She smiled.
But I could not.
‘Like this?’ she said softly, kissing me.
She kissed me.
She kissed me.
‘No, not like that,’ I said hoarsely, when at last we pulled apart. ‘That was too gentle, and too sad. If you kiss him like that he will think you pity him.’ *
Back at the Lion I said to Hannah, ‘Upstairs.’
Silently she followed me to my room.
A wordless coupling, as of animals.
Except that this time I could not finish. A great weariness came over me, I stopped, fell limply to the bed, and lay still.
I said to the ceiling, ‘You can go.’
Perhaps she was worried that I would not pay her for this failure, or that I was becoming bored with her and there would soon be no more. Whatever the reason, I heard her'say softly, ‘I will bring you a cordial.’
It was on my tongue to retort that I was a maker of cordials myself, and hardly had need of more.
But I did not.
Later I heard the door open as she returned. ‘Here.’ She handed me a tankard. The smell was of fragrant herbs - something grassy, like the taste of spring wheat when you pull a fat white stalk from its sheath of leaves, and crush its milky richness between your teeth.
Something bitter, too, in the aftertaste.
‘Valerian,’ she said, guessing my thoughts. ‘Willowbark, and klamath weed, and extract of nettles.’
‘Physick?’
‘Of a kind.’
I grunted. ‘I am not usually so unmanned.’
‘It is not for—’ She stopped. ‘Drink it anyway.’
I swallowed it down. ‘Thank you,’ I said grudgingly, handing the tankard back.
As I lay down I heard her go to my purse, the chink of coins. Then, surprisingly, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Later, when I woke, all was silent. I went downstairs. Hannah was not there. I was glad of that.
On the counter in the pantry, something caught my eye. A book.
I picked it up. The Compleat Herbal^ by Nicholas Culpeper. I glanced at the shelf where she kept her books of recipes. There was a gap where it came from, between Excellent Receipts in Cookery and The Housemdid^s Companion.
I picked it up and flicked through the pages. It seemed to be about astrology as much as herbs. You know Mars is hot and dry, and you know as well that winter is cold and moist; then you may know as well the reason why nettle-tops, eaten in the spring, consumeth the phlegmatic superfluities in the body of man, that the coldness and moistness of winter hath left behind . . .’
I flicked through until I found a reference to klamath weed. Oddly, Culpeper did not seem to prescribe it for impotence, but for heart sickness.
Carlo
Even plain white rice makes a surprisingly delicate ice cream.
The Book of Ices
‘Is there anything you need.>’ Louise asked me.
‘In what way.^’
‘I am making a list. After all, I can ask for anything I like now. I am going to bring over a whole retinue of painters and musicians . . . Even a philosophy tutor. If there is anything you want, you may as well throw it in as well.’
‘There is one thing, as it happens.’
‘Yes?’
‘There is a man here in England who knows about ice. Boyle, his name is. A chemist. A member of the Royal Society.’
‘And?’
‘I think he can help me make an ice cream for the king’s feast. An ice that is truly worthy of its recipient.’
She gave me a strange look. ‘And that is really all you want? You were instrumental-in this, you know - you could ask for anything. Any favour or gift. Even,’ she hesitated, ‘even your passage back to France.’
I had not thought of it like that. But of course I could not leave her now.
‘Boyle’s help is all I want,’ I said. ‘At least, that is the only thing it is within King Charles’s power to give.’
‘I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ she said quietly. ‘When I said that you were just a libertine, and a maker of tidbits ... I had not realised
at the time that a man can be so serious about the pleasures he creates. I will make sure you get your chemist.’
She was as good as her word. What inducements were necessary I do not know, but a few days later I received a message from Boyle inviting me to his laboratory, where, he promised,♦! would make the acquaintance of two other men of experiment - Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke - who had agreed to help us in our task, all under conditions of the strictest confidence.
Of that day, and the experiments we undertook, I will write little. This is not because I could not understand the methods of the virtuosi-^ on the contrary, they were admirably clear, and differed from common sense only in their great diligence and thoroughness. Nor was there any rank or distinction between us as we worked. Boyle, I knew, was the son of the Earl of Cork; Hooke, it turned out, had been a penniless orphan; Ejt Wren was the son of a mercer. Yet although they deferred to Boyle in philosophical matters, I believe that was only because of his superior knowledge; when it came to mathematics, it was to Wren they turned, while for anything practical or experimental, Hooke was the undisputed master.
We made over a score of different ices; varying the cream, little by litde, and then the sugar, and then the temperature, and finally the eggs. As we worked I told them what I knew, but could not necessarily explain, such as the way that'a pan of milk, left to steep overnight, makes a thicker ice than does milk that is fresh. From these scraps of information they hypothesised^ as Boyle liked to call it: each hypothesis was then handed over to Hooke for him to devise ati experiment which would prove or disprove its truth. And—
There was no great moment of illumination, such as schoolboys are taught of Archimedes may have once leapt naked from his bath, Isaac Newton (who was not of the company on that occasion, although the others spoke admiringly of his work with
280
telescopes) may have seen a falling apple — although Hooke claimed that this was a fable created by Newton to disguise the fact that it was he, Hooke, who actually discovered the forces governing the rotation of the earth: the Fellows of the Royal Society were nothing if not disputatious about such matters - but in my case it was simply a time of quiet but remarkable discovery, as one who sails to a new land does not suddenly arrive at his destination, but must first glimpse it on the horizon, and then wait patiently for the various features of the country to make themselves more visible, and only after many hours seek a suitable spot for landing. It was a voyage, indeed, that took more than one day to complete. Even with the virtuosi^ remarkable powers of concentration, experimenting in the cold of the ice laboratory became too much for them after a few hours. After that they insisted it was time to repair to a coffee house, and took me to Garraway’s, where they cross-questioned a sea captain about the best method of propagating cabbage trees; then to Will’s, where there was a fierce debate about whether the Dutch would open the dykes if the French invaded; and then to Scott’s, where they joined a competition to create a new mill wheel for London Bridge. And everywhere we went - not only the coffee shops, but the streets and places between them - people came up to my companions to ask them about the progress of this or that building project, or to enquire after an experiment, or to press an observation on them. I began to see why they generally preferred coffee to wine or ale, for they habitually moved and spoke and thought, these virtuosi^ with a lively but good-humoured impatience which coffee seemed only to exacerbate, quite unlike the stupefaction that I had experienced with mum.
By the end of three days, we had made such progress that it was with some surprise that I looked back and saw just how far we had come. It was apparent that eggs were, in one sense, the answer, for we could now consistently produce an ice cream made with eggs or hen’s testes, as Wren insisted on calling them - that was so