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 bare 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 knowledge.’
He scowled when I laughed. But how could I help it. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr. Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices and favoured democracy. Being mostly thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.
The first plate we turned to in the first book showed a baby being extracted from between a woman’s legs with a hook. We assumed the baby was dead. The second showed an arm being sawn off. Emile shut the book with a snap and slid it into its gap on the right-hand side of the top shelf. It had a fraying leather spine like every other book in the cabinet. We both memorised its position and knew we’d be back for another look later.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Well enough.’
Jeanne-Marie and I had been friends for more than a year. It was not just the kissing and my hands under her blouse I missed. I’d grown used to talking to her. She was the person I could say things to I couldn’t say to anyone else. Emile still saw his goose girl. It was rumoured they’d been seen together in the woods flattening bluebells as she laughed and fought off his closer attentions. He never mentioned her to me. It was a kindness.
Most of my spare time I spent in the kitchens, the vicomte having suggested to the headmaster that I be given the run of them. After the head cook had recovered from his fury that anyone outside the kitchens should dare tell him what to do, he granted me one half of an insufferably hot and extremely small room next to the great oven. I still brought the man rabbits, although fewer than the previous year, and anything else I caught that he might use. He no longer paid me in greasy sous, having decided access to his kingdom was payment enough.
My recipe book grew week by week as that spring turned to summer and the harvest was brought in. Rats from the rubbish dump tasted sour. Rats fed on grain from the new harvest had a cleanness that required only frying in butter and a few leaves of shredded mint to make palatable. I gave some to Emile and told him it was chicken. He didn’t doubt it, although to me it tasted more like owl. I killed a sleeping grass snake and stewed it with cat as the colonel said the Chinese did. The effects on my subtlety and vitality, if any, were minimal. The hiding place for my journal was obvious. It lived beside the first book we’d taken from the locked cabinet, its spine worn and shabby enough for the book to fit happily among its brothers.
It was while writing notes on a disappointing dormouse recipe that my life changed. The sauce had curdled, the clove spicing was entirely wrong, the taste was as sour as if I’d been chewing crab apples. I was wrestling with my foul humour when I looked out of the library window and saw a cart trundling down the drive towards the gates. The carter sat on a plank at the front, and behind him, on trunks, were Madame Faure and Jeanne-Marie, who looked a little more like her mother than when she’d left six months earlier. No one knew why they’d gone. A sick grandmother was the sensible suggestion. The most popular was that, having been bedded by the colonel, Madame Faure threw a hairbrush at her husband and left, taking her daughter with her. And here they were, almost inside the gates and headed for the arch into the main courtyard. I was hurtling down the back stairs, the grand stairs being forbidden to pupils, when I realised I could hardly burst into the courtyard and simply embrace Jeanne-Marie.
Dr. Faure looked round as I stumbled to a halt in front of the cart.
‘The cases,’ I said. ‘I thought you might need help carrying the cases.’
‘Why not?’ Dr. Faure said. He signalled to a couple of other boys and between us we wrestled the luggage from the cart and onto the cobbles, having first stepped back to let Madame Faure and her daughter down. Jeanne-Marie passed me by without a glance. She was nowhere to be seen when we finally laboured the first of the cases into the smaller courtyard and up the outside stairs that led to her raised door. The school was old, and this bit the oldest; built in the days of rebellions and civil wars, when it was dangerous to have a door at ground level. We lugged another two cases up those stairs, listing in whispers what could be in them to make them so heavy, our hissed inventions growing wilder with each step. The lead-encased corpse of Madame Faure’s lover was our last suggestion before we staggered through the door and found Jeanne-Marie waiting.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.
The others took one look at her scowling face and left with their half-completed goodbyes trailing after them. ‘Jeanne-Marie . . . ’
She stepped back as I stepped forward. ‘You owe me a cat,’ she said fiercely. ‘I’ve thought about it and I don’t mind the dog. But you o
we me a cat.’
‘You said it farted and its fur stank.’
‘Don’t be rude . . . ’ She sounded almost grown up when she said that. Her face was rounder, her hips a little wider, her blouse had filled to reveal a definite curve. Impatiently, she pulled the coat she was wearing over it tighter. ‘You understand? You owe me a cat.’ She turned to go and my stomach tightened.
‘Wait,’ I begged.
She kept walking.
‘What kind of cat?’ I asked desperately.
Jeanne-Marie turned back and I could see that question hadn’t occurred to her. Thought pulled at one side of her lip and she looked for a second as I remembered her. Searching inward, asking herself questions. When her eyes refocused she looked a little kinder, as if the answer itself made her smile. ‘A kitten,’ she said. ‘I want a kitten.’
‘I know exactly where to find one.’
She looked at me, considering. Was this a trick? How desperate was I to keep her talking? Later, I wondered if her harshness to me was a game. Or simply a way of saying don’t think we can go back to where we were. Or maybe she really did miss having a cat and believed I should provide one having been responsible for the death of the other.
‘Where?’
‘Beyond the ruined village.’
‘You know that’s out of bounds.’
I nodded, and interest entered her eyes. She smiled for the first time since I saw her on the cart and let go the coat she’d gripped tightly around her. ‘You go then,’ she said. ‘Bring me a kitten and we can be friends again.’
I shook my head. ‘You must come too.’
‘Why?’ Jeanne-Marie asked.
‘So you can make your choice.’
It was an answer she liked. ‘When?’ she demanded.
‘Tonight . . . ’
She shook her head. ‘My mother’s tired and my father will want to talk about my grandmother.’ She saw my question and said, ‘She died.’
‘Your mother’s mother?’
‘My father’s. He had his work so we went.’
‘Was it hard?’
Her glare said it was.
‘My parents died,’ I told her. Hoping for forgiveness.
‘I remember. You said they starved.’ Jeanne-Marie considered that and decided it counted. ‘Tomorrow night. Where do we meet?’
‘By the bridge.’
The bridge is what the goose girl used to scurry for before we stopped trying to ambush her. The land our side of the bridge is school grounds and we could rightly demand a toll. After the bridge was common land belonging to the village. Well, so the village said. The local baron disagreed but was too lazy to go to court over scrub and marsh and thorn. Had it been forest he’d have asserted his rights years ago. Tonight’s moon lights the bridge’s weathered handrails and glitters on the shallow stream, revealing gravel at the bottom and a single stickleback hanging in the water like a miniature pike.
Jeanne-Marie is there before me. ‘You’re late.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘Through the back door from our quarters.’
That part of the school has doors at ground level so all she had to do was keep to the shadows as she headed for the gardens and across the inner field towards the bridge. ‘I left through my dorm window,’ I tell her. ‘Walked the ledge around that side of the tower and climbed down the guttering.’
She agrees this is more difficult. ‘Where are the kittens?’
I take her hand, and though she doesn’t fold her fingers in mine, she doesn’t pull away either, as I lead her across the bridge and along a bank that separates two water meadows that have returned to marsh. We walk in the shadows of willow trees along the way and cut across a patch of drier ground towards the ruined village. No one knows when it was ruined or why. Maybe plague passed this way. Maybe soldiers. Most of the walls are broken at hip height, and the highest only rises to my shoulder. There’s a rotten door leaning drunkenly from a broken frame, and we slip into the ruins of a house and out through the back into a field beyond. I want to stop in the ruins, kiss Jeanne-Marie and feel the new ampleness inside her blouse but common sense stops me. The kittens are the key. Without the kittens we can’t go back to where we were.
‘Up here,’ I say. ‘We’re almost there.’
She takes my word for it and doesn’t complain when up there turns out to be another half mile of scrub and hedge. Silhouetted in the darkness, a dead oak separates its trunk into branches and spreads those branches into twigs. Like veins in the flesh of the sky. I marvel at my thought. The thought of any twelve-year-old who considers himself a thinker. But to me it feels original. ‘In here,’ I say, pointing at a bank of thorns. ‘I heard them yesterday.’
Jeanne-Marie stops and stares at a woven mass of twisting tendrils, each one studded with nail-length thorns. ‘How do we . . . ?’
‘Under there.’ The entrance is low and worn to grit by the feet of animals forcing a trail through the bushes. I doubt anything larger than a badger has tried to come this way before. ‘I’ll go ahead.’
She nods doubtfully.
Thorns snag my shirt and I crouch lower, realising I’ll have to crawl on my belly if I’m to reach the cat. It’s a slow process that sees a thorn scrape my temple. Blood slithers on my cheek and drips like slow tears on the broken leaves in front of my face. I can hear Jeanne-Marie’s sour muttering behind me and hope we find kittens. This seemed such a good idea when I suggested it, but with my face in the dirt and thorns tugging at my back and Jeanne-Marie’s sudden ouches behind me I’m close to deciding it was really stupid. And then, somehow, I see moonlight ahead and crawl out into a tramped circle set in the middle of the thorns. A slab of fallen wall stops their growth. And though they reach in it’s too large to let the thorns close over the top. Jeanne-Marie looks around her.
‘Heavens,’ she says. ‘How did you find this?’
I didn’t, I almost tell her. I simply heard the kittens mewling from outside. But she’s looking round with a grin on her face and I can see why. We’re protected from the world by a razor-sharp circle of thorns. This is a place where magic happens—and we’re the contents of the magic basket. ‘Hush,’ I say, putting my finger to her lips.
We listen for the kittens and I hear squeaking, slightly back the way we’ve come. So I turn until I face the other way and crawl into the tunnel, stopping to listen again. They’re to the side and sound loud enough to be within reach. I push my hand between branches and feel fur, the kitten tiny and noisy. I expect the mother to savage me but am allowed to remove a kitten without being attacked. There are five, six if you count a dead one. All thin and mewling and too weak to stand. My fingers reach again and I touch the mother’s side, ribs thin as bare bones. Dead, I think . . . She stirs, however, and tries to snap but something stops her reaching me. It’s dark inside the thorn tunnel, the moon slivers of yellow lighting brief lengths of brutal branch. I have the kittens; I have the key back into Jeanne-Marie’s heart. All I have to do is take them.
Jeanne-Marie’s voice calls me.
‘Wait,’ I whisper, reaching again. The cat’s front leg is trapped between strands of thorn that have hooked their claws into her. She could be snagged in a snare given the mess they’ve made of her. She explodes into hisses as I touch the wound and tries to fight free. ‘I’m trying to help,’ I say. Thorns scratch my wrists as I push one strand away, freeing her leg. Breaking off the sticky spikes smooths the branch, and then I pull the other branch towards me, breaking its spikes in turn. Very slowly her leg comes free.
‘Follow me,’ I say to Jeanne-Marie, and tuck the kittens into my shirt and crawl down the dirt tunnel until I’m out in the moonlight and the thorn bank is behind me. Jeanne-Marie struggles to her feet a moment later, her face furious.
‘Why did you . . . ?’ She stops at the sight of the injured cat, her eyes
widening as I pull the five kittens from inside my shirt.
‘Take your pick.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She trapped herself on thorns.’
‘And so did you.’ Jeanne-Marie wipes blood from my chin.
My face is a mess where I stretched for the twisting branches that trapped the cat; a long thorn dips under the skin of my wrist and reappears half an inch later. She watches intently as I pull it free and check for others. There’s a stream a hundred yards behind us and I wash myself there, splashing water on my face and rinsing my hands until blood stops welling from a dozen different cuts. I wash the cat’s back leg and she barely protests. All the flesh is gone from her sides and her hips are hollow, her teats sucked sore by starving kittens. As I lift her free, a single drop of milk spills onto my finger. It tastes of sadness and despair.
‘Food,’ I say. ‘She needs feeding.’
Jeanne-Marie’s eyes are alight with an expression I don’t recognise. An inner light that makes her face glow and her expression soften. ‘Give me the kittens.’ She folds a mixed bundle of mewling fur into the front of her blouse, exposing the softness of her stomach, a softness missing the last time my hands passed that way. I put the cat over my shoulder and hold the creature in place with one hand. As is always the way, the return trip seems to pass more quickly than the trip out. The solid mass of the school rising in front of us.
‘What does she need?’
‘Eggs. Six raw eggs and chicken if you can find any.’
Jeanne-Marie leaves me with the cat and the kittens and returns within two minutes, clutching a chicken leg, and with the eggs folded into her blouse where the kittens had been. She drops to a crouch and watches while I break an egg and feed the cat, which licks overflowing white and yolk from the bottom half of the shell. A second egg vanishes as quickly. Water, I think. I should give her water. I fill two half shells with water from a butt against the school wall and she drinks those down while Jeanne-Marie peers closer.
The Last Banquet Page 5
