Her gaze shifted back to me. ‘As for your little problem, that is easily settled.’
‘It is?’
Olympe got up and moved towards the bedroom. ‘I know I said we would not do this for the time being, but I find intrigues strangely arousing. Come; your cure awaits.’
Afterwards she said, ‘So . . . Do you think your litde virgin would really have been as much fun as that?’
I laughed. ‘You are quite right, as ever. She is much too dull for me. I shan’t give her another thought.’
‘Don’t be too hasty,’ she said.
Something in her tone alerted me. ‘Olympe, what are you scheming now?’
‘I have had an idea,’ she admitted. ‘Rather a delicious one - I have all my best ideas while making love. It’s very simple. Instead of seducing her, why don’t you marry her?’
‘Marry Louise!’
‘Yes. It’s perfect, isn’t it? After all, you have to marry sometime, and it should be to someone who advances your interests. You have money - new money, admittedly, but someone in her position can’t be too choosy, and time is running out; she must be at least twenty by now. But her family is a good one, and the king clearly likes her: by taking her as your wife, you would consolidate your own position.’
I was silent for a moment. ‘And afterwards?’
She shrugged. ‘As soon as she’s pregnant, you set her up in a house somewhere suitably removed. It needn’t affect your other arrangements.’ She put her hand on my arm, stroking it idly. ‘It might even make them easier. There are plenty of women who would rather have an affair with a married man than a single one. You would have the best of both worlds.’
‘And it suits your interests too, by removing Louise de Keroualle from court.’
‘Of course,’ she said simply. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise.’
I thought about it. It was true that I should marry soon: true, too, that my wealth, and the royal warrant, meant that I could hope to marry someone with connections. I had already risen further than I had ever thought possible; but with the right sort of wife, and, I hoped, the presidency of the guild, there was no reason why I should not go even further.
‘Well, I will consider it,’ I said. Olympe only smiled enigmatically.
Carlo
To make snow: take a pottle of thick cream, and the whites of eight eggs, and beat them all together with a spoon. Then take a stick, and cut the end four square: scent your mixture with some essence of bergamot or rosewater, and beat it hard until it rises.
The Book of Ices
In Florence, Ahmad sometimes told stories as we worked. The stories were about many things, but they were always, in some way, about ice.
One tale concerned our employers and a man who had worked for them a hundred and fifty years earlier. The story went that one winter it snowed in Florence. The children of Piero de’ Medici tried to make a snowman, but being children, and unpractised, their efforts were unsuccessful. So Piero summoned one of his late father’s artists and ordered him to carve them a snowman.
The young man tried to explain that working in the medium of snow was not a fitting use of his talents. Piero di Medici told him to be sure to be finished by morning.
All that frozen night, by the light of the moon, the artist sculpted the snow as if it were a block of the finest Cararra marble, his hands wrapped in soaked, freezing rags against the cold.
In the morning the Medici princes ran out to the courtyard to see what he had done. It was, a contemporary wrote, undoubtedly the most beautiful snowman that anyone had ever seen. But the day brought milder weather, and with the milder weather came rain. Soon there was nothing left of Michelangelo’s first sculpture
except a withered stalagmite of ice, like the stump of a decayed tooth, the only white thing left in the courtyard.
At this point Ahmad would pause. ‘Some people take this story to illustrate the transience of beauty and the tyranny of time, boy. I take it to mean something else. Two things, in fact. First, when a Medici tells you to jump, you ask how high. And the second . . .’ His eyes rested thoughtfully on my eager gaze. ‘And* the second is, always keep your ice away from rain.’
I made Louise de Keroualle a snowman.
It was probably not as spectacular as Michelangelo’s, but then, Michelangelo’s had not been edible.
First I had to make my snow. Milk and sugar, flavoured with rosewater, mixed with the white of eggs and beaten with a plaited whisk. Only when the froth was so light it floated off the whisk did I chill it, turning it to flakes of the purest, most delicate snow.
From this I fashioned two balls for the body and the head, adding a hat of crisp caramel and a smile of candied orange. The eyes were dried sultanas, the nose a cherry that had been preserved in liqueur. In one hand the snowman held a broom made of rosemary, while on his chest he bore a single slice of candied strawberry for a heart.
And, finally, I made it snow. .
This was a feat, supposedly invented by the great Buontalenti, that even Ahmad had rarely attempted. When a fine mist of rosewater was sprayed over a mixture of ice and saltpetre, the droplets turned to crystals so light they neither rose nor fell, but floated in the air like specks of glittering gold leaf.
It did not take long for Louise to visit me - every day now there was another order for an iced chicory water to aid Madame’s digestion, and either Louise or one of the other ladies-in-waiting would come to collect it. I waited until she came with her usual request, and said gruffly, ‘I have prepared that one already.’
Her eyebrows rose as she looked around. ‘I can’t see it.’
‘In there.’ I indicated with my head the door she should go through.
She looked suspicious, but said nothing as she went. I heard her gasp, and then there was silence.
I stayed where I was. I suddenly realised that I had no idea whether she was going to Hke it or not.
Then something cold and wet smashed into the side of my head. I whipped round. I caught a glimpse of laughing, gleeful eyes before a second snowball, launched from her other hand, hit me in the neck.
‘Signor Demirco - are you coming or not.^’ she demanded. ‘I can’t possibly have a snowball fight on my own.’
I followed her. The gust of air as I entered the second pantry made the snow billow and eddy around me, glittering in the light of a beeswax candle.
She turned, her hands already laden, and hurled another snowball, but she was too soon, and it disintegrated harmlessly on my coat. Then - I could not help it - I had taken two paces and she was in my arms; and her lips - her cool, pale lips - tasted of rosewater and sugar, dusted with flakes of frost like some soft, fragrant pollen.
For a long moment I kissed her, and she kissed me back -1 was sure of it - her mouth warm against my own. And then, with a sudden gasp, she pulled away from me, horror written across her face.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Louise, let me explain. I want—’
But she was already gone. Through the open door I felt warm air sweeping in, like seawater breaking over a sandbank, and all around me I saw my snow melting back into water, like fool’s gold.
I tried to write her a letter, but the sheet of paper was a field of pristine snow that I only ruined by covering it with my pen marks.
So I sent her the snowman instead, on a platter born by two footmen, directed *to Louise de Keroualle in the apartments of Madame Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans.
It was returned to me an hour later, unaccepted, half-melted from its trip around the palace.
*
I went to see her, but I was not admitted. So I lingered near the garden where the medlar trees were, hoping for a glimpse of her.
At last I caught sight of her going in the direction of the groves. She had something in her hands - a shawl, it looked hke.