‘I was told,^ I said, ‘before I came to this country, that Charles was a weak-willed and effeminate ruler. I have seen myself how he surrounds himself with drunken oafs and self-interested ministers. And yet he seems to me to be a charming, and indeed a clever, man.’
‘Rochester has the liberty to be offensive, and Harvey has the liberty to dissect the human brain,’ Boyle said. ‘Perhaps they are much the same thing, at heart.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘I met Galileo once. I was a young man, studying my way around the universities of Europe, and he was under house arrest in Elorence. I went to see him, but by then he had lost his mind, thanks in no small part to the way he had been treated by the authorities. England has many faults, but that, at least, could not happen here. I don’t think it can be a coincidence that we now have among us scholars such as Halley, Harvey and their ilk.’
‘Not to mention Boyle,’ his niece murmured.
He made an impatient gesture. ‘I might have done some useful work, were it not for my infirmity.’ •
‘You are too modest, uncle. Your vacuum pump—’
‘A start, nothing more.’
We had reached his carriage now, and the footman came round to help him up. ‘Thank you, Edwards,’ he said, settling himself with a sigh. ‘I was not always so frail,’ he added to me. ‘An apoplectic seizure. What they like to call a stroke of God’s hand. Although I had always imagined that His caress might be rather more gentle than this was. Would you'like those pamphlets.^’
It took me a moment to recall what pamphlets he was talking about: earlier he had offered me a copy of his 'own publications concerning cold. ‘Indeed.’
‘Good - I will send them. And when you have read them, perhaps we could resume our conversations.’
I should like that very much,’ I said. ‘There are many things I would like to understand better about what I do. It may take someone like yourself, I think — a natural philosopher — to unpick them.’ ,
He nodded. ‘In my present condition, it is just the sort of investigation I should undertake. We will leave the secrets of the cosmos to others for a few months, perhaps, and eat ice creams. What do you say, Elizabeth?’
Elizabeth was placing a blanket over his legs. ‘I do not think it sounds so very trifling, to be sloshing about in ice-cold water.’
She stepped back, and I noticed that she smiled in a familiar way at the footman, Edwards. To my surprise, he smiled back, equally familiar. It was clear to me that there was some kind of romantic intimacy between them, something that on another occasion would have shocked me. But I had heard, and seen, so many strange things that night that I simply found myself thinking, ‘Why not?’
After Boyle had driven off I walked back towards the river, deep in thought - not least about what he had said. For it was certainly true that there was something the people in this country all had in common, from the Honourable Robert Boyle right down to Hannah Crowe. It was not pride exactly, although it was something they were proud of; it was not stubbornness, although they were certainly capable of being stubborn about it if they chose. Rather, it was a fierce regard for getting to the truth of a matter; a love of disputation, and a refusal to accept another person’s point of view without first robustly testing it against your own, just as a coin might be bitten, bent, and finally flung to the ground to test its metde, before being accepted with a grudging ‘Very well.’ For such a quarrelsome and libertarian people, perhaps government by debate was not such a bad idea after all.
I had noticed, when I began to read books and newspapers in English, that whenever they wrote the word denoting the person giving his opinion - ‘I’ - they habitually used a capital letter, as if to stress its importance. This, of course,'was not something that a Frenchman or an Italian would ever do with je or me. At first this had struck me as just another example, almost an amusing one, of the presumption of the common people here, who each considered their own opinion as good as anyone else’s.
There was a fashion amongst them, I had been told, for writing diaries: not necessarily for publication, but simply to give their fleeting thoughts a lasting form. That, too, had struck me as comical. But perhaps I had been too quick to draw these conclusions. Perhaps an ordinary person’s opinion really could be of as much interest as the judgements of great men: perhaps, indeed, the only difference between great men and others was that great men took the trouble to form those opinions in the first place ... I realised that my head was buzzing, but whether it was from the effects of so much coffee, or so many new ideas, I could not have said.
?
Carlo
White strawberry ice cream: the delicate flavour of these fruits needs no adornment, save perhaps for a dusting of white pepper.
The Book of Ices
Charles’s great banquet, the beginning of his summer of festivities, was to be held on the feast day of St George, England’s patron saint. The irony of this, of course, was not lost on those who knew who the king’s patron really was, or which country was actually paying for his celebrations.
Almost a month before the feast, I moved out to Windsor to supervise the arrangements. The new Great Hall was still being worked on by the builders, while carpenters were making the last of the tables at which the king’s guests would be seated. The yeomen of the pantry were also at work, unwrapping thousands of pieces of tableware that had not been used since the coronation. The candelabra alone would take a team of eight two weeks to clean.
There were no ice houses, but I requisitioned a cellar, and had ice brought directly from the caves where I had stored it. First I began the work of carving the ice sculptures, and set workmen to preparing the great beds of crushed ice on which the cold food would be served.
But as to exactly what ice cream I would serve to the king’s table, I still had not decided.
In the weeks since the virtuosi and I had perfected the technique of making a perfectly smooth ice, I had experimented with every flavour under the sun. As soon as a new fruit or vegetable
became-available in the markets, I froze it. Asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, celeriac, even cabbages . . . Radishes turned out to be surprisingly good, and over-wintered spinach; sorrel had its merits, too. I went down to the docks and bought strange fruits off the boats that returned from the Colonies. I made ice creams of peppers, of melons, of mangos, and fruits so ugly they did not even have a name.
They were none of them right. Not for a dish made in her honour.
I toured the orangeries and pineries of the great nobles’ estates, a letter of curte blanche from the king in my pocket. More than one pineapple was pulled from its tree, sliced open, sniffed at, and discarded.
Elias said, ‘There is a man at Sonning who has grown some white strawberries, they say. They are as big as gulls’ eggs, and perfecdy sweet.’
‘I hardly think that is likely.’
‘He is a sailor. He brought the plants back from America.’
I did not believe it, but I rode out to Sonning anyway to see for myself. And found that Ehas was right: there was an old sailor, his boots covered in mud, who grew strawberry plants in a raised bed warmed by vents from a fire. As he fondled the berries in his calloused hands he muttered to each plant, stroking it and apologising for the loss of its children. He was quite mad, but his strawberries were remarkable. The fruits were completely without colour: I thought at first they must be unripe, but then he gave me one to try, and I realised it was not just sweet but completely different from the normal kind of berry - as white as cream, heavily fragrant, and with none of the tart sharpness that most strawberries have. Each one nestled under a leaf that was covered in fine prickles, like a gooseberry or a nettle: they stung a little when you handled them.