The Last Banquet (9 page)

Charlot laughs and slumps back into the leather seat of our carriage. ‘You’ve been paying attention . . .’

‘Of course I’ve been paying attention.’

The oddity is I think Charlot is more nervous of bringing me home than I am of visiting, though God knows I’m nervous enough. The colonel called me into his study before we left and told me the duc de Saulx would judge the academy on my behaviour. I was to bear that in mind. The duke has sent a carriage for us. A carriage, a coachman, outriders. The carriage is lined inside with red velvet, has red leather seats and the de Saulx arms on the door. Charlot thinks it is new. It is the most elegant vehicle I have ever seen and moves with surprising speed.

We stay at the best inns, eat what we like but drink surprisingly little. I think Charlot is worried that any misbehaviour will be reported to his father. Only once does my own behaviour worry him, when I disappear into a kitchen to ask what gave a stew its taste. Juniper, the cook tells me. I know the taste of juniper and think there’s something else. In the end, after questioning, he produces a sliver of bark and lets me sniff it. From the Indies, he tells me, claiming not to know its name. Only later do I realise I don’t know if it’s East Indies or West. ‘At home,’ Charlot begins . . .

I know what he intends to say. ‘I stay out of the kitchens?’

He nods, relieved I understand and we slouch back in our seats to watch the countryside flow past. This coach has springs so fine only the biggest ruts in the road throw us into each other or against the sides. Blossom is still out on the hedgerows, the wheat has turned from green to pale yellow in the fields, the sky is deep blue and strangely cloudless. The peasants work their fields like animals, silent and unchanging. Eyes glance towards us and glance away as our worlds slide by each other without touching. Their expressions are blank, their feelings unknowable. A young woman squats by a hedge curling out a turd without bothering to hide herself from our passing. Charlot laughs. He’s right, she’s young and comely for all she’s filthy and craps with the unthinkingness of a cow.

‘My lessons . . .’

‘Are going well,’ I agree. ‘You ride the best, you fence the best, you can read maps and choose the right bit of high ground or defensive position faster than the rest of us.’ When I seem him flush I realise he thinks I’m mocking him.

Our days at the academy have traditional lessons in the morning and drill in the afternoon. We can march, we can ride, we can charge our pistols, prime our pans and change our own flints. I can oversee the loading of cannon, even load it myself. I understand elevation and arc. No longer being first years we are allowed to wear the cockade of our academy on our tricorne hats. We are progressing as well as can be expected according to our instructors. That is high praise indeed.

‘I mean it,’ I tell Charlot. ‘Stop worrying.’

We travel the rest of that afternoon with Charlot wrapped in the silence of whatever troubles him. Whatever private storm he is suffering passes and by the time we reach the drive for Chateau de Saulx he is himself again. A long line of chestnuts both sides of the road usher us to a castle that takes my breath away. A cliff of towers and turrets and sharp roofs rises from the middle of a moat thick with lily pads. A wide stone bridge crosses the moat and enters a huge courtyard where a fountain splashes in the middle.

‘Diana, the huntress,’ Charlot says. She’s magnificent. Tight and twisted and pert and dangerous. He grins. ‘Thought you’d like her.’

We dine in silent splendour in a long room filled with mirrors and huge paintings of classically draped men and women being approved by cherubs and angels, and in one case by the Virgin Mary herself. They are, I realise, Charlot’s ancestors. We have a footman each, behind our chairs and stood back against the panelling when not needed. They wear short white wigs and livery in the de Saulx colours, scarlets and greens. Charlot kicks me under the table when I peer at one too closely.

His father sits at one end. The duke wears a wig in the old style, falling to his shoulders. He does everything slowly, from saying grace before we eat to reaching for his glass, utterly secure in his certainty the world will wait at his pleasure. Charlot’s mother sits at the other. Her hair is piled high and she wears a green silk dress and a shawl. Opposite Charlot sits his elder sister Marguerite, who looks as grown up as the duchess and a good deal more serene. She is strikingly beautiful. Far more so than her mother. As if it has taken the duke’s blood to give Margot the quality that lets her turn heads, as indeed it has. Opposite me sits Virginie. She stares at her bowl of venison soup and scowls. Perhaps the bowl offends her, perhaps it’s the soup, perhaps simply the company. Looking up to see me watching she looks sharply away and goes back to scowling at her bowl. Only Élise chatters. About our trip, about how much Charlot’s grown, about a blue ribbon she wants for her hair. In the end, her mother scolds her into silence and Élise scowls at her bowl as well.

Margot and Charlot share an inner fire that Virginie seems to be missing. It might have missed Élise as well – although it is probably too early to say. In Margot the fire is contained. In Charlot it usually blazes but tonight it smoulders. The food is obviously fresh and undoubtedly beautifully cooked but I taste none of it as one course becomes another. And I bow my way from the room at the end of the meal still ravenous but with my stomach full to aching. ‘I’m sorry,’ Charlot says, when we’re back in the linked rooms we’ve been given. One is Charlot’s bedroom, the other a dressing room that has been emptied and filled for me with a huge bed, washing stand and looking glass.

‘For what?

‘You know what. For my family.’

‘Do your sisters always curtsy when they see you?’ He considers this as if he’s never asked himself the same question – and maybe he hasn’t. ‘On first meeting my father I bow to him, on meeting my mother I bow to her and kiss her hand. My sisters receive a bow but only after they have curtsied to me first. It will be better tomorrow. Tomorrow they will leave us alone. The first day is always like this.’

Leaving him to his sourness, I retire to my room and stare down at the bronze goddess with her bow. Her arrow points straight at my window and I smile. We have two months to waste before we must return. I am sure Charlot’s temperament will improve.

Next day we rise early, rinse our faces in cold water and dress quickly. There is something Charlot wants to show me.

‘There’ he says on reaching the ragged shore of a lake below the chateau. Tied to a post in the reeds is a punt, with a strange wooden vee at the front as if for a huge oar. Charlot pulls a key from his pocket with a flourish and leads me to a low hut I’d overlooked, sturdily built and roofed with turf. The hut is in darkness until Charlot finds a catch and the top half of the wall overlooking the lake falls forward with a crash. ‘For the light,’ he says. ‘We’ll put it back.’

An old chair, a decanter, chipped glasses, a boar spear and a hunting dirk, discarded powder flasks and a filthy leather hunting jacket hanging on a hook . . .

‘There you go,’ says Charlot, pointing to a long, dark and slightly rusting iron tube on the floor against the wall. It’s a gun barrel, ridiculously long, with steel lugs either side that obviously drop into the wooden frame at the front of the punt.

My friend is grinning. ‘Wait until you hear it. We’ll wake the entire chateau.’ This is a very different Charlot to the one who sat in scowling silence, in his best academy uniform, at the dinner table the night before. The punt is only really big enough for one of us but we pole it out into the middle of the reeds and squeeze down together.

‘Now we wait,’ he says.

As well as hiding us, the reeds stop us drifting. A breeze carries the smell of a distant marsh into our faces. The sun rises high enough to burn off the last of a low frieze of mist that obscures fir-covered hillsides beyond the marsh. Charlot sees our prey first, because he knows what he’s looking for. A neat formation of dark specks in the sky. ‘Here they come.’ He blows on a coiled match until the end glows under its ash. ‘You’re the artillery man,’ he says. ‘You take the shot.’

The geese drop as they approach the lake but land way beyond the range of any gun, even one with a barrel like this. I look to Charlot and he nods towards the far horizon where other formations are showing.

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Another lake? Does it matter? The point is they come.’

A hour later I finally take my shot. Our match is down to single string and I know – from his shifts and sighs – that Charlot has grown impatient. There have been other possible shots before this, but the birds were too high or the distance too risky. Only when a dozen birds drop towards our lake heading for a patch of still-clear water, spook themselves at the sight of our punt and try to rise again, does the perfect shot occur.

The explosion is so fierce I fear the punt gun will shake itself free and sink us. The punt itself whooshes backwards and grounds on a mud bank, Charlot banging into me. He’s laughing. ‘How much powder did you use?’

‘As much as I dared.’

‘The gun’s a hundred years old,’ he says. ‘Maybe use less next time?’ He grips my shoulders and hugs me. ‘Only you,’ he says. ‘Let’s go and claim our prize.’

A dozen dead or injured geese float or flap in the water. We collect the dead ones easily enough, and break the necks of the living and toss them on top of the dead. Then we punt back to the hut, unfix the gun, replace the side of the shooting hut and struggle back to the chateau under the weight of half a dozen dead geese each. The duke himself comes to the main door to greet us and he’s smiling.

‘Impressive,’ he says.

Charlot turns red with pleasure and is happy for the rest of the day.

So our pattern is set. We shoot geese on the lake and pigeon in the woods. We pull speckled trout from the river and eat them where they die, cooked in a pan over an impromptu fire of twigs, with butter and whatever wild herbs I can find. We are, for those two months of the summer at least, inseparable. Charlot’s desires are simple. He wants to make a good duke. He would like his father to love him. He hopes for a wife who will be faithful and a friend. He would like to live a good life.

We swim naked in the mill pond, and cross the lake one night for a bet, dragging ourselves exhausted up the distant shore then turn round and swim back because neither of us dare back down. We wrestle half naked in the makeshift ring of a clearing in the woods and listen to each other’s dreams, take bets on who can piss the highest, climb the tallest tree, shoot an arrow the furthest. Margot, whom I must still call Marguerite, treats her brother with outward politeness, as is his due as the next duke. But always mixed with quiet disdain. She is a grown-up and in her eyes we are still children.

Worse, we are noisy, irritating, ever-present children given to secret plots and laughter. I overhear her telling Virginie she fears I am not a good influence on her brother. Charlot tells me I was meant to overhear. Virginie simply does not see me. I might as well not be at Chateau de Saulx for all the notice she takes. When we meet on the terraces, taking our walks before supper, she nods politely to her brother and simply looks through me. Only Élise wants to be my friend. She curtsies clumsily every time she sees me and breaks into giggles.

‘Ignore them all,’ says Charlot, with the resignation of someone outnumbered three to one. We barely see his mother, although his father appears to approve of me. ‘He can afford to,’ Charlot says, and I ask him to explain. ‘He’s de Saulx, if he wants to like you he can. My mother is less certain you’re a good influence . . .’

‘Margot?’

Charlot sighs. ‘Margot’s a snob,’ he says. ‘She wants to marry a prince, live at Versailles, spend her days playing cards and listening to the harpsichord. She thinks I should bring back older boys, with grander titles.’

‘With any title . . .’

‘You’re noble,’ he says. ‘That’s enough.’

He’s Charlot, marquis de Saulx and heir to the duke, he is allowed to say that. He tells me about tomorrow’s hunt, organised by his father as a final treat before we return to the academy. A wolf has been taking lambs from one of the fields that border the forest and we will beat the woods tomorrow and kill or capture the beast. We must sleep soon because it will be an early start.

I’m woken by a tap at my door. Charlot is already dressed in simple trews and a leather hunting coat, with a dirk at his hip and long pistol in his hand. He waits while I splash water onto my face, strip off my nightgown and change quickly into clothes he grew out of last year if not the one before. The first surprise of the day is that Élise is allowed to come on the understanding one of her sisters looks after her. Since Margot refuses to have anything to do with the hunt, Virginie has that duty. Her scowl greets us as we hurry out to find the others waiting. ‘You’re late,’ she says.

‘And a good morning to you, dear sister.’

She blushes, drops a brittle curtsy and turns away. I grin at Élise and she grins back, slipping away from Virginie to stand beside Charlot. ‘You’ll protect me from wolves, won’t you?’ she demands.

My friend grins, glances at his middle sister and says, ‘I should help Papa. You’ll both be quite safe with Jean-Marie. I’m sure he will protect you both grandly.’

Virginie’s scowl at this is so black I’m on the point of suggesting he and I swap places, when Charlot shoulders his musket, clicks his fingers for a dog that is apparently his in the holidays only, and hurries after the departing hunters, leaving us at the edge of the lawn.

‘I’m going back inside,’ Virginie says.

‘You can’t,’ Élise protests. ‘Mama says you have to look after me.’

‘Monsieur d’Aumout can look after you.’

‘That wouldn’t be proper,’ Élise says loudly. ‘I’m not a child.’ At eleven that is exactly what she is, and her face, usually so sweet, is so childishly stubborn I have to turn away to hide my smile. ‘I will tell Mama,’ Élise adds, her winning salvo in a battle that ends with Virginie sighing heavily and turning for the path to the forest without looking to see if she is being followed. ‘Ignore her,’ Élise says loudly.