The Last Banquet

by Jonathan Grimwood

  ‘You could have been killed.’

  ‘But I wasn’t.’ Putting the candlestick on a table, Héloïse asked, ‘Do you like what you see?’ The slyness of her smile said she already knew the answer. Of course I did. She was young and her skin was clear and her flesh firm. How could I not? Taking my silence for assent, she explained the rules of the game. I was to drip exactly twelve drops of hot wax on her body. Anywhere I liked. The choice was mine. If my choices were good I could have her any way I wanted. If they were poor we were done.

  The hem of her dress dropped as she stood, turning away. ‘You’ll have to do the buttons.’ There were a dozen of them running from her shoulders to her buttocks and I undid every one, my fingers no longer shaking by the time I reached the last. Only then did I lift the dress from her shoulders and let it fall into a puddle around her feet. She untied the ribbons on her petticoat herself, stepping out of both. Her figure was full and her curves soft, her skin the white of milk and her nipples strawberry, the hair between her thighs crinkly as saffron. A bandage circled her injured ankle. I glanced at the door, knowing I should use it.

  ‘You want this,’ she said.

  She was right. I did. Héloïse let me stretch her facedown along a brocade chaise longue. The chaise curled up at one end, so that was where I put her legs, bending them at the knee. Her head I let hang over the foot of the chaise, feeling her smile as I used a rotting curtain tie to lash her wrists to the legs. I slid a second curtain tie under her waist and tied it like an over-tight belt, stepping back to consider the result.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That you would understand this.’

  I almost protested that I understood little of what was going on in this room but it would have been a lie. I recognised hunger when I saw it. And could feel it grow in me to match the salt hunger that rose from her body. Taking the candle, I lifted away her hair and let it fall forward, dripping the first drop of wax onto her neck. She flinched. I made her wait ten seconds between each offering of molten wax, placing one on the underside of her foot, another on her shoulder, choosing carefully. By the time the last drop splashed between her perfect buttocks her body was rigid and she came with a cry.

  The first sound since we began.

  I left Héloïse where she was and, untying my breeches, knelt in front of her. Having come deep inside her throat, I cut her hand free and crouched by the foot of the chaise so we could kiss. She tasted of wine, foie gras, butter pastry and me. In some strange way she seemed happier than before. The fierce intensity she’d brought to the start of this meeting was no longer there. The rest of our coupling was ordinary. She knelt up, she lay flat, she rode me like a jockey. I had her piss into a pot, letting the last of it dribble into my hand so I could taste what she’d eaten previously. She took me into her mouth again–from choice this time–and tried to guess what I’d drunk. I pleasured her arse with a plum and her quim with the narrow end of a pear, eating both when we were finished. I licked honey from her navel and brandy from her nipples, making her raise her hips high so I could fill her lower lips with Champagne. The bubbles tickled and her giggles spilt most of it before I could dip my head to drink.

  Donatien de Sade, a young man and almost neighbour, knowing nothing of my encounter with Héloïse, sent me a note in response to a pamphlet I wrote after returning from Corsica. I’d said good food was civilised Man’s primary pleasure. He replied that sex was as important as eating or drinking and I should allow that appetite to be satisfied with as little false modesty as any other. Mind you, he also wrote that sex without pain was like bread without yeast. By then I’d lost contact with Héloïse or I’d have introduced them. I suspect she would have liked him, and he would have been impressed by her lack of false modesty.

  Later, much later, when the noise beyond the door had stilled to silence and even the servants who’d come to clear the Abundance Salon seemed to be in bed, I asked Héloïse about brocciu di Dónna. She told me it was a cheese. A hidden one. I knew what brocciu was. But the di Dónna version was unknown to me and ‘hidden cheese’ was not a term I’d met. When I asked what it was made from, she smiled and turned my head towards her breast and pushed one nipple against my lips until my mouth opened to suckle.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘You have your answer.’

  The candles had burnt out and dawn was a smear against dirty glass on the other side of a curtained window. I only knew I gazed into eyes of the purest blue because I’d learnt their exact colour hours earlier as I hung above her. Peering into the shadows where her eyes should be I wondered if she meant what I thought she meant, and suspected from her grin that she did. I’d tasted almost everything a noble in France could procure. At least, until that moment, I’d thought I had. Sex with Héloïse was not meant to tie me to the mission. She was simply the hors d’oeuvre. I knew she was here on Jerome’s orders to compromise me, should he need me compromised, but he had no need. I sucked her breast so hard it filled my mouth.

  ‘Really?’ I asked when I was done.

  ‘Made from the finest milk, taken from girls fed on moun­tain food. No mixing of the milk unless the girls are twins. Each cheese is the size of my fist, wrapped in muslin and kept in spring water to keep it cool. It must be eaten quickly.’

  ‘When do we leave?’

  She laughed, but kindly.

  Leaving Versailles

  I remember the journey well, even at this distance. Maybe the sharpness of what had passed the night before gave the day a sweetness it didn’t deserve but I have it perfectly, one of a handful so clear in my memory that I recall every moment.

  As we leave the gilded cage through gates decorated with the boyish face of a long-dead king, I feel my headache lift and my lungs fill with fresher air. Within five miles my nose is no longer clogged with palace stink, within fifty its foulness is a memory. As Armand de Plessis picks at his nails and sulks, his half-sister gazes from the carriage window. In place of last night’s troubled figure sits a smiling young woman, her hands in her lap and her knees together. For all I know her back is raw with burns but she sits neatly and shows no sign of discomfort. The most she says, as we trundle noisily over a stone bridge above a dried-out riverbed, is ‘I’m glad to leave.’ After inhaling deeply, she breathes out and I think I see the last of some strange sadness leave her eyes.

  ‘Have you been to Corsica before?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘You’ll love it,’ she promises.

  ‘You’ve been?’

  ‘I’m Corsican. Well, my mother was.’ Héloïse catches my glance towards her half-brother. ‘His mother too,’ she says. ‘Our father was French.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  She looks at her brother. ‘Dead.’

  ‘Jerome is family?’

  ‘He became so.’ I get a sense of something unsaid. As if to confirm this, Armand pointedly sits back and closes his eyes. After a while his pretence of sleeping is replaced by tiny snores and Héloïse’s smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Understanding.’

  The moment for either of us to say more passes, and eventually she closes her eyes in turn, her head lolling to one side before falling forward onto her chest, until the obvious discomfort of that position makes me rest her head back against red velvet. She smiles. Even though I know she is asleep, Héloïse smiles.

  Our coach, the one taking us south to Toulon, takes us through forests, wheat fields, vineyards and finally olive groves unchanged in a hundred years. The hedgerows are ragged, the roads rutted and old oaks stand abandoned by the lightning that killed them. And in the shadow of the hedgerows, and on the roads, and at the foot of those blasted oaks, the same sullen faces I’d seen thirty-five years earlier.

  Men piss at walls and women squat, barely bothering to hide their buttocks. Armand,
who has woken, scowls, shuts his eyes and loses himself in daydreams. Héloïse buries her nose in Rousseau’s Julie, reading aloud the most touching of Jean-Jacques’ lines, so far as I can tell entirely without mockery. Only I notice the animal-like shuffle on the road, and hours pass before I realise the difference between now and thirty-five years before. Where once the peasants’ gaze slid across our coach, almost unseeing, our worlds not colliding, now they meet my stare and there is fury as well as desperation in their eyes.

  We stay at inns in Auxerre, Beaune, Lyons and Valence, changing horses four or five times a day as conditions demand. Our coach bears state arms and our coachman wears the palace livery. Armand and Héloïse share rooms, as is allowed of a brother and sister. I sleep alone, even in those places where I am offered company. We are given the best chambers, served first and offered the fastest horses.

  Mostly Armand dozes and I use the time to learn about Héloïse. She lives in an apartment in Paris and attends Versailles one week a month to fulfil her duties as a lady-in-waiting to one of the princesses. Her brother attends one of the lesser princes, and the half-brother and -sister arrange their lives so their duties at Versailles coincide and they can live the rest of the month together at their Parisian apartment. That is what everyone does, apparently. The old rules requiring courtiers to remain in residence are gone. The only exceptions are those who wait on the king directly, and the royal governess.

  Héloïse tells me Armand’s mother had been Paoli’s cousin, and that she’s been chosen to accompany me because her few words of lingua corsa will help smooth the way. I ask what she knows of the man I am to meet and it is little enough. Pasquale Paoli comes from a family of lawyers and his father was a nationalist before him. His republic controls the rocky centre of the island and we, that is, the French, control the coast. But there are six hundred miles of shoreline and two hundred or more coves and beaches. Héloïse shrugs prettily and I understand. Jerome is sensible to want a peaceful solution. If half of what Héloïse tells me about mountain strongholds, centuries-long vendettas and smuggling is true, pacifying the place would be a nightmare.

  ‘Signore Paoli knows we’re coming?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The marquis de Caussard has informed him. The signore is expecting us.’ Héloïse sits back, opens her Rousseau, and within a mile the carriage has returned her to sleep, dozing as prettily as her brother. We make Toulon in good time, wait another day for our ship and a fortunate tide, and are met on the jetty at Calvi in the north of Corsica by a Gascon colonel who seems doubtful about the wisdom of our visit. A bottle of wine later I know why. Colonel Montaubon has been on the island for ten years, first at the invitation of the Genoese and then commanding local French mercenaries. The man I am going to visit is the man he’s spent the last decade trying to kill. He has his doubts Paoli will receive me.

  ‘We have a safe conduct,’ says Armand, who takes a scroll from a leather case and passes it to Héloïse, who unrolls it and passes it to me. I give it to the colonel, who peers at the signature and a red wax seal showing the head of a Moor cut off at the neck.

  ‘Well,’ the colonel says. ‘It looks real enough. You’ll just have to hope you don’t fall into the hands of Paoli’s enemies.’

  ‘He has enemies?’

  ‘This is Corsica. Everyone has enemies.’

  Picking up my bottle, Colonel Montaubon peers with pantomime disappointment into its emptiness and puts it back. I take the hint and order another. The girl who delivers it brings olives and bread at the same time. The olives are stale, the bread hard and the new bottle no better than the one before it. In fact, it is so sour it would have drawn complaints from a barracks full of soldiers. I wonder why the colonel has brought us here and must be looking around me a little too obviously.

  ‘One of ours,’ he says. ‘The innkeeper is French.’

  ‘You can trust him not to tell tales?’

  ‘I can trust him not to try to poison me.’ Colonel Mon­taubon sighs. ‘You know little enough about this part of the world, don’t you?’ He speaks with the studied ennui of a long-term visitor who proclaims he hates where he finds himself while secretly knowing he loves it too much to leave. It is the tone Jerome uses to tell me how much he hates life at court, only to look appalled when I suggest he resign.

  ‘It’s all stabbings, ambushes and abductions,’ the colonel says. ‘The merchants are thieves, their peasants are worse than ours. Pasquale Paoli’s parliament is proof of what happens when you let lawyers loose. I’ll give you soldiers for your protection.’

  ‘We go alone,’ I say. ‘That is the agreement.’

  Colonel Montaubon looks briefly querulous, opens his mouth to object and decides to fill it with wine instead. So I thank him for his advice, nod to Héloïse and Armand to say we should go, and leave the colonel what remains of my bottle. Eyes watch us leave. I can feel them as we move through a dusty square towards a dry fountain, with Armand leading the way. ‘There,’ Armand says.

  Three donkeys and a ragged boy wait by the fountain, beyond which a handful of old men stand one side of a line scratched in the sand and throw heavy wooden balls in looping arcs to drop onto a smaller ball several feet away. The old men barely glance up as Armand hails the boy. ‘Spies,’ Héloïse mutters.

  ‘I expected a coach . . . ’

  ‘Later,’ she promises. ‘A donkey is better for reaching the citadel.’ She means the huge fortress perched on a rocky outcrop and overlooking the harbour.

  ‘That’s where we’re going?’

  She smiles and shakes her head. ‘That’s where we’re pretending to go. You only have to travel by donkey for a mile at most. Then we’ll change to a cart. It’s all worked out.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘The signore.’

  I take her word for it. There is little else I can do. As he’d said his goodbyes, Jerome had told me that Armand and Héloïse know where I should go and when. My job is simply to impress Pasquale Paoli with my sincerity when we arrive. I am a marquis, a friend of the great and beloved by the dauphin, yet I dress plainly and talk quietly of simple things. I’d started to tell Jerome that there was nothing simple about taste, but he moved on to how impressed Signore Paoli would be to meet me.

  Very occasionally the boy leading the donkeys would drop back to swipe one of the animals across its rear but mostly his turning towards them was enough to have them pick up their hooves. The sun was hot overhead and the air rich with the scent of herbs: thyme, marjoram, mint, juniper and honeysuckle. Even my own kitchen garden lacked this wild and casual abundance. At the back of the citadel we kept climbing rather than enter the heavy arch that led to the headquarters of the French forces in this area.

  ‘Soon,’ Héloïse promised. Sweat beaded her forehead and dark patches showed under her arms. Since there was no one to see, I removed my wig and held it like a dead thing as I let the donkey carry me into an olive grove and over a small bridge to where a horse and cart stood. It would have blocked the traffic had there been any for it to block. Around us was red earth, rocks like weathered bone, sharp-leaved plants and coarse grasses. I wondered how far French authority really ran.

  Fifteen minutes later I found out. As our cart turned a corner, it hit a rock and the carter swore, dropped his reins and lifted his hands in one fluid movement. His cart came to a trundling halt, one wheel dangerously askew. Three masked men stood in our path with drawn pistols while two others with muskets were silhouetted on a slope above. At a barked command, the carter clambered from his seat and prostrated himself in the red dirt, facedown and with his hands stretched in front of him. The man in charge spoke again.

  I thought Armand would answer but it was Héloïse, her words fierce and her accent strange. If she was speaking lingua corsa she knew more than the few words she’d mentioned. She nodded at Armand, nodded at me and finally said something I understood. Pasquale Paoli. The man looked at me,
looked at Héloïse and Armand and waved his gun to indicate they too should clamber down. When Héloïse shook her head, he raised the pistol and his hand tightened on the trigger.

  ‘Wait,’ begged Armand. He practically dragged his half-sister from the cart while the man stood there laughing. After which, he examined me slowly, asked a few questions of the two now kneeling on the road and began a heated conversation with his companions. They were obviously arguing about something and, after a particularly fierce glare, I began to suspect it was whether or not to shoot me. There comes, in such moments, a sweeping fatalism. Well, it comes to me in those moments when the world waits on the edge of change. I can remember red flowers like tiny blood splat­ters standing out against a grey rock. Every boulder in the wild fields around us was topped by a rough pyramid of stones, an offering to the god of high places or maybe a memorial to something.

  I recognised the same stillness and calmness I felt when I realised Virginie was dead. If I could have fought them I might have done, having my training and a certain skill with a sword; but the three on the road had pistols and the two on the hill above had muskets and I was unarmed. That had been part of the conditions. I was to come unarmed. Without even my sword. Glancing up, I found one of those on the road examining me. ‘Your name,’ he demanded in French, his accent as thick as a Marseilles innkeeper’s.

  I bowed. That was the first thing we were taught at school. When you need to make an impression, always bow. ‘Jean-Marie, marquis d’Aumout. Here to meet Signore Pasquale Paoli, president of the Corsican republic.’