The Last Banquet (29 page)

‘Break it down then,’ I told them.

They stared at me, the pair of them. Young and sunburnt and stinking of sweat, garlic and cheap wine. They wanted to know who was giving them orders but something in my tone made them hesitate. ‘You’re French?’ one asked.

‘I am the marquis d’Aumout. Please call your commanding officer.’

They looked at me doubtfully, then looked at each other with the slightly helpless air of men who realise they’d have been better off staying where they were, and one of them stumbled his way downhill while the other attacked the door with a large rock. Since the door opened inwards he had better luck than I’d had pulling from inside. I was out, and crouched in the sunlight, when a grizzled lieutenant appeared. Up from a sergeant, I thought, remembering some of our trainers from the academy.

‘You are the marquis d’Aumout?’

I bowed slightly and he remembered his manners and bowed in return. ‘We were told you were dead,’ he said. ‘Everyone believes you dead.’

‘There were times I believed that myself.’

He asked if I could walk and I said probably, but not swiftly. So he shouted for a man to find me a mule and three solders ended up carrying the ammunition the mule had been carrying and the mule ended up carrying me. ‘There was a battle,’ I said, before clambering onto the creature’s back. ‘A day or so ago.’

‘Ponte Novu,’ the lieutenant replied. ‘It was a bloodbath. One of their generals refused to fight. Their Hessian mercenaries turned against them in the middle of the battle. Half their army cut and ran. The war is over. We’re hunting their so-called general and his gang. We’ll find them, don’t you worry.’ The lieutenant slapped my mule and we set off in a long ragged line up to the ridge of a hill and down the other side towards a small town nestled in a valley. The air smelt sweet and the crickets sang and I drank water from one soldier’s canteen and ate another’s bread. It was good, if surprising, to be alive.

The lieutenant passed me to a major who delivered me himself to the house in Corte commandeered by the comte de Vaux. Having established it really was me, the comte gave me his own quarters, found me decent clothes and had his own servant shave my head and remove my beard. He also lent me a wig and had servants bring me endless jugs of hot water until I felt clean enough to join him. For a week I was tended by a doctor and fed food only fit for an invalid. De Vaux told me again that everyone had presumed me dead. My murder had been mourned and my reputation enhanced accordingly. He was glad this had proved untrue.

I thanked him for his sentiments and asked whom I should talk to about catching the next ship. I would go to Paris if summoned, and I would see Jerome, and Charlot, and anyone else who felt the need to see me, but first I insisted on going home. Manon and my children would be waiting. Tigris too. Tears came into my eyes at the thought of them. De Vaux made the arrangements, told me he’d sent messages ahead announcing my return, and asked, as a favour, if I could visit the gaol in Calvi where Corsican prisoners were being held. Pasquale Paoli had not been found, nor had most of his senior staff. It was thought they were hiding among common soldiers being held until the war was over. Seeing my surprise, he added that the war was over, in any real sense of the word, but a few of the Corsicans had yet to realise that and cleaning up might take another few months.

He fed me well on the last evening, and then I took myself up to bed, stopping only in a corridor to stare at myself in a flyspecked looking glass. My face was gaunt, my cheeks sunken. My shoulders had shrunk and my gut was as flat as a boy’s. I’d not looked this thin since leaving the academy. There was far more grey than I remembered in my stubble. The next morning I climbed into a coach and was driven with only two changes of horse to Calvi where I presented a letter from the comte de Vaux to a major who saluted me respectfully and walked me to the prison. The cells were crowded and stank of misery. There were French soldiers with bayonets on their muskets to keep the prisoners back if they mobbed me.

I walked through three huge halls filled with Corsicans; some were wounded and others swaying with tiredness but all gazed at me with blank hatred. In the third hall I noticed a flash of blue eyes and glance in that direction.

‘Someone you recognise, my lord?’

Paoli had grown his hair and a beard and wore the tattered uniform of a private. He had a crutch under one arm and was supported by another man, having been shot in the leg. The man who supported him was Armand de Plessis. Without thinking, I looked round for Héloïse but realised quickly it was a room full of men.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Similar but not the same.’

The major nodded regretfully.

‘What will happen to them?’

He looked at his prisoners with distaste. ‘We’ll release them shortly. Take their names and the parole of any who are officers. Although most of those got away.’ Pulling out a fob watch, he consulted it and told me my ship, the
Léopard
, would be leaving within three hours and I was welcome to dine with him or else join my vessel. Pleading tiredness I made my excuses and he had a cart take me to the harbour.

In the last few minutes before we sailed a boy appeared on the jetty and begged to speak to me. A doubtful captain fetched me from my cabin with promises that he would have the urchin beaten if he was wasting my time.

‘You are the Frenchman?’

I tried to smile at him, though desperate for my cot. ‘I am Jean-Marie, marquis d’Aumout.’

He nodded, as if that was what he’d asked, and pushed a small parcel towards me. He held it out when I didn’t take it and kept holding it out until I did. Then he turned and ran, losing himself in the evening crowd.

‘Is everything all right, my lord?’

I assured the captain that it was, and took myself to my cabin with my heart hammering against my ribs and sticky liquid oozing onto my fingers. The muslin was filthy, tied by the corners into a knot that my hands scrabbled to undo. Inside was a cleaner cloth and inside that a fist-sized lump of cheese. Scraping my nail down one side I carried a fragment to my mouth. It was creamy with a slight taste of thyme and the faintest trace of lemon. I remembered Héloïse telling me the girls who gave milk were fed on the finest foods. I allowed myself a slightly larger piece and then wrapped the cheese again in its inner cloth and dropped it into a jug of water to keep it cool.

Corsica gave me back my curiosity and hardened my soul – not the way stale bread hardens in air, but the way steel hardens when put through fire and plunged into water. Long after I’d forgotten the exact shape of Pasquale Paoli’s features I could summon fierce hunger and the scent of wild herbs on hot summer winds simply by thinking about those days. And Corsica taught me something else, something unexpected about myself. I was not as comfortable and complacent as I’d thought. In the cottages and ruins and caves of my captivity I’d clung to life with a ferocity that would have done Tigris proud.

It was Signore Paoli in that prison. I’m sure of it. But he had, in his way, treated me fairly and I had come through my experiences alive. More than that, I’d rediscovered my appetite and my hunger and my passion for food. That he sent me brocciu di Dónna seemed fitting. It was the first truly original thing I’d eaten in ten years. More than this, much more than this, it tasted new. Only later did I realise he’d let me taste new ideas as well.

Brocciu di Dónna

Take two pints of whey made from an equal mixture of ewe and breast milk and heat until hand-hot in a ceramic pot over a steady heat. (I’ve never produced satisfactory results, certainly nothing that equals the brocciu de Dónna from Corsica using breast milk alone.) Add three teaspoons of salt and two-thirds of a pint of fresh breast milk and two-thirds of a pint of fresh ewe’s milk. Heat to just below the simmering point without allowing the milk to catch on the side of the pan. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. Lift the cheese from the whey and drain though muslin. The result should be ivory coloured.
Tastes creamy, rich, almost silky.

Simple brocciu di Dónna

Heat a mixture of two pints of breast milk and two pints of ewe’s milk to just below simmering, add a wine glass of good Champagne vinegar (or half that of fresh lemon juice) and allow the mixture to return to room temperature. Strain the mixture through muslin to drain away the whey and mix the salt into the remain curds. Eat within one day.
Tastes creamy and rich, but less elegant in its finish than the above.

1770
The Return

I
returned home to a fierce hug from my son, who at twelve was on the edge of believing himself too grown up for such things. My fifteen-year-old daughter simply curtsied. Hélène now looked enough like her mother for me to bow back. As for my cat, Tigris barely deigned to acknowledge my return for two days and then refused to leave my side for a month, sleeping across my bedroom door when Manon refused to let her camp at the bottom of our bed.

I’ll get to Manon in a moment – but first let me deal with the letters that awaited me. Jerome’s announced he was forgoing the last four years of the ten-year period in which I was not to receive my salary as Master of the Menagerie. The treasury had been instructed to remit me twenty thousand gold livres, being the money for this year and the last, when I had been so abominably held captive by . . .

I didn’t bother reading the rest. Charlot’s letter was strangely formal. He stressed his friendship and our ties. He thanked God for my safety. So much went unsaid I wondered what troubled him. The king’s letter, which was probably written by Jerome, thanked me for my efforts on behalf of France and promised me a position at court for my son. If I would rather, Laurant could have a commission in the army instead.

Voltaire wrote too. I liked his letter best.

He gave thanks for my survival, talked of the trials that put steel in men’s souls and ended by paying tribute to the rightness of the cause of those who captured me. He understood I had met Pasquale Paoli in person. He asked me to write by return giving my impressions of the man, his followers and his politics. He’d heard Paoli had given women in Corsica the vote, that Corsican women not only fought beside their men but acted as NCOs and even commanded brigades. He wanted to know if I had seen any of this. ‘It seems the Corsicans’ principal weapon was their courage. This was so great that in that final battle near the River Golo they made a rampart of their dead in order to have the time to reload. Bravery can be found everywhere. But courage like that is found only among free people.’ Reading Voltaire’s words, I remembered those of the old Corsican on the march to the bridge.
It’s everybody’s war.
For the first time in my life I wondered if we were on the right side.

As I’d hoped, Manon came to my room the night I returned. She was my wife, the marquise, she’d looked after my children and run Chateau d’Aumout while I was away as ably as any Corsican woman widowed by a vendetta. Charlot’s letter had stressed how well she’d done. Manon knocked once, pushed open my door, and picked a fight.

‘Why didn’t you write? You should have written.’

‘Manon, I was a prisoner.’

‘From the day you left this chateau until this morning? Someone held you prisoner for all of that? They tied your hands and denied you paper?’

‘I was captured almost on landing.’

‘You should have written before that. From Versailles. And you should have written the moment you were released. What was it? Ten days ago? More than ten days?’ She stood in her white nightgown in the doorway between my room, which had always been our room, and my dressing room, which now seemed to be her bedroom. Her fingers were folded into fists and hard against her hips like a furious child. Sighing, I climbed from my bed and went to hold her. She pushed me away. ‘You should have written.’

There was something forced about her anger. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Everything. I thought you were dead.’

‘Manon. What happened?’

There was anger in her eyes, that was real enough. Perhaps not as much as she pretended and about something other than my lack of letters. She was right, though. I should have written before setting off from Versailles, and at the point I landed in Calvi, and when the comte de Vaux was sending news of my safety to the court. But this was about more than my neglect in not writing, I was certain of that. And I understood Manon well enough to know much of her anger was turned in on herself. I’d known her for eleven years, we’d been lovers for eight and it was five years since I’d married her.

‘Manon. Tell me.’

Something in my irritation gave her the courage to answer. Raising her chin, she said, ‘Charlot came.’ That she called him Charlot, when once she would have said le duc de Saulx or simply le duc should have warned me.

‘Charlot came?

‘A month ago. He came in person to say the comte de Vaux’s campaign against Pasquale Paoli was coming to a head. He knew I still hoped you were alive but he thought it unlikely. He was sorry to be the one to tell me that, but he owed you the debt of treating me honestly. I said . . .’ Manon hesitated. ‘What if he was wrong?’

‘And Charlot replied?’

‘If you were not already dead the Corsicans would kill you to stop you being retaken . . . There were tears in his eyes when he said that.’ Manon looked at me, and I understood she was momentarily cross with me, when before she’d been close to pretending. ‘You have no idea how he values you. He told me I had his protection. He would find a good husband for Hélène. He would treat Laurant as his own son. He would take over responsibility for running Chateau d’Aumout until Laurant came of age.’

‘Manon, what happened?’

‘I was lonely.’

She looked away. Her words when they came were a whisper. ‘You’d been gone for over a year. And I was lonely.’ She gave the tiniest shrug, without looking up from the floor. ‘He said you were dead. And I believed him. And now . . .’

‘I’m not.’

Tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks until they reached her jaw and splashed onto her nightdress, turning the cotton translucent. She let me take her shoulders and suffered me to lift her head and dry her eyes with my fingers.