‘He plays for you,’ Lady Arlington says under her breath, clapping furiously. ‘Smile. Now you must play for him.’
As the players drink cold cordials, the court disperses. I recognise a figure in a French frock coat walking away, an ice box in his arms.
‘Signor Demirco,’ I call.
For a moment he hesitates - but then he hurries on, and I am obliged to break into a trot.
‘Wait,’ I call. ‘Signor Demirco, wait!^
Finally he has no choice but to stop.
‘Did you not hear me,’ I begin, puzzled.
‘I heard,’ he says curtly.
‘Then why do you glower like that.>’
It seems to me that he almost says something, but thinks better of it. ‘No reason,’ he says at last. ‘How do you fare? I have heard that your diplomacy here is meeting with great success.’
Is it my imagination, or is there a hint of a sneer on the word ‘diplomacy’? A little put out, I say, ‘And I hear that yours is not.’
He shrugs. ‘It is thought that the king is more likely to accept my ices if it is you who proposes them.’
‘And that is why you are so . . . surly? Your pride is hurt?’
‘I am not surly, as you put it,’ he says, still curt. ‘Nor is it anything to do with my pride. On the contrary, your success will be my passage back to France. Speaking of which, how glad you must be now that you did not accept my proposal of marriage, back at Versailles.’
‘I could not have accepted it, in any case,’ I say carefully. ‘Given the gulf between our births. But, since you have evidendy been informed by our mutual friends of my possible good fortune in this regard, I will say that yes, it is a good thing. Although, signor ... it might be better if that particular episode were to remain a secret between us. A proposal, even one that is refused, might be seen as tarnishing my good name, and my reputation is going to be more important than ever now.’
‘Your reputation?’ he mutters. ‘Oh, please. Spare me. You mean that now you have bigger fish to fry.’
Angry now, I say, ‘I am lifting the king’s spirits - something that you, it seems, are unable to do with your i(;es.’
He bows. ‘Indeed. You have my gratitude.’ He walks away, his face like thunder.
I gaze after him, exasperated. The confectioner’s feelings, it seems, are still somewhat bruised. Of course, I am sorry for it although somewhat surprised - but it cannot be allowed to deflect me from my task.
That evening, Arlington and his wife have a conversation behind closed doors. Later, Lady Arlington comes to my room. She sends my maid away and combs out my hair herself, exclaiming over the thickness of the corkscrew ringlets that spring out from under her fingers, unruly as ever. I have never been able to tame them properly.
T think we know someone who admires them, anyway,’ she says teasingly, and I blush.
‘Tell me,’ she continues in the same calm voice. ‘When are your monthly courses.^’
A litde embarrassed, I say, ‘I have everything I need, thank you.’
‘I don’t mean thpLt^' she says, unperturbed. ‘I mean for the king. So that you go to him at the right time.’ She smiles at me reassuringly in the glass. ‘You do want him to fall in love with you, don’t you?’ Her hand on the comb never misses a beat, as regular as a groom brushing down a horse.
‘I . . . don’t know,’ I say hesitandy.
‘I think you do,’ she murmurs. ‘I think you must. The way he looks at you . . . He wants you as more than comfort in his grief Much more. Lucky you!’
‘No!’ I say. ‘I could not do that. Not ever.’
She holds my hair out to the sides in two bunches. ‘Have you ever thought about wearing it like this?’ she says, changing the subject as casually if we have been discussing nothing more important than a new coiffure.
Carlo
Alone among desserts, ices excite curiosity and Wonder in equal measure.
The Book of Ices
It might be thought as a result of my conversations with them regarding oaths, courtiers and so on, that the servants at the Red Lion were an unusually pious lot. But, in fact, I soon realised, the place was little better than a brothel.
On the Continent, a man knows that he is visiting a house of iU repute and, his business concluded, may close the door and forget all about the dealings he has conducted there. In England the demarcation between inn and stew, servant and trull, was rather less defined - indeed, they have a word, sluf which describes someone who occupies the lowest rank of domestic servant, but which also indicates that she is likely to be available for whatever else may be required of her. It soon became apparent that at the Red Lion there were several sluts who supplemented their wages in this way. These young women - Mary, Rose, and two or three others - openly worked the main dining rooms of an evening, going from patron to patron under the guise of bringing them ale, engaging them in flirtatious conversation and so on, before slipping upstairs with them to one of the attic bedrooms.
I was, initially, somewhat annoyed when I discovered what sort of place it was - not because I was bothered by the vice itself, but because in France or Italy, to base your business in a brothel would be grounds for an instant removal of the royal warrant. But in England, clearly, things were not so straightforward. Indeed, when I mentioned it to Robert Cassell, he seemed almost amused.
‘Well, of course,’ he said. ‘What did you expect? It’s a London tavern.’
‘The authorities don’t object?’
‘In theory, yes - but in practice, they have more pressing matters to deal with.’
London’s inns, he explained, had been hotbeds of dissent during the Commonwealth, often hosting informal parliaments of working men and women. Some had even had their own printing presses, and produced newspapers and revolutionary tracts which were eagerly devoured by the mob. After the purging that had necessarily taken place at the time of the Restoration, it had been decided that whoring was the lesser of the many evils that had to be dealt with.
‘There isn’t a tap-servant in London who can’t be had for a silver sixpence,’ he concluded.
‘But I thought the people here were Puritans, before the Restoration?’
‘Some were, but there were many sorts of dissenter, and they all had different views on what was or wasn’t acceptable. Diggers, Quakers, Ranters, Levellers, the Family of Love, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists . . . They’re ail banished now, but for a while England had almost as many crazed sects as it had counties. Some of them, like the Ranters or the Family of Love, were virtually indistinguishable from libertines, except that in their case they dressed it up with a lot of nonsense about Christ Within and communality and brethrenhood. But whatever the sect, what they all had in common was a complete refusal to accept any authority but their own.’
I thought about Hannah’s oddly defiant attitude to being thrown out of her pantry. In France or Italy a servant would have done as she was told without debate, but I could see how the people here, having tasted revolution, might find it a hard habit to break.
*
I had not actually considered, however, that Hannah herself might be among those servants who could, as Cassell put it, be had for a silver sixpence, and I was therefore surprised when I witnessed an altercation along those lines between her and one of her customers.. The two of them were tucked away behind one of the stout beams of blackened oak that supported the ceiling in the front dining room, and speaking, despite their evident anger, in low tones; I probably would not have glanced at them at all had I not been waiting for her to bring me my food. Then I noticed two things. The first was that the man was better dressed than most of the Lion’s other customers - almost as well dressed as I was myself The second was that he had her in a tight grip by the arm.
‘Don’t go speaking to your betters in that way,’ he was saying.
‘I call no man my better, nor woman neither,’ she retorted. ‘And what exactly makes you better than me, in any case? Last night I was prepared to take your money; you were prepared to offer it. The difference is. I’ll not make that mistake again.’