you must come home with me,’ Charlot says carelessly. ‘You’ll amuse my sisters.’
A year passes and summer comes round. Charlot has forgotten or never meant it. He spends the summer at Jerome’s chateau. I spend it at the school. With the others gone, the red-haired laundry maid no longer hurries away at the sight of me and lets me inside her petticoats. The taste on my fingers is acrid, stronger. Roquefort to Jeanne-Marie’s new Brie. I note both their tastes in my book, with the dates, and resolve to find a girl with fair hair to see if she tastes different again. The laundry maid disappears as summer ends and I discover she’s newly married. By then the others are back, talking about the cold faces turned to them by the girls they love. Except for Charlot, who remains as languid as ever, slouched in his battered chair in the bigger study we’ve been given this year. He tells us nothing, I realise. His tales are of hunts and parties and could be pretty stories from a book.
His friendship with Jerome has grown watchful. Jerome’s stomach has shrunk as his shoulders have strengthened. Our Norman bear looks dangerous now. Dangerous and amused and somehow stepped back from the bustle around him. The maids stare after him, looking away when they’re noticed. Some of the boys too. He’s the dark shadow to Charlot’s lazy sunlight. On the afternoon of the first day back talk turns to our ambitions. Charlot tosses off some bon mot about maids deflowered and boars killed and Jerome rounds on him. ‘That’s it? The limit of your ambition?’
‘And to be a good duke when the time comes.’
While I’m still marvelling that Charlot is prepared to admit that much, Jerome turns away peevishly. The rest of us shift uncomfortably.
‘What do you want?’ I ask Jerome.
‘What does any man want? To make my mark. I should have been born when my grandfather was. A man could be great then.’
‘Today is better,’ Emile protests. ‘We have science. We have thinkers. Superstition is vanishing. We are building better roads. New canals.’
‘To carry what?’ Jerome asks. ‘Apples to places that have apples? Stones to places that have stone? Superstition will never vanish. It taints peasant blood like ditchwater.’
Emile blushes and turns away. I wonder how many generations he’s removed from that insult – his grandfather, the religious turncoat? I know how far I’m removed. One generation. Jerome would consider my mother a peasant. If he made an exception for her, he’d include her father without thinking about it. One of the villagers hanged by the duc d’Orléans for stealing was my mother’s cousin.
My salvation where Jerome is concerned is that my father was noblesse d’épée, descended from knights. At least half our class are noblesse de robe, from newer families granted titles for civil work. Jerome lists what France needs: a strong king, which we have in Louis le bien-aimé, now twenty, and already tired of the ugly Polish woman they’d married him to and beginning to bed good French mistresses. A strong king, a strong treasury, a strong army. France must be the most feared state in Europe.
‘It is,’ Charlot says mildly.
‘We must make her stronger.’
Boys around him are nodding and I wonder what it is like to have that degree of belief in anything, even as part of me is mocking his fervour and noticing Charlot’s amusement. Emile turns, blurts out, ‘We have a choice.’
‘Between what?’ Jerome demands.
Emile puts his hands behind his back, rises onto tiptoe and rocks back. It looks like something he’s seen his father do. ‘Between reason and ritual. Between what we can still discover and what we’ve been told to believe. Between the modern and the old.’
‘And if I want both? Jerome asks.
‘You can’t have them. They contradict each other.’
Charlot laughs and around him boys smile. ‘Enough seriousness,’ he says. ‘Let’s open our hampers.’ He pats Emile on the shoulder as he passes, a move both comforting and dismissive, as if petting a dog. As always, knowing my strange obsession with taste, my friends let me try whatever they’ve brought from home. A wind-dried ham from Navarre that cuts so finely the slices look like soiled paper and melt on the tongue like snow. A waxy cheese devoid of taste from the Lowlands. Anchovies pickled in oil and dressed with capers. All of the boys bring bread. Two days old, three days, five – depending on how long they’ve had to travel. It must be what they miss most. The loaf Emile brings is pure white. Jerome’s is solid as rock. He swears his cook doesn’t knead the dough so much as punch it, pick it up and slam it on the table like a washerwoman beating clothes on rock. It can take an hour before she decides it’s ready.
They watch me take their offerings. Occasionally I’ll open my eyes after I’ve tasted something particularly fine and catch them looking at each other and smiling. I don’t mind; at least I don’t mind that much. Some of them, I suspect, barely taste what they eat.
‘Try this, philosopher,’ Charlot says. The pot he holds is small and sealed with clarified butter. He hands me a knife and tears off a chunk of oily bread and indicates I should dig through the butter to what lies beneath. The taste I know – goose liver. But this is rich beyond description. Parfait de foie gras. ‘Now clear your palate with this.’
He hands me a second pot and a tiny spoon. This pot is sealed with cork and the darkness beneath has mould that he tells me to scrape away. The sourness of the puréed cherries cuts through the richness of foie gras. He laughs at my expression and I think no more about it until a year passes and summer comes round again and Charlot stops me in a corridor to say, ‘You must see our cherry trees.’ I look at him, remembering that earlier invitation.
‘The colonel agrees,’ Charlot says. ‘My father has already talked to him.’
1734
The Injured Wolf
‘My mother . . .’
‘Will be distant but polite. Your father, whom I will see when I first arrive at Chateau de Saulx and again when we leave, will be too busy to bother with either of us in between. Your sister Marguerite, who I may not call Margot unless she invites me, is beautiful, distant, cold and older than me. I must not fall in love with her. Your middle sister Virginie may be friendly, she may be reserved, who knows. But Élise, your littlest sister, will crawl all over me and want piggybacks. Your mother thinks she is too old for piggybacks so I must refuse . . .’
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