‘Most dangerous part of a knife's the handle,’ Mister Bunce told them both. ‘Know why?’
They shook their heads.
‘That's the part that joins the blade to the kitchen boy.’
The Head of Firsts kept the knives wrapped in linen cloths and the linens wrapped in sacking inside a drawer which he locked each night. They were sharpened every Thursday on a saddle-backed whetstone and polished every other week by Mister Bunce using a cloth and a secret white paste made of goat's urine and chalk, according to Alf When Mister Bunce chopped, the blade seemed to blur. Wafer-like slices flew across the board, each precisely as thick or thin as required. John's fingers might tire or turn to thumbs, but the man's thick digits worked on effortlessly.
‘Look here,’ he called to John as his knife darted in and out of a dice of turnip. ‘We used to call these kickshaws. That's French, that is. Means what-you-like or somesuch. I don't remember exactly.’
Transparent slivers fell to the table. The man's blunt fingers turned the object with surprising delicacy.
‘There's all kinds of kickshaws. Pastries, sweets. You can make ‘em from anything. Even this turnip.’
The knife pricked and prised. At last the man held up a tiny cockerel complete with cock's comb.
‘Used to do a lot of this work back in Lady Anne's day. You try.’
John poked and prodded, the turnip growing warm and slippery. At last he held up a creature that resembled a lopsided pig. Mister Bunce pursed his lips doubtfully.
‘Needs a bit of work, that one.’
As summer approached, maunds piled high with drop-apples were dragged into the vaulted room. John eyed the red and gold-streaked fruits, most hardly bigger than gull's eggs, remembering the sour apples from Bellicca's ancient trees and the scent of blossom from outside the chapel.
‘Fruit ain't like the roots you've been hacking,’ Mister Bunce announced. ‘It don't forget an insult. You have to be careful. You have to roll the blade down or the fiesh'll bruise. Watch.’
Mister Bunce rested his knife point-first on the board and wedged an apple beneath the broad blade. John saw light catch the edge, a curved sliver of silver, then heard a wet crunch. The two halves rolled apart. Another crunch and the two were four.
‘Think you can do that?’
John regarded the small bitter fruit. He took his own knife and held it poised over the remaining half-apple.
‘No, no, no!’ barked Bunce.
John adjusted. And readjusted. It took four attempts before Mister Bunce let him bring the knife down. When he split the apple, Bunce threw up his hands.
‘You felling trees, John? Killing a pig? If you don't cut your own hand off it'll be young Elsterstreet's here . . . ‘
It didn't take an axe to cut an apple, the Head of Firsts told them. The flesh would brown or turn to mush. It was almost dinner when John took up the knife for what seemed the thousandth time and felt his hand follow the line of the cut, felt the blade split the waxen skin and slice through the flesh. The edge rolled down onto the board. Two clean-cut halves tumbled apart. He turned to Mister Bunce.
‘I've seen hedges cut better,’ the round-faced man declared flatly. He regarded the halves, still rocking gently on the board. ‘Mind, I've seen worse too.’
The drop-apples were replaced by golden-skinned Pearmains, then damsons that arrived in bracken-lined baskets. Gooseberries and raspberries came from Motte's fruit cages. Mazzards and bigaroons followed. John and Philip pitted the fat cherries, peeled apricots and eased the stones out of plums. They tweaked the tiny stalks from strawberries, chopped last season's dried quinces for soaking and sliced greengages into translucent panes.
Working together at the benches, John and Philip eased the stones from peaches, cupping the soft fruit in their palms and sliding the knife between their fingers as Mister Bunce showed them. They stoned damsons ready for pickling. Midsummer was celebrated by Mister Bunce professing them not entirely useless. On Saint Meg's Day, the Head of Firsts summoned them.
‘Let the kitchen guide you. That what Master Scovell ordered?’
They nodded.
‘I reckon it's time for you to move on.’
At the benches and tables, before the hearth and over the glowing coals of the chafing dishes, on wooden blocks and marble slabs, John's hands shaped, gripped, chopped and pinched. At the kneading trough in the bakehouse, he and Philip pummelled maslin dough until the dull-skinned clods stretched and sprang. A scowling Vanian showed them how to make the airy-light manchet bread that the upper servants ate, then the pastes for meat-coffins and pie crusts. They baked flaking florentine rounds and set them with peaches in snow-cream or neats’ tongues in jelly. They stood over the ovens to watch eat's tongue biscuits, waiting for the moment before they browned. John mixed the paste for dariole-cases, working the mixture with his fingertips, then filled them with sack creams and studded them with roasted pistachio nuts. In the fish house across the servants’ yard, the two boys scaled and cleaned the yellow-green carp from the Heron Boy's ponds, unpacked barrels of herrings and hauled sides of yellow salt-fish onto the benches and beat them with the knotted end of a rope. On Sundays they filed into chapel, listened to Father Yapp announce the week's fast-days then shuffled out again. Lady Lucretia and the higher members of the Household were long gone by the time the kitchen boys emerged to run down into the fields. Now when John waved his arms at the Heron Boy, the ragged figure waved back, his looming movements mirroring John's own.
Winter approached. John and Philip manned the salting troughs, rubbing the coarse grey grains into collops of mutton, pork and beef and packing them into barrels. A week before All Hallows silence descended on the Manor. For Lady Anne, as Mister Bunce informed them sombrely. Upstairs, the Great Hall was hung with black velvet from floor to ceiling, Gemma reported to Philip. The Household servants wore mourning bands and walked the passageways in silence. Dinner was gruel and supper would be salt-fish. John and the others kicked their heels in boredom. Scovell, John noticed, was not seen all day.
The gatehouse closed on Old Saint Andrew's Day. The first snows fell, cutting the roads, and the yard emptied of all but those ragged men and women who struggled through the drifts for the weekly dole. In the kitchens, the smells of roasting meat and fowl mingled with the sweet scents of great fruit cakes and shivering blancmanges, quaking puddings and hot syllabubs. Mister Pouncey descended with a clinking satchel for Scovell who rang the great copper with his ladle. Once the men had been paid it was the turn of the boys.
‘Phineas Campin!’ the Master Cook called out. ‘I hear your manchet loaves have grown so light, some were seen floating over the chapel.’
The kitchen boys laughed as a blushing Phineas collected his coins. Adam Lockyer followed whose knifework in Underley's jointing room was such a miracle he would soon be joining the King's Army in Bohemia. After him came Jed Scantlebury who must have stolen a pair of seven-league boots he had taken so many great steps forward, then Wendell Turpin, brushing feathers off his livery, Peter Pears ambled up then the Gingell brothers. Even Coake, Barlow and Stubbs received a few words of praise. When Philip had been congratulated on his escape from the scullery, John's name was called. Adam Lockyer gave him a playful push forward.
‘Ah, Master Saturnall,’ Master Scovell exclaimed. ‘Tell me now, where has the kitchen guided you?’
John looked up. The Master Cook had barely addressed a word to him all year. He had set him on this course with no hint of his purpose. Yet now the man waited expectantly.
‘I do not know, Master Scovell,’ John mumbled, squirming under the eyes of the other boys.
‘Then venture further,’ Scovell said.
The man dropped the warm coins into John's hand.
Christmas came. On the Twelfth Night feast, the kitchen echoed with the horseplay in the Great Hall above. When the snows melted, the roads reopened. A week after Lady Day, Henry Palewick called John out to the yard where, at the back of a string
of packhorses, a limping mule regarded John as if he had once done it a grave injustice. Beside the beast, a lean grey-haired man nodded a greeting.
‘They're feeding you then,’ Joshua Palewick greeted John, looking him over. John grinned. He had grown stronger working under the kitchen's regime, the long fiat muscles rising in his arms and legs. The driver clapped him on the back. ‘How's Ben?’
‘The same. How's the village?’
‘Old Holy's sick. The rest of'em ain't much better.’
The driver looked unchanged by the intervening year, thought John, as if time outside the kitchen had remained frozen ever since he had entered the Manor.
‘I hear John Saturnall's a name to reckon with,’ Josh said with a wink to Henry.
‘I'm just a kitchen boy,’ John said, embarrassed.
‘A kitchen boy with Master Scovell's favour.’
‘He doesn't show it,’ John retorted.
The packhorses were unloaded and watered. All around them, carters and porters raised their voices. Across the throng a red-faced Calybute Pardew cried the intelligences of Mercurius Bucklandicus.
‘Monstrous birth in Southstoke!’ the man bellowed. ‘Shower of lizards at Tucking Mill! King's latest quarrel with Parliament! Fear-God and his naked prayer-meet . . .’
‘What's that?’ John swivelled about. Calybute thrust out a pamphlet.
The woodcut in the pamphlet was crude but ‘Fear-God’ stared out with familiar directness, his long hair hanging down on either side of his head. At the sight of Marpot, John felt a slow anger stir inside him.
‘Inside's his wives,’ Calybute said, turning the page. ‘That's what he calls them.’
The women knelt in rows, their ballooning breasts and buttocks drawn in thick crude lines. Marpot stood before them, as naked as they, holding up his Bible. For an instant, Cassie flashed in John's memory. Her white legs as she pulled up her long brown dress to run down the bank.
‘That Marpot?’ Josh asked when Calybute moved on. ‘The one who . . . ‘
John nodded mutely.
‘They say he's preaching out around Zoyland. Him and a whole bunch of bodies. His family, he calls them. Adamites, that's the Bishop's term. His lordship'll have him in the pillory soon enough. Mark my words.’ Josh nodded, turning the mule about. ‘I'll see you next year, John.’
Marpot belonged to a country he had quit, John told himself walking back into the kitchen. Now it was Scovell's voice that rever-berated in his head. Where has the kitchen guided you? . . . Instead of the shouts of the villagers, his ears rang with the clang and clatter of pots and pans. Instead of the chimney's old soot, thick fugs of cooking smells filled his nostrils and the wet winding-sheet smell was drawn away like the fat-flecked water that swirled down the scullery drain.
Now, instead of the hut and the meadow, he ran between Henry Palewick's root stores and apple lofts, or the cellars where barrels and tuns stretched away into the darkness. Where he once had fetched herbs from the slopes, now he carried cheeses wrapped in cloths or onions hung in nets from the larders. In Underley's jointing room, John and Philip scraped bristles and scooped guts into Barney Curle's barrow, stripped sinews and trimmed fat. In the main kitchen they minced the meat and in the spice room they watched Melichert Roos season it with ground fennel and mace.
Spring arrived. The feasts resumed. From the Great Hall above Mister Pouncey's nasal voice rang out again, the piercing tones finding their way down the stairs as he called out the places at the High Table.
‘My Lord Hector and Lady Callock of Forham and Artois! Lord Piers Callock of Forham and Artois! My Lady Musselbrooke the Marchioness of Charnley! My Lord Fell, the Count of Byewater! My Lord Firbrough! The Marquis of Hertford!’
At Shrovetide, Sir Hector's threadbare retainers were joined by those of the Suffords of Mere and the Rowles of Brodenham. At Michaelmas, the Bishop of Carrboro and his retinue came. Processions of horses clopped down the drive. In the kitchen it seemed that each household vied to present more hungry mouths than the last. Midday dinner merged into supper and supper was hardly done before next morning's breakfast began. The days spilled into one another, overflowing at last into the final feast when everyone and everything in the kitchen clanged, shouted, crashed, swore, splashed, bellowed and roared.
‘Just like the old days,’ Mister Bunce observed with satisfaction. ‘No one's got time to piss in a pot.’
Yet for all his industry, a frustration grew in John. The kitchen would guide him, Scovell had promised. But for every dish he mastered, a dozen others rose before his mind's eye. Each skill perfected by his fumbling fingers drew a score of new tasks. If the other boys came to him now when their sauces split, or their meats poached to shreds, or their creams thinned to water the more they beat them, it was only because they did not suspect the vistas of his ignorance. The kitchen knew no limit, he thought, watching Colin and Luke baste, or Vanian shape pastries. Falling asleep next to Philip on the pallet, John dreamed of processions of trays that advanced and rose up the stairs on the shoulders of Quiller's serving men then returned empty to be filled, over and over again . . .
He rose earlier than the other boys and was the last to fall back on his pallet. As the light from the hearth faded, the kitchen boys talked. Alf spoke of his sister while Adam and Peter debated the charms of Ginny and Meg. Adam had seen her naked, so he claimed. The boys rose on their elbows to listen. But John's thoughts drifted to the Rose Garden and the white ankle revealed beneath the dark green skirt. The sharp face in the Solar Gallery. Then a resentful confusion rose in him, a welter of feelings boring new channels through his body. His sweat smelt different, he fancied. Dark hairs marched up his belly. Why should Lucretia Fremantle invade his thoughts down here? His voice was changing too, adding its own odd lurches to the din of the kitchen. Then, with Melichert Roos's spice room awash with preserves and the first sides of pork arriving in the jointing room, the banging, clanging, crackling voices of the kitchen fell silent. Lady Anne's Day had come around again.
Once again gruel and salt-fish steamed in the hearth. Once again Scovell absented himself from the kitchens. The dull day wore on. Driven by boredom, John helped Luke and Colin beat the sides of yellow fish. As the wet salt caked the knotted rope, Luke looked up. Mister Bunce stood in the doorway. His gaze found John.
‘Master Scovell wants to see you.’
The long brown bottle. That was the smell. The same stale fumes had lurked under the mint on Father Hole's breath. Scovell sat in a chair by the fire, wearing a black armband.
‘You summoned me, Master Scovell.’
The Master Cook stirred. ‘Step into the light, John Saturnall.’
His voice was steady.
‘You have combed every room, I hear,’ the man said. ‘Busied yourself in every corner. No kitchen boy was ever so hungry for knowledge, my Head Cooks tell me. What have you learned, John Saturnall?’
Firsts, thought John. The spice room, the bakehouse, the jointing room and the cellars. Each with its different arts to be mastered. But the vistas of his ignorance stretched before him.
‘I know less than when I started, Master Scovell,’ John blurted.
To his surprise, the Master Cook smiled. ‘Then you have come far.’ The man hauled himself from his chair and stood by his desk. ‘I said you must bend your gift to its purpose. Do you recall?’
‘Yes, Master Scovell.’ But that purpose was a riddle, John thought. Another one to add to those left him by his mother. In his mind's eye, the steam twisted up from her kettle once more . . . The man beckoned. The smell of drink grew stronger. Drawing near he saw that Scovell's grey-blue eyes were flecked with red.
‘A true cook has one purpose. A purpose your mother understood as well as myself A purpose of many parts. I think you know it, Master Saturnall.’
John looked back, feeling awkward under the man's gaze. What had his mother told the Master Cook? At the back of his mind he heard her voice. Her final riddle. We keep it for all of t
hem. He shook his head.
‘I do not know, Master Scovell.’
‘The Feast.’
John stiffened, clenching his jaw to keep the shock from his face. In his memory he heard his mother's voice reciting the dishes, his own words returning across the fire. Slowly, he shook his head. Scovell's eyes narrowed. But then he gazed down into the fire.
‘It was a mere story,’ Scovell said, the flickering light playing over his face. ‘So I believed at first. I was barely your age when I heard word of it. Fanciful tales were told in the kitchens where I spent my youth. Tales of a surpassing feast. Some said it was the one served in Eden. Others that it awaited us in Paradise. Its dishes took in every part of Creation and filled a table so great a man could not walk its length in a day. Tall tales. Yet some among the cooks believed an older truth lay behind them. Such a feast had once been served, they said. A feast so bountiful God himself had forbidden that it be kept. For men should earn their bread by labour in the fields, the Lord had decreed. Their wives should bring forth their children in pain. Such a feast would lead men and women into sloth and greed and lust.’ Scovell gave a rueful smile. ‘That feast led me too, but from kitchen to kitchen. Soon I learned that others believed as I did. Some were learned men. Others were fools. Some were honest. Others possessed no more scruples than a magpie. Only the Feast united them. To serve up the whole span of God's Creation . . . Such a cook might better call himself a priest. So I pursued my quarry through the great kitchens until I received word of a feast kept long ago at a place called Buckland. Here at the Manor I discovered old receipts handed down from the Master Cooks and beyond its walls lay the remains of ancient orchards and gardens . . .’
As Scovell spoke, John recalled the smell of the spiced wine from the Saint Joseph's Day feast. And the fruit blossom drifting through the chestnut woods above the chapel.
‘But the receipts proved mere fragments,’ Scovell confessed. ‘The gardens were remnants. The Feast had vanished, I came to believe. Its dishes were lost. So I resigned myself to its disappearance. Then fate brought your mother.’
John Saturnall's Feast Page 17
