The Last Banquet (25 page)

When we remount, I expect Jerome to head for the next pretty sight in what I suspect is a well trodden path through the beautiful. Instead he tells me he needs to talk privately with Armand and asks if I’d mind Héloïse leading me home? By which he means Versailles presumably. I shrug, before realising that’s impolite and she’s done nothing to deserve my irritation. I say I’d be happy to ride back beside her. Jerome tells me the servant will find his own way. He adds that we’ll meet again that evening for supper, spurs his horse and leaves without another word. Armand gives Héloïse a single glance and trots after him.

Our journey back is uneventful for the first hour. We’ve gone deeper into the forest than I realise and we ride slowly, grateful for the shade the trees give us from the sun overhead. I’m almost dozing in the saddle when Héloïse gives a little cry and wrenches at her reins, dragging her horse’s head to one side. Her animal shies and Hélöise is already slipping when its rear hoof comes down wretchedly and it whinnies in pain, bolting in the same moment towards a low-hanging branch. Héloïse shouts in real fear and twists awkwardly in the saddle as she tries to dismount. But a side saddle is no easier to dismount than mount and I’ve kicked my horse after hers before I realise it. I join her at the moment she falls, her foot still in her stirrup.

Sometimes the body acts ahead of the mind, which makes me believe the brain is not the body’s sole coachman. I fling myself from my saddle without any thought for the consequences, and there will be many and they will stretch beyond trying to save a young girl from being hurt. Landing beside her horse’s head, I grab its bridle, but this only infuriates the beast, which begins to rear, so I grab its skull instead, clinging tight with my body covering its eyes. The animal shies and shakes its neck and beneath its skin I can feel every one of a dozen muscles thick as a ship’s rope. A slighter man would have been thrown and a less desperate one have had the sense to let go. Neither happens. In the end my weight brings her mount to a halt and blindness stills it.

Héloïse is sobbing, her feet still hooked in the stirrup as she sprawls in the dirt, a scar half a dozen paces long showing where she’s been dragged through leaf mould. Her skirt has flopped across her face and she’s struggling to move it. I’d help but the fallen skirt has revealed her raised leg, naked thighs and a patch of palest fur between.

‘Please,’ she begs.

Letting go of her horse’s head, I stroke its neck briefly and mutter quick endearments until I’m certain it’s stilled, and then, having patted its neck one final time, I reach for Héloïse’s ankle and she whimpers. I end up unbuckling her stirrup leather since this is easier than trying to extract her bruised ankle. Obviously enough, that takes time, in which I glance occasionally, and despite myself, at the prize between her thighs. In the final moment, as the strap is about to come free from the saddle, I give in to temptation and slide my middle finger lightly along her cleft, taking its taste and smell. The slightest tang of urea, a trace of evaporating salts. It is exquisite.

‘There,’ I say, lowering her leg to the ground. With my help she stands unsteadily and smooths her skirt. She seems on the edge of saying something, but keeps silent. Her face is scarlet, from being head-down as much as embarrassment I hope. She doesn’t protest when I kneel to remove her shoe. The bones in her foot are whole, the skin on one side broken, bruising already blooms on the other. We need cold water and the sooner the better. I walk her to a stream and she sits at the edge and whimpers slightly as it stings her broken skin. After a while she thanks me.

‘What happened?’

She has trouble meeting my eyes, poor child. ‘An adder,’ she says. ‘I saw . . . I thought I saw an adder on the path in front of me.’ The afternoon is hot, the hour dappled with sunlight, and adders like sleeping in the open. It seems entirely possible.

‘Can you ride?’

She looks at her saddle doubtfully. In the end she rides back sitting in front of me, her legs swung to one side and my arms around her to reach my reins. She’s awkward, almost embarrassed at my touch and thanks me constantly. She is furious with herself. Quite obviously furious beyond what the accident demands and my comment that it could happen to anyone brings her to tears. Her eyes are still red when we ride back into the stables and a groom comes running, followed a few minutes later by Jerome and Armand, who appear from a door in a wing of the palace.

‘Her horse bolted,’ I say shortly. ‘You might want to have a doctor look at her ankle, although it seems well enough to me. Don’t scold her. She’s upset enough as it is.’ I hand responsibility for her care to Jerome whether he wants it or not, and turn towards the gates to the stable.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘To play with the other animals.’

At least they, the ones in cages, knew they were trapped and probably suspected their lives were unnatural. I walk away and he lets me go.

Supper with Candles

To cook foie gras en croute

Make a pastry from a pound of flour, a third of a pound of good butter, a tablespoon of mildly salted water and one egg, and put aside in a cool place until needed. Vein a whole goose liver – foie gras – until all the veins are gone and only the flesh remains. The bigger and finer the liver, the easier this will be. Soak a Périgord truffle in good cognac. Now finely dice two slices of smoked wild boar and a small quantity of lard and shred the truffle, mixing the three together well. Wrap your foie gras in the forcemeat and hold in place with a sheet of fatty caul taken from a pig’s stomach. (The other kind works but this is better.) Using only as much pastry as is necessary wrap your parcel, seal the edges carefully with milk and smooth these away before brushing the whole with beaten egg. Cook in a medium oven for an hour and serve immediately.
Tastes sublime.

Jerome and I ate that night in a private room near the Abundance Salon, which we passed through on our way to supper. The tables in the salon were crowded with plates of marzipan fruit, silver jugs of coffee and trays offering wines and liqueurs. The floor was as crowded with nobles as the buffet was with food, and the smell of stale coffee mixed with that of sweet chartreuse, the musk of urine and a miasmic stink of shit.

‘Behave,’ said Jerome, and I realised I’d named the scents aloud.

Small dogs cocked their legs to piss on people’s shoes. A goat on a leather lead was as barbered as the fop who owned it. Cold eyes watched me pass and weighed my value. A tiny woman with a lined face and hair to her knees smiled knowingly, her hair filled with roses and peacock feathers. ‘Madame de Laborde,’ Jerome whispered. ‘La pompadour’s cousin.’

There were a dozen lesser courts within Versailles, places where dukes and princes kept open table for their followers and friends, where politics could be discussed and alliances made. Jerome had quarters on the second floor overlooking the Royal Court. I asked about the apartment Charlot had and barely used, and my friend’s mouth set. When at Versailles, Charlot had rooms on the third floor of the Old Wing, overlooking the Ministers’ Court. From the sourness with which I was told this I imagined his were bigger or their location better. To smooth things over I asked about Lisette, and was told flatly she’d produced yet another son for the de Saulx family line. Jerome had daughters. That too was a touchy subject.

Inside the dining room Armand and Héloïse were already waiting; her head slumped onto his shoulder, his arm around her shoulders to lightly touch the side of her breast. When Virginie and I were first together we sat like that for hours, half touching, grateful for the contact. Neither of us knowing Jean-Pierre was already in her belly.

‘Husband and wife?’ I muttered.

‘Brother and sister. Well, half-brother and -sister.’ Jerome didn’t bother to lower his voice and I understood they were his creatures. ‘She gets her looks from her mother. He gets his concupiscence from his father.’

I looked at Jerome.

‘It is my knowledge of this that makes them pliable.’

The objects of our discussion smiled in Jerome’s direction and turned to me as one to nod politely. Then all life left their faces and they sat back as if breath had gone from their lungs or the room was empty again and we had simply disappeared.

‘Why are they here?’

‘Armand is your secretary. Héloïse your housekeeper.’

‘Jerome. Why are they here?’

‘Half my reports say Paoli likes pretty women. The other half say he likes pretty boys. There are those who say he likes both. Sometimes at once . . . Don’t look so shocked. It is my job to know these things.’ Other words from a younger Jerome entered my head, brave boasts about keeping France strong and making her great. Now we sat in a room where the very roundels of the Sun King on the door mocked our childish idealism. His grandson was despised by his subjects. His palace stank like a sewer. Every war he fought lost us lands or cost us gold we didn’t have. I should have stayed at home and pretended I never received Jerome’s letter.

‘Cheer up,’ Jerome said. ‘I’m going to feed you.’

The young man rang a glass bell and a door opened to admit liveried servants, who put porcelain plates on a marble-topped table and followed them with silver knives and forks and crystal glasses and jugs of wine. Finally, a huge silver gilt platter was brought in on which sat four pastry-wrapped parcels. My dining companions watched carefully as I took mine, sliced it open and scooped a warm morsel from inside. I could taste fat, and discovered a texture close to bone marrow, which dissolved to liquid with the heat of my tongue.

‘Well?’ Jerome demanded.

‘A whole foie gras, wrapped in a forcemeat of veal and lard, baked in butter pastry but first wrapped round with . . .’ The texture was parchment but the aftertaste was not. He had me and I wondered who Jerome had found capable of cooking like this.

‘Wrapped in calf ’s caul,’ he said, naming the membrane ripped from the face of new-born cattle. He smiled at my surprise and took one for himself, making a pretence of savouring the first mouthful. By the third mouthful he’d forgotten what he was eating and finished long before Armand or Héloïse.

‘Now, to business,’ Jerome said, when I had finished. ‘You are being sent to Corsica because Signore Paoli respects you. He has read of your passion for hard work, your draining of marshes, your efforts to improve crops. He knows that you read widely, that you make scientific discoveries, that Voltaire answers your letter. You are kindred spirits. You will offer him hereditary nobility, a pension from the French state and the title of marquis di Bonafacio.’

‘And if he refuses?’

‘You offer him the title of duc de Bastia.’

Héloïse smiled and I knew she understood my question was not how high I could bid but what happened if Signore Paoli did not intend to be bought. Without being asked she poured me a glass of white wine and pushed it forward, revealing the valley between her youthful breasts. She blushed prettily when she saw me look.

‘And if he refuses that?’

‘You can offer him prince of Corsica.’

‘I see. And his followers? His ministers?’

‘Lesser titles. As many as you need without making us look ridiculous. They may keep their language and even teach it in schools. They may conduct local business in
lingua corsa.
’ He nodded at his glass and Armand filled it. ‘Their peasants can barely speak Italian, never mind French. At least Paoli is almost one of us. That will help.’ Emptying his glass in a single gulp, Jerome said. ‘Now, Armand and I have business. Héloïse can tell you the rest. Ask her about
brocciu di Dónna
. That should interest you.’

‘You shouldn’t dislike him so,’ said Héloïse, once the door had closed behind Jerome and her half-brother. Leaving the sofa she’d shared with her brother, she poured herself a glass of wine and finished it in two gulps, poured herself another and refilled mine. Then sat herself in a chair directly opposite. That was when I realised she hadn’t been drinking.

‘Jerome is one of my oldest friends.’

‘It shows.’ She smiled sadly and looked around her, the subject apparently having changed. ‘You hate this place, don’t you?’

‘I prefer my own chateau.’

Héloïse snorted. ‘Your contempt for Versailles in obvious. You should have seen the marquis de Caussard’s face when you said that about the
other animals
. . .’

It was odd to hear Jerome referred to by his full title, and I wondered if Héloïse suggesting I disliked Jerome was her way of saying she did. I certainly doubted Jerome’s motives for so obviously bringing us together for the second time that day.

‘Versailles is rotting,’ she said. ‘One day it will simply fall down.’

‘It’s rotten already. If it was going to fall it would have done so.’

‘You’d pull it down?’ She looked sly.

‘I’d burn it. That’s the only way to get rid of this stench.’

She glanced at the admixture of lavish and rancid around us, the crumbling drapes and dog-pissed rugs, the perfectlybreasted marble nymphs flanking the fireplace with their mottled drape of staining. ‘You wouldn’t save anything?’

‘My animals. They didn’t choose to be in prison.’

‘Yet they say you keep wild animals yourself.’

‘In better conditions than this.’

‘Comfortable captivity is still captivity. Don’t you agree?’ The hem of her dress lifted slightly and for a moment I thought I’d imagined it, but she edged the hem higher and higher still, opening her knees until I could see a little darkness between. ‘Marquis, you haven’t answered.’

‘Most would die if returned to the wild.’

‘You think we’ve been rendered unfit for freedom too?’

‘I’ve considered it.’

Of course I had, she told me. Everybody who wasn’t a fool had. As she said this, I wondered if she realised I meant freeing my animals. I’d certainly considered releasing the animals kept at Chateau d’Aumout, but I was worried they’d simply be killed by my peasants or the authorities. And if I sent them back to their original countries, they’d be killed by animals who’d never been captive. Besides, I liked them around me. They reminded me we were once wild too. So yes, she was probably right, we had been rendered unfit. All of us.