You can use that, and this . . .’ He held up a napkin.
The water was cold and fresh and I drank enough to take the richness from my throat and then let the grand servant clean my fingers in the stream and wash my face, rinsing his cloth out between washes. Tiny fish danced below us and one came into my hand and wriggled inside my fingers. It was still wriggling when I swallowed it.
The servant looked at me.
‘Do you want one?
He shook his head and wiped my face one last time, brushing crust from the corner of my eyes and snot from beneath my nose. When I returned to where the others waited they were more solemn than ever. The one called vicomte knelt in front of me, despite the dirt, to ask what had happened to the things in the house. ‘They were taken,’ I said.
‘By whom?’
‘The villagers.’
‘What did they say?’ He looked serious. So serious, I understood he wanted me to understand he was being serious.
‘That my father owed them money.’
‘They told you not to go inside?’
I nodded in answer. They’d told me my parents were sleeping. Since my father had already told me I was not to go in because he and my mother would be sleeping this had been no surprise. That the villagers had gone in and returned carrying my parents’ few possessions had been strange. But most things I asked about came down to ‘That is how it is’, and I imagined this was the same.
‘Where did you sleep?’
‘In the stable if it rained. In the yard if it was fine.’
He thought back and maybe it hadn’t rained in his last few days but it had rained on at least two of mine and I’d been grateful for the shelter the stable offered. Its roof leaked, because every roof in the house leaked, but the horse slept in the corner that got most of the wet and I liked the company. Before the vicomte climbed to his feet, he said, ‘He is le Régent. Call him Highness.’ He was looking at the old man who stood supporting himself on the neck of his horse, watching us in silence while everyone else stayed back.
‘And bow,’ the vicomte said.
I bowed as ordered, the best bow I’d been taught and the old man smiled sadly and nodded his head a fraction in reply. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘Stolen by peasants,’ the vicomte answered.
‘Do we know their names?’
The vicomte knelt again and asked me the same question – despite the fact I’d already heard it. So I told him who’d come to the house and the old man nodded the answers towards the brown-coated servant to say he should pay attention. The servant spoke to one of the soldiers who rode away with three others following after.
‘Your name?’ the sullen young man asked me.
‘Philippe,’
‘We should know his name.’ The young man’s voice was as sulky as his face. ‘He could be anybody. You don’t know who he is.’
The old man sighed. ‘Tell me your name.’
‘Jean-Marie,’ I replied.
He waited and then smiled indulgently and I realised he was waiting for more. I knew my name and I knew most of my letters, I could count to twenty and sometimes to fifty without getting any of them wrong.
‘Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout, Highness.’
He looked at the vicomte at the last and the vicomte shrugged. I could see that the old man was pleased and that the vicome was pleased with me. The boy called Philippe just looked furious but that was all he’d looked since I’d first seen him so I ignored it.
Le Régent said, ‘Put him on the baggage cart.’
‘We’re taking him with us?’ the vicomte asked.
‘Until we reach Limoges. There must be an orphanage there.’
The vicomte leant forward and spoke too quietly for me to catch the words but the old man looked thoughtful and then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘He can go to St Luce. Tell the mayor to sell the manor and the horse. He can remit the money direct to the school. Make sure they know my interest in the child.’
Bowing low, the vicomte sent a soldier for the mayor.
The soldier and the mayor returned but – before they did – the other four soldiers who’d been sent into the village earlier came back with the first three of the men I’d named as taking things from the house. They were hanging from trees before the mayor even appeared at the bottom of the road. I tried not to look at them kick and when the vicomte realised I was watching he sent me to sit in a cart and stare in a different direction.
I couldn’t see them with my back to the trees.
Their protests were loud enough for me to hear though; and their begging, when they realised protests were not enough. Finally they cursed the world and its unfairness and insisted my father owed them all money. This was not in doubt, apparently. It was the taking of what had not been declared theirs that was the crime. Besides, my father was noble and the law distinguished between those who were and those who were not.
The not, hanging from the trees, had better clothes than me. In one case the man kicking his heels had leather shoes instead of the wooden sabots peasants usually wore. But he was still a peasant, bound to his land and owing duties to his lord. The villagers could be taxed and beaten and thrown off their fields and tried with the most perfunctory of trials. Those things could not be done to me. Nor could I work, of course. Unless it was my own land, and I had no land. I understood now that my parents were dead.
Tears would have been right, perhaps sobbing . . . But my father was a sullen and silent man who whipped me without thought, and my mother had been the shadow at his side, no more effective in protecting me than a real shadow.
Even now I would like to miss them more than I do.
All I could think about, as the cart trundled away from the manor that was soon to be sold, was the miraculous taste of the blue cheese I’d been allowed earlier. And the only thing I mourned was leaving my father’s horse behind. It was old and lame and fly ridden, with a moulting mane and a ragged tail, and was believed by everyone else to have a foul temper, but it had been my friend from the day I first toddled unsteadily through the open door of its stall and plonked myself in the straw at its feet.
‘Don’t look back,’ the vicomte said.
From his tone I knew they were still hanging villagers. A line of kicking shapes throwing shadows on the dusty road. Shadows that stilled in order, like a slow rolling wave on the irrigation ditches when the water is released.
The vicomte was Louis, vicomte d’Anvers, aide to the stern-faced man, His Highness the duc d’Orléans, known to everyone as le Régent. Until February that year he’d been guardian to the young Louis XV. Although he looked impossibly old to me he was forty-nine, more than twenty years younger than I am now. He would die that December, in the year of our Lord 1723, worn out by responsibility, childhood illness and the disappointment of having his power removed.
As for my parents. My father was a fool and my mother starved to death rather than steal apples from a neighbour’s orchard and disgrace the name of the family into which she’d married so proudly. There are two ways to lose your nobility in this absurd country of ours . . . Well, two ways before self-elected committees began issuing edicts banning titles and taking away our lands.
Once these mattered but soon they will become so obscure as to be forgotten. Déchéance – failing in your feudal duties. And dérogeance – practising forbidden occupations, roughly, engaging in trade or working another’s land rather than your own. My father had few duties, no skills to speak of and had sold what little land he inherited for enough coin to buy my brother a commission in the cavalry. Dying in his first battle,