eye for a moment that seemed to John to last an hour. But at last he gave a nod.

‘Not all books are written, are they, John?’

John remembered the Feast that he and his mother had conjured each night, the dishes rising into the cold air. ‘I do not know, Master Scovell.’

‘Then what does your demon advise?’

Was the Master Cook mocking him? A flicker of annoyance stirred in John. ‘He keeps his counsel, Master Scovell.’

‘He is wise. Would that I had kept my own counsel that night.’

John thought of the Master Cook's absences. Not for Lady Anne, he realised. They were for Susan Sandall. He imagined his mother standing in this room, keeping her counsel as Scovell sought to persuade her.

‘The Feast belongs to its cook, I told your mother,’ Scovell said. ‘It was for all, she answered. Those were her last words to me. I understood her nature too late. But she understood mine better. When she left, I believed the Feast was lost for ever.’ He looked up at John. ‘Then you came.’