The Last Banquet. Jonathan Grimwood

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 . . .