to the best of his belief content with that.
Charlot lives in a huge chateau, obviously. One of several belonging to his family. His mother is beautiful, his father is brave, his family are rich beyond belief. In someone less cavalier the idle boasting would grate. Somehow Charlot carries it off. He takes our homage and protects us lazily. If a Richelieu boy in our year is in trouble with an older boy, Charlot deals with it. He treats everyone as his equal: those younger than him, those older than him, even masters. It takes me two terms to realise he barely sees servants. Another term to realise no one else in my year sees them either. Even Emile learns to look through them. I stop to talk to a red-haired laundry maid and she’s so shocked she turns scarlet and rushes away. She’s young, probably no older than me. The next time she sees me she turns on her heels and hurries back the way she came.
‘Jean-Marie . . .’ Charlot and Jerome are in the corridor behind me. ‘You can’t make friends with loons,’ Charlot scolds. It’s the name we use for servants.
‘He doesn’t want to make friends,’ Jerome says.
I blush. ‘She’s a person.’
Charlot rolls his eyes. Jerome smirks. The next time we see her, both of them are exaggeratedly polite and she retreats with tears in her eyes. ‘She only likes philosophers,’ Jerome says. But that’s it. She refuses to come near me again.
Emile goes to stay with an aunt the next summer and I stay at school, somehow happier to be free of his family and have time for myself. I prepare my own food in the kitchens, which amuses the cooks until they realise I know what I’m doing. In between, to keep the colonel happy, I make mixtures that smoke, flash and explode. Filling a paper tube with three kinds of gunpowder I nearly lose my fingers when all three ignite at once before I’m ready. My next tube has cardboard spaces between the powders and a series of linked but separate fuses. The colonel comes to see what I am doing.
‘Add colour,’ he says.
To the flash, the smoke or the explosion? I wonder. In the end I add them to all three and produce something between a flare and a firework that flashes red, smokes a ruddy pink and then explodes in an impressive blast of vermillion. By the time Charlot, Jerome and Emile return from their holidays I have created tubes that will flare, smoke and explode in reds, greens and blues. The colonel is more convinced than ever that I have a fine future in one of the artillery regiments. ‘Show-off,’ Charlot says.
Jerome laughs. ‘Ignore him,’ he says, his Normandy accent thicker than ever from a summer spent at home. ‘He’s just jealous.’
‘I was bored,’ I say. As close to an apology as I can manage.
‘Next summer 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
