Her mouth opens for a moment at the end. ‘That,’ she says, ‘is how you do it.’ I insist we do it again to make sure I understand. We kiss ourselves from spring into summer and through an entire winter beyond. We kiss ourselves into the following spring, and the only person who doesn’t know is Jeanne-Marie’s father. Perhaps her mother also. Although the woman looks at me with a mixture of amusement and worry.
A year to the day I first kiss her, Emile is five rooms away telling Dr Faure he hasn’t seen me, but will be sure to tell me the headmaster requires my presence the moment he does. Emile says this with such politeness Jeanne-Marie’s father doesn’t know if he’s being mocked. It is the same politeness with which Emile has asked, every day for a year, if there’s any news of the missing dog. Dr Faure has come from asking Madame Faure if she knows where Jeanne-Marie is. Luckily he doesn’t put her absence and my absence together and come up with my hand under his daughter’s blouse, her ribs sharp as twigs and a slightness where her breasts are budding. ‘The fat boy in your class has bigger tits than me. It’s not fair. My mother has udders like a cow.’
I say it’s hard to believe they’re related.
‘That’s because we’re not. I was found in a basket in the reeds. My mother, my supposed mother, found me when she went to the river to wash clothes.’
‘That was Moses,’ I tell her, grinning. ‘And Pharaoh’s wife went to the river to bathe not wash clothes. She had servants for that.’
‘I’m serious,’ she says. ‘My real mother was a princess who loved unwisely . . .’
I grin at her words. So obviously overheard. ‘Why didn’t Madame Faure give you back? Surely that would have been sensible?’
Jeanne-Marie steps closer and rests her forehead against mine, her words a garlic-soaked whisper. ‘She tried. But my mother’s enemies gave her gold. Thousands of livres to keep me . . .’ She pauses, aware she’s spun her story into a corner, and adds, ‘It was stolen, almost immediately. By bandits.’
‘Unlucky,’ I say.
‘Tragic.’ She grins at me. The bell is being tolled laboriously by one of the junior boys for luncheon and our stolen time is at an end.
‘My princess.’
She accepts my bow with a curtsy and skips away humming. Even Emile telling me the headmaster requires me isn’t enough to destroy my secret happiness. I tell him that, like his goose girl, Jeanne-Marie is another noble orphan stolen from her rightful parents. ‘Do you believe her?’
I look at him. ‘Do you believe your goose girl?’
He grins. ‘As much as you believe your beloved namesake.’
That’s when I know I’ve done him wrong and he has kissed his goose girl.
‘You should hurry,’ Emile says, ‘There are men with the headmaster. He calls one of them sir.’ He watches me scurry away and goes to his lunch at the long table in the refectory, where we sit on benches and the older boys steal from the younger and our bowls are emptied as swiftly as if biblical locusts fly in one window and out the other, barely pausing to feed. Others will eat my lunch.
‘So here you are.’
I bow and risk a glance at the headmaster’s companions.
‘These men are here to see you.’ The headmaster notices their amusement at his words and amends them. ‘These men are here. They have asked to see you. This is . . .’ He indicates a magnificently dressed comte whose name I miss because I’m looking at the man in the middle, who is staring at me intently. The man to his other side is a colonel, in uniform for all he’s retired and head of a cadet academy.
‘And this . . .’ The headmaster names the third man last. ‘Is the vicomte d’Anvers.’ It’s obvious the vicomte is the man who matters, despite being younger than the colonel, and being outranked by the comte. The headmaster looks to him for approval.
‘This is the boy?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘He looks well and stands straight . . .’ A buffet catches my shoulder and rocks me on my feet. ‘Stands firm enough. Looks one in the eyes when angry. Is he intelligent?’
‘We have several cleverer. A fair number who are not. He manages Latin well enough. Can tolerate a little Greek. Knows his map of France, and his map of Europe. Mostly he’s interested in botany.’ How does the headmaster know this? Unless Dr Faure has told him, but why would the headmaster be asking about me? Nothing in his or the vicomte’s face give me an answer to that.
‘What do you want to be?’ The colonel’s voice growls like gravel under a cartwheel. ‘Let’s start with the obvious question.’
‘No,’ says the vicomte. ‘If I might rephrase that? Boy – if you could be anything, what would you be? No job is forbidden. Simply tell the truth. That,’ he adds, turning to the colonel, ‘is how you judge a boy. By the measure of his dreams.’
‘A cook,’ I tell them.
Everyone except the vicomte scowls. ‘You are noble,’ the comte says. ‘Try to remember that. Choose again.’ His tone is so contemptuous the colonel comes to my defence.
‘Come now. No doubt the meals here are sparse and repetitive. What would any sensible boy think of, if not food? It’s all they fuss about at the academy.’
Vicomte d’Anvers snorts. ‘At his age my interests were . . .’ He pauses, searching for the perfect phrase. ‘Let me just say – it was not my stomach that hungered.’
The comte shoots him a reproachful glance.
‘Tell me,’ the vicomte says, obviously not finished with the subject. ‘Are my dear friends right? Is it hunger that makes you dream of having the run of a kitchen and the keys to the larder? Is this fantasy driven by a surfeit of winter vegetables, poor-quality bread, a simple lack of meat?’
I want to tell him food is plentiful enough, for all it is repetitive. And though recent bad harvests mean the peasants starve as often as their animals, vegetables and flour still find their way to our kitchens. As for meat . . . My recent understanding with the cooks, which saw any ‘rabbits’ I caught exchanged for the occasional sou, means meat has started to turn up in our stews. I doubt the cooks really believe I bring them rabbit, but a skinned, gutted and beheaded cat is indistinguishable in looks, taste and texture.
‘Well?’ demands the vicomte.
‘I’m interested in the science of taste,’ I say as seriously as I can.
‘There,’ he says triumphantly. ‘The boy’s a natural philosopher, who naturally wishes to go about his experiments in the laboratory of his choice. So,’ he says to me. ‘What is your favourite taste?’
Fresh sweat from the edge of Jeanne-Marie’s hairline when I am kissing her neck. Although her tongue after she’s eaten oranges comes close. In Jeanne-Marie, my search for the next taste and my hunger for the secrets of the other sex come together. I could not tell then if the search and the hunger would remain entwined or separate again. ‘Roquefort,’ I tell the vicomte. He smiles somewhat sadly.
‘You don’t remember me,
