were eating beetles, with your back to a dung heap and a smile on your face. It was summer and a horse was in the stall behind you.’
‘You were with le Régent?’
‘I was his aide.’
‘The other man . . . ?’ I remember the youth who scowled and growled and wanted as little to do with a dung-stinking, beetle-eating boy as possible.
‘He died,’ the vicome says flatly. ‘An accident.’
‘He didn’t like me.’
‘He liked very little. There were reasons, but none that need concern a boy of your age. All the same his death was regrettable.’ Vicomte d’Anvers speaks to me seriously, as he might speak to a grown man. Although perhaps keeping his sentences short, his words simple and his wit under control.
‘Am I going to have an accident?’
The vicomte lets a smile pull at the side of his mouth. ‘Unlikely,’ he says. ‘A careful boy like you. We’re dining here tonight. You should join us. No doubt the cooks will excel themselves.’
‘You want him at the table?’ The headmaster sounds horrified.
‘A bad precedent, you think?’ The vicomte pulls a handkerchief from his sleeve and flaps it vaguely. ‘You’re probably right. He can serve the wine. You know how to serve wine, don’t you?’
I shake my head.
‘Then I suggest you learn . . .’
I am sent from the room with instructions to wash and make myself as presentable as possible. I will be sent for when needed.
What I remember most about that night is the food. A pike was dressed in hot vinegar that turned its scales to the blue of a gun barrel. Its cucumber-and-black-pepper sauce had the texture of cream and smelt of spiced grass. The fish itself tasted of river weed and should have been soaked to remove its muddiness. I discovered its taste when I returned to the kitchens to fetch another bottle of Graves and helped myself to a sliver of pike from an abandoned plate. They ate rabbit next, three of them, stuffed with chestnut forcemeat and roasted. Since I hadn’t delivered any of my rabbits to the kitchens that week I imagined this was the kind that hopped around fields rather than hunted on the school roofs or infested the ruined village beyond the stream. Pudding was a mess of cherries in brandy, mixed with broken honeycomb and meringue. The taste was sour and sweet and wet and dry and close to perfect. The pike had returned to the kitchens almost untouched, the rabbits had been mostly eaten but this simply vanished. I had to scrape the plates with my finger to taste it at all. Our visitors had eaten with forks, using the forks and scraps of bread to separate the fish and rabbit from their bones. I resolved to try the method for myself.
‘The kings are much alike,’ the colonel was saying as I returned with brandy and glasses on a tray. I wondered which kings and listened harder, discovering that he meant ours, the young Louis XV, and the king of China. Although listening more carefully still, I wondered if he meant the Chinaman and Louis the Great, the man still called the Sun King. The colonel’s voyage to China seemed to have occurred long before I was born.
‘Vast empire, absolute ruler, troublesome family . . .’
The headmaster seemed worried by the last comment and glanced pointedly towards me. ‘Listening, are you?’ the colonel said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wise man. You can learn a lot by listening. Any questions so far?’
‘What do they eat, sir?’
Vicomte d’Anvers laughed.
Taking a glass, the colonel smiled. ‘Can’t tell you what their king eats. Never met him. Doubt any foreigner has. His subjects, however, eat dog, cat, snake, chicken’s feet, eggs soused in horse urine and buried in the dirt to rot for a hundred days, sea cucumbers, insects, lizards, goat’s embryos. It’s hard to find something they won’t eat . . .’
Hearing this I wondered if I should have been born Chinese.
‘His subjects ascribe medicinal qualities to their food. This for calmness, that for strength.’ Looking down the table to where Madame Faure sat prim-faced beside her husband, he smiled. Her primness was at odds with the ampleness of her overflowing and barely-covered bosom and the colonel had been glancing in that direction all night. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘snake is believed to impart vigour in men. And cat is believed to impart agility. Together in the same dish called Dragon & Tiger they are believed to make a man both insatiable and subtle in his matrimonial duties . . .’
Madame Faure blushed and her husband scowled. The headmaster simply looked at me, decided I had no idea what the colonel was talking about and was thus too young to have my ears scandalised and joined his guests in their laughter. The evening broke up shortly afterwards, with Dr Faure’s wife excusing herself first. I fell asleep half an hour later, wondering how hard it would be to catch a snake. And woke to the cockerel’s crow, wondering if I should cook the snake by itself or with cat.
You’re no better than Emile’s goose girl, I told myself as I watched them ride away. No different from Jeanne-Marie, a schoolmaster’s daughter, for all I loved the taste of her lips and the secrets she hid inside her blouse. You were not found in the reeds floating in a basket. No Pharaoh’s wife plucked you from the waters. No princess pushed you into the current further upstream. Idle curiosity brought the vicomte here. You are Jean-Marie d’Aumout, scholar – child of nobles so destitute they starved to death.
But what if ? said the voice in my head.
What if . . . ?
The Thorn Bush
Jeanne-Marie vanished the following week. There was little secret about it. She climbed onto a cart beside her mother, and the carter whipped his horse and they lurched forward as the shafts of the cart engaged with the leather harness straps. Gone, in an echo of hooves from the arch and a shuffle of gravel on the drive beyond. Dr Faure watched them go, his face impassive: then set us some Caesar to translate and five pages from Montaigne to précis in no more than three hundred words and no less than two hundred and fifty . . .
It was a long time since Dr Faure had flogged anyone. He clipped us round the ear, threw books at our heads, kicked chairs from under us as the temper took him, but no one had been forced to stretch across the table in full assembly and bear their buttocks to the willow twigs. For all that, the school ran as well as it ever did. The headmaster controlled the masters, the masters controlled the upper school, the upper school controlled the lower. It was, Emile told me, a very microcosm of the French state. He read in corners books he hid from masters and took from a locked cabinet in the library. He’d forced the lock, and for that he would surely be beaten, but the cabinet was in the darkest corner and everybody knew it was locked and the lock looked fine at a glance. Inside, the wood was splintered and the brass bent. The only damage outside was a dip where Emile’s knife pushed so hard against the cabinet door that the edge bruised. I was there when he did it.
‘Emile . . .’
He’d jumped at his name, not sure if he was furious or relieved to see me. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. At which, I’d nodded at the knife in his hand and the half-forced lock and told him I could ask the same.
‘Freeing
