My tactic now when she talks like this is to look vague. ‘My own fire is perfectly warm, thank you. The se^ coal here in London is very good, don’t you find?’
That winter, one of his Parliament men circulates a poem that begins:
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, ludy, were no crime . . .
Charles sends it to me with a note: This man is one of my enemies, and a scurrilous pamphleteer, but somehow he expresses my own thoughts more eloquently than I can myself.
*
In the evenings, entertainment. The great fad this winter is for masquerades. In the Banqueting House, in the mansions of Pall Mall, we dance and gossip in disguise. I have a dozen different masks, fashioned from lace, from feathers, from silver leaf and worked leather.
And one that I am still wearing when the other masks come off.
So many layers of dressing up. I have seen the king without his mask, but not without his wig. Does he take it off, I wonder, when he takes a woman to bed.> I have a sudden image of him in his nightshirt, the luxuriant hair pulled away from his head, a soldier’s crop beneath. Dark stubble. It should be comical, ridiculous, the monarch stripped of his dignity - but instead I feel a kind of tenderness at the thought.
At the dances the king and his brother are easily picked out, both by the fineness of their clothes and their great height. But sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart. Only the king’s posture - that athleticism in the dance - distinguishes them.
And this: James flirts, a little awkwardly. He tries to talk with me, to catch my interest in some current event or gossip.
Charles only stares at me from behind the vizard, his dark, glittering eyes more eloquent than words.
Carlo
Cinnamon, galangal, sassafras and cloves are all good spices for ices. Nutmeg ice cream, indeed, can hold its own with the very grandest of gelati, and makes an excellent ice in winter. Serve it with some warm apple pie and a glass of mulled ale.
The Book of Ices
England was glutted with snow now, groaning with it, surfeited. My workmen grew desperate, forcing carts laden with ice through the endless deep drifts. The horses’ hooves had to be wrapped in scraps of fur; even so, picking their way through the cold and wet, some got the rot and had to be turned loose to fend for themselves as best they could. Sometimes we were trapped for days by howling bhzzards that scoured the skin from our faces and pushed pellets of snow inside every crevice of our clothes. At other times the sky was blue and brilliant and calm above a world turned white, the still air sparkling like the dust from a garble-cutter’s drill; pillars of snow heaped on every cottage and frozen cart like the freshly baked crusts of pies.
I was in my element.
It was not only ice to fill the king’s ice house I required. That might have provided enough for his own household, but the court, and his feast, had greater needs. That meant finding and filling caves where the air would stay cold all year, granaries of ice from which I would refill the larder in St James’s.
Caves are rarely near good roads, and even good roads were impassable now. The horses’ v^thers were soon striped indelibly with the marks of our whips.
It was mid-January by the time Elias and I returned to London, at the head of a caravan of carts. Although it was not long after noon, darkness was falling - there were few good hours of daylight in those midwinter days. We passed through Ludgate, and saw the great river below us. For a moment I thought they must have lit the famous beacons that warned London of invasion. Then I realised that - a thing of wonder - the bonfires were on the river itself, actually on top of the ice, a line of flames that stretched away towards the west as far as the eye could see.
It was like the gathering of a circus, or the encampment of an army. There were castles made of canvas; fire eaters and dancing bears; jugglers and fools; fire balloons, and the glittering sparks of coloured gunpowders illuminating the faces of the crowds. Pennants fluttered in the breeze, and the sound of music drifted towards us.
‘It’s the wherrymen’s doing,’ Elias said, from his perch by the carter. ‘When they can no longer work their boats, they declare the frost fair open. No one has jurisdiction between the riverbanks but them.’
The road we were on led down to the river. Soon I could smell roasting chestnuts and the warm, spicy odour of mulled beer.
‘Want to stop.>’ the carter said, licking his lips.
‘No,’ I said shortiy. ‘We must get our ice to its destination.’
When we finally reached the Lion, exhausted after a night spent unloading the ice carts, I found the place deserted except for a solitary tap-man. Titus Clarke had opened a fuddling tent at the frost fair, he explained, and Hannah was selling her pies.
Curious, I accompanied Elias down to the river, where a coach and six was taking passengers from one bank to the other. The driver assured me that it was perfectly safe, but I had too much respect for ice to toy with its dangers, and stayed on foot. At the Red Lion’s tent Elias was reunited with his mother: she hugged him and told him that he must have grown at least a foot. He
looked a little uncomfortable at this display of affection. Not all his growing-up had been done on the outside, I thought, amused.
To me her smile of welcome was warm. ‘Thank you for looking after him,’ she said. I nodded, and left them to catch up.
Each tent bore the sign of an inn, and, by agreement, sold only one style of drink. The Three Bells was an arak tent; the Coach and Horses dispensed wormwood, while the Red Lion was serving mum.
‘Why is it called that.>’ I asked Titus Clarke.
‘Because mum is what you become if you drink enough of it,’ he said cheerfully as he handed me a foaming tankard. ‘Has the power to take away speech, mum does, as many a man has found out to his cost before now.’
I tried some: it was a frothy mulled ale spiced with sassafras and cloves, pleasant, if a little too aromatic, in a way that reminded me of a linctus for the cough. All around me Englishmen and women were taking great drafts of the stuff. I drank mine a little more moderately - in Italy we are not inclined to drunkenness, as the English are. Rather to my surprise, it felt good to be back in London: I had not realised, out in the countryside, how much I missed its rough, perpetual energy. I strolled on. There was ^ome bull-baiting going on, and a cockfight or two, which diverted me for a while. People were eating apple pies and sweetmeats, and the warm smells of nutmeg and cinnamon filled the ain
Then I heard a shout: The kin 0 .1 looked up. A procession of a dozen coaches was driving down the ice from the direction of Whitehall. As I watched, they pulled up and the court disembarked from them, men and women spilling onto the ice. Many were wearing skates beneath their fine clothes, and as they set off, as graceful as dancers, the crowd gave them a cheer. I saw Louise among them, skating backwards in a circle, her dress of golden silk billowing. Then the king stretched out his hand to her, and the two of them went speeding down towards the Great Bridge together, outstripping all the rest, their legs moving in perfect
unison, her long black hair streaming behind her; as if they were two gorgeous birds, flying away downriver.
I turned back to the fair, which suddenly seemed a litde darker, a little colder, without them there.
The next thing I can remember I was waking up, painfully, in my room at the Lion. Someone had undressed me: whoever it was had folded my clothes neatly beside the bed, and even put my boots outside for cleaning. I swung upright, alarmed, then wished that I had not: my head ached unbearably, like a rock that had been split open by a mason’s hammer. It seemed that I had succumbed to the vice of the English after all, and drunk too much.