Free The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood Page B

languid as ever, slouched in his battered chair in the bigger study we’ve been given this year. He tells us nothing, I realise. His tales are of hunts and parties and could be pretty stories from a book.
    His friendship with Jerome has grown watchful. Jerome’s stomach has shrunk as his shoulders have strengthened. Our Norman bear looks dangerous now. Dangerous and amused and somehow stepped back from the bustle around him. The maids stare after him, looking away when they’re noticed. Some of the boys too. He’s the dark shadow to Charlot’s lazy sunlight. On the afternoon of the first day back talk turns to our ambitions. Charlot tosses off some bon mot about maids deflowered and boars killed and Jerome rounds on him. ‘That’s it? The limit of your ambition?’
    ‘And to be a good duke when the time comes.’
    While I’m still marvelling that Charlot is prepared to admit that much, Jerome turns away peevishly. The rest of us shift uncomfortably.
    ‘What do you want?’ I ask Jerome.
    ‘What does any man want? To make my mark. I should have been born when my grandfather was. A man could be great then.’
    ‘Today is better,’ Emile protests. ‘We have science. We have thinkers. Superstition is vanishing. We are building better roads. New canals.’
    ‘To carry what?’ Jerome asks. ‘Apples to places that have apples? Stones to places that have stone? Superstition will never vanish. It taints peasant blood like ditchwater.’
    Emile blushes and turns away. I wonder how many generations he’s removed from that insult – his grandfather, the religious turncoat? I know how far I’m removed. One generation. Jerome would consider my mother a peasant. If he made an exception for her, he’d include her father without thinking about it. One of the villagers hung by the duc d’Orleans for stealing was my mother’s cousin.
    My salvation where Jerome is concerned is that my father was noblesse d’épée , descended from knights. At least half our class are noblesse de robe , from newer families granted titles for civil work. Jerome lists what France needs: a strong king, which we have in Louis le bien-aimé, now twenty, and already tired of the ugly Polish woman they’d married him to and beginning to bed good French mistresses. A strong king, a strong treasury, a strong army. France must be the most feared state in Europe.
    ‘It is,’ Charlot says mildly.
    ‘We must make her stronger.’
    Boys around him are nodding and I wonder what it is like to have that degree of belief in anything, even as part of me is mocking his fervour and noticing Charlot’s amusement. Emile turns, blurts out, ‘We have a choice.’
    ‘Between what?’ Jerome demands.
    Emile puts his hands behind his back, rises onto tiptoe and rocks back. It looks like something he’s seen his father do. ‘Between reason and ritual. Between what we can still discover and what we’ve been told to believe. Between the modern and the old.’
    ‘And if I want both? Jerome asks.
    ‘You can’t have them. They contradict each other.’
    Charlot laughs and around him boys smile. ‘Enough seriousness,’ he says. ‘Let’s open our hampers.’ He pats Emile on the shoulder as he passes, a move both comforting and dismissive, as if petting a dog. As always, knowing my strange obsession with taste, my friends let me try whatever they’ve brought from home. A wind-dried ham from Navarre that cuts so finely the slices look like soiled paper and melt on the tongue like snow. A waxy cheese devoid of taste from the Lowlands. Anchovies pickled in oil and dressed with capers. All of the boys bring bread. Two days old, three days, five – depending on how long they’ve had to travel. It must be what they miss most. The loaf Emile brings is pure white. Jerome’s is solid as rock. He swears his cook doesn’t knead the dough so much as punch it, pick it up and slam it on the table like a washerwoman beating clothes on rock. It can take an hour before