As she turned the corner into the rose garden, on an impulse I called after her, ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again.’
She did not stop, but her voice floated back to me. ‘If we both keep looking for places to be alone. Signor Demirco, you may be sure of it.’ ^
‘Forget this,’ she had said, but - rather to my surprise - I found that I could not. It was not her appearance, or not that alone. The French court was full of beautiful women; indeed, by their standards she hardly wus a beauty; that lazy eye, almost a squint, must surely count against her on that score; no, it was something else, something in her manner.
It Italian they have a word, stizzoso^ which means someone who is prickly, discontented, angry even; like a porcupine or hedgehog. Amongst those polished, languid court women of Versailles I had come across very few hedgehogs. But Louise de Keroualle was one.
‘Perhaps we will meet again’ - how clumsy I had been, but she had not rebuffed me altogether. ‘You may be sure of it. .
Well, I had been back to the medlar trees half a dozen times since then, but she had not been there.
Olympe waited until our lovemaking was done, and the two of us were lying head-to-toe on the big four-poster bed in her apartments, before saying, ‘You were distracted today’
I turned and kissed her plump calf. ‘Never.’
‘Who is she?’
‘What do you mean? There’s no one but you.’
‘Liar.’ Olympe kicked me away and sat up, propping herself on one arm. ‘Tell me. I much prefer intrigues to compliments, if the truth be known. Perhaps I can help you seduce her, whoever she is.’
‘There’s a girl . . .’ I said reluctandy.
‘Well, of course. Who? Come on, tell me.’
‘Louise de Kerouaile. I don’t know why, but I find her rather intriguing.’
‘Oh, her.' Olympe lay back down again. ‘Forget her. You can’t have her. Nobody can.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s not married, of course.’ Seeing my look of incomprehension, she explained, ‘One can tolerate infidelity in a wife or a mistress - indeed, it’s to be expected, in a place like this. But a potential fiancee - particularly one as poverty-stricken as poor litde Louise de Kerouaile - has only her virginity to recommend her. Sadly, she’s much too poor for anyone at this court even to think of marrying her. And so she will remain a virgin for ever, unless her parents realise their mistake and place her in a less demanding marketplace.’
‘You make her sound like something for sale.’
‘Of course. We women are all for sale. It is simply that some of us prefer to handle the negotiations ourselves. Or to loan
ourselves out occasionally.’ She stretched luxuriously. ‘In any case, she’s quite wrong for you. She disapproves of anyone having fun.’
‘She disapproves of you, you mean?’
‘Can you imagine,’ Olympe said, not answering me directly, ‘what a persondike that would be like in bed? The only interest would be in seeing if you could get her there in the first place. After that -’ she made a dismissive shrug - ‘boredom.’
‘She probably thinks bed is for reading books.’
Olympe laughed. ‘I found a book I would quite like us to read,’ she said teasingly. ‘Aretino’s Postures. The court is going mad for it. It shows twenty-seven variations of position, and there are at least four we have not tried yet.’
I glanced at her naked body. ‘When shall I see you next?’
‘Like this? That rather depends on whether you intend to do anything about the de Keroualle girl.’
‘You said I couldn’t have her.’
‘You can’t.’ She swung her short, voluptuous legs off the bed and went towards the anteroom, where her bath was waiting. ‘But I don’t think that’s going to stop you from trying, is it?’
I did not see Louise de Keroualle again for almost a week. The days were even hotter now, and there was a constant stream of requests coming down from the ladies and gendemen of the court for iced cordials and cooling liquors, not to mention the king’s competition to think about... I did not see her, but I found my thoughts returning to her, and the king’s competition received less attention than it should have done as a result.
I was in the ice pantry, overseeing the making of a batch of sorbets, when a woman’s voice said, ‘Excuse me.’
It was her. She was wearing a simple short-sleeved dress of brown linen. But I saw the way the cold of the pantry had brought goose-skin to her forearms and the delicate flesh below her throat, and quite suddenly I could imagine just what it would
be like to step forward, to take those velvety forearms between my hands, and rub them until the bumps had gone . . .
‘Mademoiselle de Keroualle,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Perhaps I spoke a little too enthusiastically: at any rate, it seemed to me tliat she eyed me somewhat warily.
‘If this is really a pleasure, signor, then perhaps you are too easily pleased.’
I was not to be dissuaded by the rattling of her quills. ‘If you dissect so innocent a pleasantry, perhaps you are too easily offended.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Anyway, Madame has sent me. She would like a glass of iced chicory water.’
‘Certainly - I will make it myself But it will take a few minutes.’
‘I can wait.’ She leaned against one of the stone shelves that ran against the wall, folding her arms across her chest to keep warm, as I began to assemble the things I would need. Occasionally I glanced at her, hoping that my smiles might encourage her to reciprocate, but she simply looked around, as if curious about her surroundings.
At the back of the pantry stood a great stack of ice blocks, ready to be crushed, carved, or smashed. ‘How beautiful they are,’ she said quietly.
‘Beautiful?’ I had not thought of them that way. To me they were simply bricks, raw materials waiting to be used, but they were beautiful in a way, I now saw, each slab as individual as porphyry or marble; some clear as crystal, some opaque, some containing within their centres suspended cores and whorls of frozen whiteness, like water that turns cloudy as it is stirred. The stack was as low and as wide as a table, and in the dim light of the pantry it gave off a land of cold, silvery glow.
‘So pure,’ she said. ‘And so remarkable, here in the middle of summer.’
‘Thes.e come by cart direct from the king’s own caves at Besan^on. There is no finer ice in Paris.’ I glanced at her arms, at the fine hairs that once again had risen along her forearms. ‘You’re cold. Here, let me rub—’
‘Thank you,’ she said quickly, moving away. ‘But there is no need, really. Like you, I am used to the cold.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’ Pulling on a grating glove - a gauntlet of thick leather covered with a lattice of chainmail - I began to shave ice into a bowl with a hard, rhythmic motion.
‘Where I come from - the Bay of Brest - the winters are very severe.’ She was silent for a moment, as if remembering. ‘Even the sea fills with ice. Sometimes a fog comes in from the German Sea and freezes everything, every tree and blade of grass, and they become coated with tiny crystals, like a white fur.’
I nodded. ‘I have heard of such a thing, though I have never seen it.’
‘If you are warm, or rich, or young, it is rather wonderful,’ she said. Her eyes had a faraway look in them as they followed the rhythmic motion of my hand across the ice. ‘But if you are poor, or old, or hungry, it can be terrifying. Every year, when the earth could be dug again, we buried dozens of people killed by the bad weather. My family were better off than most, of course. We always had enough for a fire in the great hall - a fire, of wood, that is, not sea coal. But in the nursery, or the sleeping quarters - there we had no heat at all. We used to look forward to snow, because that was a sign the weather was getting warmer. If you woke up and the grate was full of snow, you would puU on your clothes and run outside to dance and make snowmen.’ Her eyes softened at a memory. ‘Or throw snowballs at your brothers, of course. But that was before I was sent to court.’