Groaning, I made my way down to the dining rooms. I could tell the kitchens were open - the smell of baking pies was wafting out from the back - but there was no one about, and I was in no condition to shout. Eventually my breakfast was brought to me by Rose, the lowest of the sluts.
It took me a little while to realise that she had sat down at a nearby table and was now watching me eat.
‘How’re you feeflng.^’ she enquired, with what was clearly intended as a sympathetic smile.
I frowned. ‘My head is a litde thick.’
‘Not surprised, if that was the first time you’d tried mum.’
So she had seen me the night before. ‘I take it I became speechless? Stupefied with drink?’
She threw her head back and laughed. ‘You? Speechless? No. You it took the other way. Speechifying like a priest, you was.’
Needless to say, I had no recollection of this. ‘What was I . . . speechifying about?’
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘If I did,’ I pointed out, ‘I would have no need to ask.’
She nodded. ‘Eair enough. Let’s just say most of it went over my head. Mary’s too. Especially the bits in Italian. Pretty, they
were, and very persuasive, but not in any way that was what you might call intelligible,’
I wondered at that ‘persuasive’, But at least, it seemed, I had not blabbed any of my secrets. It was another reason to vow never to touch mum again, had the condition of my head not already resolved me to just such a course.
Whatever had happened that night, it had another unforeseen consequence. Far from being horrified by my lack of self-control, the regulars at the Lion seemed to take it as evidence that I was now, as they put it, ‘one of them’.
‘We thought you were stuck up to start with,’ the other slut, Mary, confided to me. ‘But you’re all right really, aren’t you.^’
I was rather in two minds about this. On the one hand, I was tempted to point out that, as the confectioner to His Majesty, I was hardly one of them; on the other, I was glad these people no longer considered me an outsider, and so I judged that the best thing to do would be to accept their friendship in the spirit in which it was offered.
Mary and Rose, in particular, loved to gossip about the court, and now that I had - somehow - signalled to them that I was more approachable than I had hitherto given them reason to believe, they often came to bother me as I worked.
‘What about Lady Casdemaine? Is she as beautiful as they say?’
‘I have not had the pleasure of seeiiig that lady yet.’
‘What about the king? What’s he like?’
‘His Majesty is very gracious. And tall. That is his most distinguishing characteristic; his height.’
‘Is it true that Lady Arlington has a hundred gowns?’
‘I have not counted them myself. But at Versailles, a hundred gowns would not be considered so very many, by a true lady of fashion.’
In particular, they were fascinated beyond all imagining by Nell Gwynne - ‘Our Nell,’ as they called her. I might look askance
when I heard the name, and venture the opinion that the actress was a coarse and unappetising creature, but for them that was simply part of her fascination. The fact that Nell had started out as a common whore - ‘a coal-yard cullymonger’ Mary called her graduating to^the stage, fame, and thence to the royal bed, seemed to them a kind of fairy tale, all the more so for the way that in its sordid beginnings it reminded them of their own lives.
T was an orange girl like her, only at the Duke’s, not the King’s. Eleven, I was, when a gentleman decided he wanted to unpeel more than he’d paid for,’ Mary said. I quickly changed the subject, although the discomfort was all on my side, not hers.
They had heard of Louise de Keroualle, but their impression of her was formed by a different prejudice: that as a Frenchwoman, she had been sent to the English court for the sole purpose of bewitching their king. All my protestations that this was not in fact the case were met with polite but stubborn disbelief. One of the girls even had a book purporting to be Louise’s biography, and, not being able to read, asked me if I would describe its contents to her. It was, of course, more filth, and after taking one look I declined in no uncertain terms.
There was more gossip and chatter to which I paid little heed; but to my surprise, when Robert Cassell dropped by on his regular visits, it was this tavern gossip, and not my progress with making a smoother ice cream, in which he seemed most interested.
‘Anything else.^’’ he said, leaning across the table and fixing me with his bright military gaze. ‘What about talk of other nations, for example .>’
‘Well, they ^^are quite convinced that the Dutch started the Great Fire.’
‘Are they indeed.^’ he said, with a slight smile.
‘I told them that it is far more likely that God is punishing their country for its regicide.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I think, for the time being, you should perhaps keep that point of view to yourself. Opinions are going to get rather heated on subjects such as that one in the coming months. In fact, it would be better for many reasons if you were to say that you have heard several eminent people at court also say that the Dutch were behind the burning.’
One person who took little part in the gossiping was Hannah. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, I found myself disputing with her almost as much as with the other two. For if Rose and Mary were too credulous, Hannah was too dismissive.
‘Hann,’ they would call to her as she passed through the front rooms, ‘Come and Usten, do. Signor Carlo is telling us about the time he served goblets of snow mixed with a rosewater conserve to the Countess of Sedburgh at a ball.’
‘The Countess of Sedburgh is not an acquaintance of mine,’ Hannah said without stopping. ‘So I am not very interested in what she has to eat.’
‘But she is beautiful—’ Rose called after her; but it was too late; Hannah was already out of earshot. It seemed to me that she was shorter with all of us since the night of the frost fair; then again, winter was the busiest time of year for her pies, so she might simply have been pressed for time. I
Then there was the occasion when I was repeating some remarks the king had made concerning the forthcoming feast for the Garter Knights at Windsor, and my own central role in those festivities.
‘So he has money enough to spend on palaces and banquets, but none for wells or hospitals,’ Hannah said, overhearing me. ‘And every single penny of it paid for from our taxes.’
‘What the king spends his exchequer on is a matter for His Majesty and his advisors,’ I observed mildly. ‘How can we, with our limited information, presume to question the decisions of great men?’
She did stop then - stopped dead, in fact: a rare enough occurrence for me to mark it. ‘And what, pray, makes one person great, and another not.>’ she demanded.
‘His birth, his manners and his blood,’ I said immediately. ‘You may not always like those whom God has set above you, but you surely cannot doubt that He has the means to do so. Just as the king is entitled to some of the respect that is due to God, whose representative he is, so his courtiers are entitled to some of the respect that is due to the angels.’
Perhaps I did not express myself very clearly, because Hannah simply threw her head back and laughed sarcastically.
‘And I suppose you include yourself in that.>’ she said when she had stopped laughing. ‘Because if you’re an angel, then I’m a Frenchman’s arse.’
I stared at her, baffled as to where this new animosity had come from. I was certain she could not be referring to my own humble birth: that was a shameful secret I never alluded to. Unless I had somehow betrayed my lowly origins when drunk.> I watched her, trying to gain some clue from her expression. But she had already turned her back on me and moved away.
Carlo
To make a sorbet of medlars; simmer two pounds of medlar pulp with one cup of sugar and the juice of a lemon, working it smooth with a spoon or stick. It will be improved by adding a glass or two of cordial made from the blackthorn or sloe berries that grow wild in northern climes.