The sad truth is that, apart from dog, one animal tastes much like another, and those that don’t taste like chicken mostly taste like beef, with the rest tasting like mutton. The secret of variety for meat is in the spicing. Vegetables, fruits, herbs have far wider variations in taste than the creatures that pick, browse or gnaw upon them. Even the way we describe the taste of meats other than the obvious ones is wrong. We say cat tastes like chicken when, had we been weaned on kitten stew, we’d say chicken tastes like cat.
‘To cook mice’ was my first recipe, written in careful lettering in a small notebook stolen from a master. I was ten and lied about the taste. It tasted more like chicken than beef because my palate was too inexperienced to make a better comparison. A cat and a dog changed my life. The cat came first, although the cat in this bit of the story is not that cat, simply a wild cat found trapped in a bush. But before this cat came a whipping. The old headmaster died the winter I was nine. The school was hushed into silence and slow movement. We knew in our common rooms and dorms that something was wrong because that afternoon’s lessons were cancelled and the doctor was seen entering the gates in his cart and was hurried up the main stairs by the old headmaster’s son himself.
The whole school attended his funeral.
The year I was ten no one died—and the year I turned eleven Dr. Faure arrived. He taught Latin and theology and disliked me from the start. He disliked my face, my friendship with Emile, which he found suspicious, and he disliked that I was due to stay with Emile during the coming holiday when the terms of my attendance said I should remain at St. Luce. He whipped me in his first week at school for being disgusting.
That is, he whipped me for eating a raw snail. Snails were common in the stews we were given and the masters ate snails boiled in butter and seasoned with garlic. This was different apparently. Because I took the snail from a pile of night soil collected from the school’s latrines and I ate the snail raw. He announced he would transfer that rawness from the snail to my buttocks. After Friday prayers and the blessing, I was called forward, climbed the steps to the dais, and told to drop my breeches and grip the far edge of a small table—a position that left me stretched across the table with my behind exposed.
He used a switch of willow twigs, soaked overnight in a tub of brine that was carried in between two boys. The salt water makes the twigs subtle and acts as an astringent to stop the stripes going bad. The first blow made me jump so fiercely my knuckles cracked where I gripped the table. I was eleven. Everyone I knew in the world was watching in silence as I fought the pain that scalded up my body. Emile had told me to scream. He said people like Dr. Faure liked you to scream. There would be fewer strokes and it would be over quicker if I screamed. Only my throat was too tight and the scream would not reach past my teeth.
The second blow was fiercer, the third so fierce that the wall of the assembly hall swam in and out of darkness. A whimper left my lips and I heard Dr. Faure mutter in satisfaction. I kept silent for the fourth blow, helped by the darkness that washed over me the second it landed. The fifth had my mouth open in a silent scream and I would have howled my lungs out with the sixth had I not looked up and seen a girl staring at me through a crack in an almost closed door. Her dark hair was greasy, her eyes wide and shocked, her mouth slightly open. She was my age, perhaps a year older.
A girl, in a school of a hundred and fifty boys.
The sixth blow shocked me into a low moan and the headmaster stepped forward before Dr. Faure could decide to launch another. When I looked up the girl was gone and the side door to the assembly room shut again. I was helped to my feet by the headmaster and put into the care of two of my classmates, who were told to take me to my classroom and report to his wife if I showed any sign of fever. Dr. Faure glowered at the fuss and scowled at me so fiercely I grinned, which only made him angrier.
They clapped me into the classroom, the other boys. I was a hero, the boy who took six strokes of the birch and barely murmured. I had to drop my trews and stand there while classmate after classmate came to stare at the bleeding. It was the best, several agreed, beating the existing record for damage, which had been inflicted by ten strokes of the cane laid on with full force by the headmaster the summer before. The previous record holder spent a full minute with his face a hand’s breadth from my rear while the class waited in silence for his verdict. Magnanimously, he agreed this was better.
A round of clapping saluted his sportsmanship.
‘Are you an idiot?’ Emile hissed, dragging me to one side when the clapping was done and the class had returned to flicking over the pages of the books they should have been reading or baiting each other. ‘He’ll just whip you again harder.’
Emile was usually good at knowing what others thought but he was wrong in this and I told him so. Dr. Faure could not risk that I would hold out again. He’d failed to get a scream out of me and the headmaster had stopped him before he could inflict lasting damage. I’d made an enemy for life; neither Emile nor I doubted that. But Dr. Faure could not risk another so very public humiliation in front of the boys. We should have guessed his response. Since he couldn’t break me he would break Emile. It happened the following week. Some imagined infraction on Monday afternoon saw Emile stretched across a table in the assembly hall on Tuesday morning, Dr. Faure with a sneer on his face and a birch gripped firmly in his hand. Emile did scream. He screamed so loud that some of the smaller boys covered their ears. The headmaster stepped forward when blood began to flow after the third stroke, not to stop the whipping but to indicate Dr. Faure should lessen his vigour. It made no difference, Emile was sobbing by then.
No one clapped him into our classroom. No one suggested he drop his breeches so I could see if I’d lost my title, although his bruising was every bit as bad and his welts as bloodily raw as mine had been. They avoided him as if cowardice was catching. His bourgeois birth, the fact his grandmother was meant to be Jewish, his going home at weekends were rolled out as reasons for his weakness. He went to bed still crying and woke looking even more hollow-eyed than the day before. At lunchtime, unable to stand his silent tears or the insults of my companions, I went to find the headmaster’s wife and insisted Emile had a fever.
‘What are the symptoms?’
‘He cries,’ I said.
She sighed heavily, muttered something about that bloody man and told me to fetch Emile immediately. He should spend the night in the sanatorium and since I was his friend I could sleep there too. In the meantime I was to bring her Emile and then return to my lessons. I was d’Aumout, wasn’t I? I agreed this was me and did what she said, collecting Emile under the scornful gaze of my classmates. ‘I’ll see you later,’ I told him.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said bitterly. ‘I want to be alone anyway.’
‘Don’t you want revenge?’ The plan had been forming since that morning. It was risky but what good plan wasn’t? And it would give Emile back his confidence and even impress the rest of the class. Not waiting for his reply, I left him at the door of the sanatorium, a dark room overlooking a small courtyard in which Dr. Faure kept his dog. Dr. Faure’s quarters were opposite so we would need to act quietly.
Back in the classroom I told them Emile needed volunteers for a plan he was going to put into action that night.
‘What kind of plan?’
‘He needs a judge, a scribe and a witness to swear that the trial was fair. Emile will act as the judge.’
‘And you?’ someone demanded.
‘I’ll be the executioner. Should one be necessary.’
‘He’s going to try Dr. Faure?’
I shook my head. ‘Even better. He’s going to try his dog.’
Marcus, our class captain, grinned and I knew that if we brought this off Emile would be forgiven. Dr. Faure’s dog was a foul-tempered hound on which he doted. It spent its nights in the locked courtyard howling at the slightest noise a
nd keeping the dormitories awake. The beast was walked religiously each day and was, everyone agreed, the only thing in the school with a fouler temperament than the man who walked it. The boys in my class began to draw up a list of crimes with which the dog should be charged.
By the time the shadows thickened to darkness everyone except Emile knew he’d sworn ferocious revenge on Dr. Faure, and he greeted my news of this with wide eyes. His lips were bitten, his face puffy and his nose red from crying. So I told him to rinse himself in the cold water the headmaster’s wife had sent up for us. When he just stood there, I put a china bowl on a tripod stand and poured the water myself, then gripped his head and pushed him under. He came up spluttering and flailing at me with useless fists.
‘You do it for yourself then.’
He scowled furiously and splashed his face noisily, spilling water down the front of his uniform, since neither of us had changed for bed and nor would we until justice had been done. I explained what I wanted from him. He’d seen his father in action in a courtroom. He was to be that man. This was to be done seriously.
‘I’m the judge?’
‘Yes. You prosecute and Marcus defends. But the final decision is yours and you are the one who passes sentence.’
‘But how can we get the dog to stay quiet? It will bark itself mad and Faure will come. He’ll see us.’ Another thought occurred to him. ‘And how do we get into the courtyard? It’s locked at night.’
‘That’s the point,’ I said. The little courtyard belonged to the Faures’ quarters and though a dozen windows looked into it there were only two doors: one into the main body of the school and one across the way into where the Faures lived. Dr. Faure locked the first when he retired for the night and the second after he’d put his dog out. Only one man had the keys to those doors. Well, perhaps the headmaster had a spare set. But only one man had ready access. ‘We don’t get into the courtyard. The trial takes place on the roof overlooking Faure’s door. As for keeping the brute quiet . . . ’
I pulled a bag from under my coat, feeling its stickiness.
Emile looked in horror at the chunk of bloody meat I offered him. He stepped back and seemed to be reconsidering the whole idea.
‘What’s that?’
‘Madame Faure’s cat. I took a piece for . . . experimentation.’ I didn’t share the fact I’d fried that piece and still had slivers of cat and onion trapped in my back teeth. ‘This is the rest of it. It should be enough. Although we’ll need a quick trial. A decisive judgement.’
His eyes widened at my attempt to sound grown-up and I almost smiled but caught myself in time. Serious. For this to work we had to be serious. Was he always so thin? I wondered. Had he always looked so weak? His eyes were watery, his lips bitten with anxiety. In my head he was bigger than me, this boy who punched me that first day and demanded my conkers. Now I realised I was looking down on him.
‘You killed her cat?’
‘It was fat and ugly.’
‘This judgement . . . ’ Emile sounded anxious.
‘Execution. Death by hanging. To be carried out immediately.’
He mouthed the words, trying to make them his. Then it was time to meet the others in the lesser attic. Being caught out of bed would see us all whipped and I hurried Emile up the stairs, his steps slow and his face tight from his earlier beating. A broken harp loomed over us, leather cases rotted to spill their contents, a pair of ruined rapiers, their snapped blades rendering them exactly the right length for boys our age. Marcus grabbed one and tossed the other to a friend. Their clatter of enthusiastic battle was stilled by my outraged hiss.
‘Leave the blades here,’ Emile whispered. ‘Take them on the way back.’ Ordinarily Marcus would never take orders, but the fact Emile was judge in what came next was enough. Marcus put down the broken foil and his friend did the same.
At the far end of the attic was a door to the roof. Most of us had come this way for bets or to cut lead from the flashings to be melted to make silver rivers or dropped into water to make strange shapes. That was the way we went, up one side of a gully where two roofs met and down the other side, to a parapet overlooking the courtyard where Dr. Faure kept his dog. It was late summer and the air was rich with the stink of recently manured fields. The countryside was a dark sea around us. The peasantry were like their animals, early to rise and early to sleep, driven by the seasons and the length of the day.
‘God’s farted,’ Marcus said. Someone sniggered and someone else muttered about blasphemy. I ignored them, already reaching into my bag.
‘May I go ahead?’ I asked Emile.
He stared at me, his hollow eyes half lit by moonshine the yellow of a cheap rush light. He was rocking slightly on his feet.
‘You’re the judge. May I go ahead to quieten the dog?’
‘Go,’ he said. So I opened my bag and pulled out a sliver of bleeding meat and lobbed it underarm along the edge of the parapet so it just cleared the top and splattered down onto the courtyard bricks. An eruption of barking greeted its landing, and I heard Marcus swear and Emile groan, and then the barking became snuffling. No lights showed in Dr. Faure’s house, no windows were thrown open. The snuffling became a whine for more.
‘Here.’ I gestured the others closer.
They huddled around me and I had to burrow through them to reach where Emile stood on the edge. His face was white.
‘Do this,’ I whispered.
He raised his chin and his face changed as if his body were a house inhabited by different owners. He moved confidently through the small crowd and stared down at the foul-faced dog. ‘Feed it again,’ he ordered. The dog took its bloody mouthful and looked up to hear the charges. ‘You are charged,’ Emile said, ‘with being owned by Dr. Faure. You are charged with being a vile four-legged monster no better than your master. You are charged with being ugly, noisy and foul-tempered. How do you plead?’ The animal whined for another sliver of meat and Emile nodded. ‘The plaintiff pleads not guilty.’
I tossed the plaintiff another chunk of Madame Faure’s cat and wondered if I had enough to last the trial. Emile must have wondered the same, because he turned to the defence and ordered him to keep his speech short and to the point. He then ordered the official witness to watch carefully. It was important that justice was seen to be done. This was an Emile none of us had seen before. Very different from the snivelling wretch who had sidled into our classroom that morning on a sea of his own tears.
‘Begin,’ Emile ordered.
‘To sentence a dog for its owner’s sins is no fairer than punishing a servant for obeying his master. The dog is not at fault. If it were my dog or your dog instead of Dr. Faure’s dog it would still be the same dog. Would you judge it then?’
A couple of the boys clapped softly and I agreed. It was a good speech—to the point and clear about the potential for injustice. I wondered how Emile would answer.
‘The charges are in two parts. Both are serious. It is Dr. Faure’s dog, and it is an ugly brute no better than its master. Where those points overlap is where the seriousness of this offence lies. When two men gather together for the committal of crime this is conspiracy. In this case we have a conspiracy of ugliness. This court requires you to prove two things to establish innocence. That the dog is not ugly, and that it is not owned by Dr. Faure . . . Jean-Marie, more meat.’
I threw it down as the lawyer for the defence began his hasty summary. He could not prove either point, but repeated that the dog was of previously good character and threw himself on the mercy of the court. It was a poor dog, a dog that knew no better, that had fallen in with bad company and was being judged for the sins of others.
Emile, however, was not swayed. ‘There can be no mercy for crimes of this nature.’ He looked to the boy acting as witness. ‘You accept the trial is fair and carried out in accordance with the law. You hold witness to this fact?’
The boy nodded seriously.
‘Then all that remains is for me to pass sentence.’ Emile leant out over the parapet so he could see the dog clearly. Staring back, the dog wagged its tail and whined for treats. ‘Pleading now will not help you. You have been found guilty of crimes so serious that there can only be one sentence . . . ’ Emile let the pause stretch. ‘And that sentence is death.’ A couple of our classmates looked at each other and he raised his eyebrows as if wondering what they thought we were doing out here on a rotting roof.
‘You may carry on,’ he told me flatly.
I reached for a rope coiled under my jacket, its noose already prepared, and hesitated. ‘The condemned deserves to finish his last meal . . . ’ The remaining pieces of meat splattered onto the brick below and the dog wolfed them down, thrashing its tail with delight and licking its chops. I felt sick at the thought of what I was to do next and furious with myself for suggesting it. The last chunk of meat vanished down the dog’s gullet with barely a chew of those fearsome teeth. And as the hound looked up and whined expectantly, my noose dropped over its head and I yanked furiously, desperation putting steel in my muscles. One handful of rope followed another. The dog rose rapidly until my grip slipped, it plummeted a few feet and came to an abrupt halt. The drop broke its neck. The whole thing was over in seconds.
‘Help me,’ I said desperately.
‘Do what?’ Marcus and the others looked puzzled.
‘Drag the carcass up here. We can’t simply leave it.’ That obvious point had passed them by in the excitement. A huge dog dead in the courtyard would inevitably point suspicion at us. The animal had to vanish. That way, the servants would decide it was witchcraft and the headmaster would waste his time telling them not to be so stupid. Forming a line, my classmates began to pull on the rope while I kept the pendulum dog away from the wall. Our victim was almost at the parapet when I looked up and froze.
‘What?’ Emile demanded.
I grabbed the noose and wrestled the dead dog onto the parapet. ‘Nothing,’ I said hastily. ‘Simply shadows.’ A girl stared at me from a window opposite. White as a ghost against the darkness of an unlit room. Her hair was down and she wore a thin shift. I swear, even from across the courtyard, I could tell she was grinning.
The Last Banquet Page 3
