Edward Trencom's Nose: A Novel of History, Dark Intrigue and Cheese

by Giles Milton

  She folded her arms decisively, as if to underscore what she had just said. But she hadn’t finished quite yet.

  ‘I strongly suggest you forget your family for a while – let the matter rest. And I also suggest that you go to the doctor about your nose – find out what’s really wrong. Let’s get back to some old-fashioned common sense. There’s not nearly enough of it around here these days. You said yourself that the same thing had happened to your father. It’s probably hereditary – something that can be cured.’

  ‘Spot on!’ said Edward, who sprang into life for the first time in days. ‘You’re right, darling, it is hereditary. That’s what I’ve known all along. Everything that has happened – absolutely everything – is somehow linked to my nose.’

  Richard Barcley looked around his office and then back at Edward. His friend really was behaving in a most peculiar fashion and he could now see that the strain was beginning to take its toll.

  ‘I must confess, you’ve lost me,’ said Barcley after a long silence. ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean. You’re trying to tell me that this disaster – the flood – is in some way linked to your nose?’

  ‘Not everything can be explained by logic,’ said an exasperated Edward. ‘Take one pot of milk, add a starter culture and within days you’ve got cheese. Now tell me – where’s the logic in that? And what about roquefort? It’s filled with greeny-blue mould and yet it tastes quite delicious. You’ve said so yourself. Is there any logic in that? You’re quite wrong to rely upon logic, Richard. Quite wrong. It can’t explain everything.’

  ‘Well, all I can say,’ responded Barcley, ‘is that I’m very glad my clients aren’t all like you. I’d be out of business in no time.’

  ‘I thought you, of all people, would understand,’ said Edward wistfully.

  ‘No – I’m afraid that on this occasion you’ve lost me,’ replied Richard. ‘And I’m afraid you’re in danger of losing yourself as well.’

  Edward caught a reflection of himself in the window of Barcley’s office. How strange, he thought, that the sun was shining directly onto his nose.

  ‘Everything is working towards a conclusion,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much longer to wait. There’s only one Trencom left to investigate: old Humphrey, the founder of Trencoms. And I’m sure that he holds the key to us all.’

  PART FOUR

  10 SEPTEMBER 1666

  Three days after the last of the flames were finally extinguished, Humphrey Trencom returned to the site of Trencoms cheese shop. It took him more than an hour to make his way from the river to Cheapside and he marvelled at the destruction wrought by the fire. Not a single building was left standing. Where once there had been taverns, stores and busy markets, now there was a mass of charred debris.

  Foster Lane had ceased to exist. The Olde Bear was a smouldering pile of masonry. The Olde Supply Store had collapsed in on itself. And Trencoms itself … ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Humphrey to himself as he picked through the slough of smouldering rubble that had until recently represented his livelihood. He clambered over the pile of broken bricks, stone, mortar and tile, pausing only to sniff at the air. Little wisps of smoke were still filtering out of the debris and the bricks were hot underfoot. Humphrey sniffed again. Funny, he thought. Amid the overpowering smell of charred timber and masonry, he was sure he could detect a more familiar scent. ‘Ah – yes,’ he said to himself. ‘I do believe it is.’ And as he took a long and deep inhalation of breath, he allowed himself a vague smile of recognition. ‘Mmn – yes – even here, where there’s such desolation, the noble charworth can make itself known.’

  He fell to his knees and put his nose right up close to the rubble. As he breathed deeply for a second time, he began to smell other familiar scents as well. ‘Oh, caerphilly, my beauty, – and my fragrant neufchatel. My beloved cheeses! Papa Humphrey will miss you all.’ And as he thought these thoughts, two large tears welled in his eyes then rolled down his bulbous cheeks.

  In the days since the destruction of his shop, Humphrey Trencom had taken a most momentous decision. He had not the heart to rebuild the shop – not after all the hard work he had put in the first time round. The new shop could be opened under the auspices of brother John, who was a bright young lad and full of promise. It would be a challenge for him, thought Humphrey, something to spur him on in life.

  There was another reason why Humphrey had no wish to spend the next few years rebuilding his shop – one that was rather harder to fathom. He had come to believe that the fire was some sort of portentous sign from on high. The heavens, yes, the very heavens were calling Humphrey to his destiny. Had his mother not told him as much? What were her exact words? A ‘signal from the heavens … a welter of fire and flame’.

  Well, surely to God this was a welter of fire and flame. And therefore, this was the moment that he must seize. It was now – right now – or it was never.

  And so it was that Humphrey Trencom returned to the Dorset village from whence he had come just four years earlier. It was his first port of call in a voyage that was to lead him into treacherous and treasonable waters.

  The Trencom farmhouse stood in the Dorset village of Piddletrenthide – a cob and timber affair that had been in the possession of the family for at least eight generations. Humphrey’s parents had lived in the farm before him, and so had their parents and grandparents. Indeed, ever since the house was built, in the turbulent reign of King Henry IV, it had been occupied by one or another of the Trencom family.

  It was surrounded by flower-strewn meadows on the banks of the River Piddle. It was a peaceful spot, especially in midsummer when the meadow was waist-high in grasses and wild flowers – yellow tansies, wild camomile and the rare purple larkspur. On autumn mornings, when the mists hung low over the river, Humphrey was in the habit of poking his nose out of the window and sniffing the odoriferous air. ‘Ah,’ he would say to himself with a sigh, ‘the sweet smell of the Piddle – what scent could be more delightful?’

  Humphrey’s forebears had been remarkable only for their ordinariness – they farmed, they milked cows, they made cheese. But he differed from them in almost every respect – in temperament, intellect and in body mass. ‘I am,’ he admitted to himself wearily each morning, ‘of ample girth – of large belly – and fat.’ And as he said these words, he would rub his smooth white hands over his smooth white belly and ponder, misty-eyed, on when he had last seen his fleshy undercarriage.

  The extent of his rotundity was never so apparent as when he relaxed in his favourite oak settle. There was a clear two feet and six inches between the arms of the chair – making it rather larger than average – yet it was only with considerable difficulty that Humphrey managed to squeeze himself into position. There would be a dreadful squeaking noise as the wooden arms were forced outwards from the perpendicular. The dovetail joints would groan. The mortise joints would gasp. As the full force of Humphrey’s posterior neared the seat of the chair, the rivets and wedges which held the settle together would brace themselves for an all-out assault.

  The clock’s pendulum would tock six times before Humphrey was settled comfortably into his chair and it would be a further three tocks before gravity allowed the ripples of body fat to slide themselves into place. It was as if every wobbly bulge – every pinguid roll and droop – needed a few moments of catching breath before allowing itself to subside into the rigid parameters of the chair.

  Humphrey was in every sense a man of the flesh. He could not begin the day – at least, not in good humour – unless he had spilled his seed into Mrs Trencom, his wife. And thus it was that every morning, just as soon as the cock crowed, Humphrey’s privy parts started to stir. He would heave himself onto the long-suffering Agnes Trencom, who was scarcely awake, and proceed to pummel his way into her with great gusto. Agnes did not exactly enjoy the experience and once remarked that it was like having a large wardrobe falling on top of her. Indeed, during coitus, she would often turn her gaze to the vast oak chest in the corn
er of her chamber and wonder, idly, which was the heavier – it, or her husband. ‘Probably my Humphrey,’ she concluded, ‘who at least has no blunt edges.’

  Agnes had come to accept that this morning ritual was just one of her husband’s foibles. She knew from weary experience that there was little she could do to change him, for the Trencoms were incapable of overriding their passions. There was a disturbing sense in which they allowed their obsessions to take control of their personalities.

  Humphrey had displayed a talent for studying at a very tender age. Whether or not his precocious skills came from his mother – a newcomer to the Piddle Valley – remains unclear. But she certainly nurtured his genius, registering him at Briantspuddle Grammar School at the age of seven. Humphrey soon mastered Latin and went on to excel himself at Greek. Indeed, he displayed such a faculty for this latter language that it was as if he’d been born with it already installed in his head. By the time he was fifteen, he was able to read the three books he had inherited from his maternal grandmother: George Sphrantzes’s Chron. maius., Michael Eugenikos’s Cosmographia and John Doukas’s Ekthesis Chronicle.

  Humphrey was almost certainly the first Trencom to be literate. He was also the first to display an interest in the near Orient and the expanding empire of the Ottomans. By the time he was twenty-seven, he had amassed a considerable library of books about the history of Constantinople. His purchases had been greatly aided by his move to London in the spring of 1662. No sooner had he begun to earn a living from the sale of cheese than he began to spend his money on books, almost all of which were about the history and topography of the city of Constantinople. His fascination with the Ottoman capital rapidly turned into an obsession and he developed a desperate urge to visit the city. He even told Agnes his wife of his wish to set sail, and said that a voyage to the east would be the making of him.

  ‘Aye,’ she said in her weary tone. ‘But I know ye, Humphrey Trencom. Ye’ll catch ye pox there yonder, from some Orient whore.’

  Humphrey would never have fulfilled his desire to travel to Constantinople had it not been for a most fortuitous set of circumstances. First of all there was the Great Fire, which forced him to return temporarily to the village that he left just four years earlier. Then there was the unexpected upsurge in demand for the trencom round, the hard cows’ cheese that had, for centuries, been made in the Piddle Valley. The interest in this cheese had waxed so sharp over the previous months that Humphrey was obliged to buy milk from neigh-bouring farms – one of which lay on the estate of the Duke of Athelhampton.

  When the two men met, the duke was most interested to learn of Humphrey’s urgent yearning to visit Constantinople. Only a few weeks earlier, His Grace had been informed that Byzantine antiquities were being sold for a song in the city souks. And since he had a keen interest in the exotic (he had recently acquired a mummified pygmy from the highlands of Borneo), he decided to despatch Humphrey to the city of cities with orders to buy whatever took his fancy.

  Mrs Trencom was most unhappy about her husband’s voyage, although she did look forward to rising from her slumber without the marital wardrobe falling on her. She knew that Humphrey would not survive months away without ‘sheathing his pinis’ (her expression) and sanctioned him to enjoy whatever pleasures that the Orient might offer. ‘Find yourself a Turkey whore,’ she said, ‘and don’t bring back the pox.’ With these words ringing in his ears, and after one final bout in the bedroom, Humphrey bid a tearful farewell to his patient Agnes.

  Thus it was that a rather apprehensive Mr H.T. found himself standing on the cobb at Lyme Regis on a blustery October afternoon, preparing to sail on the Hector, an 800-ton leviathan owned by the merchants of the Levant Company.

  ‘I dranke verrie moche,’ he wrote about the eve of his departure, ‘and was in a most miserable, squaimish and puking condition.’ Yet he managed to carry aboard his sea chest, books, bedding and a pair of virginals before collapsing into the bed-sized cabin he had rented from Captain John Davys.

  It is hard to comprehend Humphrey’s horror when he awoke to the vile stench of the good ship Hector. He was blessed with an extraordinarily sensitive nose – the first of the Trencom family to have been granted this beneficent curse – and he was now introducing it to a strange new world where smell was the most powerful sensation. The first and most overwhelming odour on this particular morning was that of his own vomit. It was sickly sweet – the overripe smell of malmsey mingled with the sour contents of his guts. Beyond this and emanating from the bowels of the ship was an altogether more pervasive stink. It was hard, even for Humphrey, to detect the individual components. There was the stench of meat – several barrels of which were already putrid. There was the vinegary stink of sour beer; the smell of tar and sweat, rank pork and stale cheese. Even the water – barrelled just three days earlier – carried a worrying pungency. To Humphrey’s nose, it smelled like the stagnant millponds of Piddletrenthide.

  ‘Oh fie,’ he said. ‘To think that we haven’t even left port. Nothing good will come of this.’

  Humphrey had always had a big appetite. But every week of his sea voyage to Constantinople would see him diminish slightly in stature. His belly, once as rotund as an inflated pig’s bladder, soon collapsed into airless ripples. His lardaceous under-chin – in times past the size of a large gourd – soon hung empty and withered. Even his cheeks, which held their own for six long weeks, eventually fell victim to hunger and thence to gravity. They hung from his face like a pair of heavy flesh drapes, with only the ruptured capillaries serving to remind Humphrey of the shadow that he had become. His nose alone, with its peculiar dome, remained immutable in the face of hunger. As Humphrey slowly collapsed in on himself, his imperious nose seemed determined to retain its shapeliness – a beacon of defiance on a storm-tossed and rapidly crumbling promontory.

  It was not just the foetid food that led to Humphrey’s decline. Seasickness, too, took its dreadful toll. ‘I evacuated all the humours that wished to overflowe,’ he wrote, ‘yet still I puked.’ Not until the Hector reached the Straits of Gibraltar – by which time even the ship’s tack was riddled with weevils – did Humphrey’s guts accept the roll and swell of the sea.

  On Tuesday, 15 January 1667, some two hours into the second watch, Humphrey went out on deck. He sniffed the air, as was his fashion, drinking deeply at the salty sea breeze. And almost immediately he detected an unutterably blissful fragrance on the wind.

  ‘Land’, he shouted. ‘I smell land.’

  And sure enough, some six and a half hours later, the broken coastline of Asia was sighted. The Hector – and its contingent of hungry sailors, merchants and one cheese-farmer-turned-antiquarian – was approaching the straits that led towards Constantinople.

  ‘When I went to land my books,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘the customs ript open my trunks and chests and rifled every thing.’ They confiscated his copy of Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire; they ‘filch’t’ his edition of Lane’s The Negotiations of Sir T. L. in his Embassy to the Sublime Porte. But they left untouched the rest of his travelling library and Humphrey had the good sense not to lodge an official complaint.

  He had been offered lodgings at the factory of the Levant Company, which stood on the waterfront at Galata. He made his way there in the company of the other merchants and settled into his comfortable but modest living quarters. His first and most immediate task was to secure himself a Turkey whore. This was easier said than done, for he discovered that Sultan Mehmet IV had recently passed a decree forbidding sexual relations between Muslims and Christians. But Humphrey eventually found himself a young strumpet called Hafise, who offered to service his needs for a mere 1s 2d per session.

  She smelled of the East – a fresh, newly washed aroma of attar and bergamot, orris and eau de cologne. ‘If only my Agnes …’ thought Humphrey wistfully, before checking himself. ‘Humphrey Trencom,’ he added, ‘you’re an ungrateful wretch.’

  Hafise had been plying her
fleshy trade for many years. She had provided entertainment for pashas, merchants, a lapsed dervish and three European traders. Yet even she was taken aback by the gusto with which the rumbustious Humphrey performed his lovemaking. With a low growl, he stripped off his hose and breeches, unbuttoned his chemise and kicked away his boots. Then, when he was entirely naked (and ‘prick at noon’, as he wrote in his journal), he made his move on Hafise. ‘Come on, my little Turkey,’ he purred. ‘Come to Humphrey.’

  Over the weeks that followed, Humphrey would explore every nook and cranny of his Turkey-bird, poking fingers into places where fingers ought not really to go. He stroked and caressed her, licked her and sucked her. ‘I shall drink deep and hard at this particular well of pleasure,’ he said to himself with a greedy grunt.

  Humphrey’s English compatriots observed his behaviour with some bemusement and not a little curiosity. He would spend his daylight hours in his quarters poring over hand-drawn maps, then leave the factory at strange times of the night. He arranged clandestine assignations with Feneriot merchants living in the Christian quarter of the city and had even been seen loitering in the streets around the Selim I mosque. The Levant Company factors quizzed him about his activities but he remained tight-lipped. ‘I’m roomaging for antiquytees,’ was his only reply. ‘Roomaging for antiquytees.’

  It was after returning from one of his strange noctural excursions that something rather odd happened to Humphrey Trencom. He had arranged to meet Hafise at the English factory in the hour before dawn, in order that he could indulge in his early morning sport. ‘My morning stroll in the country,’ he joshed. ‘Up with the cock-a-doodle-doo.’