We walked, I could not believe the distances we walked, as Paoli’s peasant army sang songs around me. Some songs buoyed me on my way; others seemed so endless, I began to believe my exhaustion came not from walking but from the monotony of tunes that refused to end. I staggered, I swore openly, but I kept walking. There were women among the men and at least one of the sergeants was female. Filthy-faced and hard-eyed, she barked for her troop to keep moving and threatened a flogging for any who stopped. At about the nineteen-mile point my sides ached as if from the most vicious kidney punch. I saw one soldier stop to bend at the waist, and another stretch her leg muscles, but knew that if I did the same I’d never start again. A mile later, with the setting sun on my back and the column ahead, around and behind me I became determined to make it to the end.
My hair was to my shoulders and my beard long enough and tangled enough to need occasional combing with my fingers. My clothes were rags. So ragged that one of my captors had brought me a rancidly rotten coat the previous winter and I’d worn it gladly. I was unwashed and unkempt, hungry and thirsty and my eyes were raw from dust and that day’s brightness. In short, I was enough like those around me to attract no attention. When a boy in front of me stumbled and almost dropped his musket, I took it from him. Milk Eye stepped forward, only for the rough-voiced man to pull him back. What damage could an unloaded musket do in a crowd that size? I gave it back to the boy when we reached the end, nodding curtly when he thanked me in corsu rather than speak and give myself away. The rough-voiced man brought me a cup of raw wine as reward. It was a year since I’d drunk anything but water and I grinned as its taste blossomed on my tongue.
‘What will you do here?’ I asked him.
‘Die, most probably. You’re free to join us.’
‘It’s not my war.’
Unreadable eyes examined me. ‘It’s everybody’s war,’ he said.
He stayed at Ponte Novu and my guard took me through. At a church, in the next village that the milk-eyed young man led me through, I begged leave to say a prayer and he let me go up worn stone steps and into the gloom alone. It was not God I wanted but a moment to myself. And since God probably recognised this, if he existed at all, he left me alone too. All the same, habit made me use the water in his bowl by the door to cross myself, then kneel briefly before his altar. The windows around were high and narrow, one being broken near the top to let in a ray of light so sharp it pierced the floor.
Hunger, I told myself. That’s why everything looks strange.
Away to one side, a marble bier supported a glass coffin. Inside it was a girl, perhaps a woman, her flesh as white as new ivory, her eyes closed and her hands crossed demurely over breasts that swelled sweetly beneath yellowing lace. I had no doubt she was wax, and was equally sure the village priest claimed she really was whichever local saint she was supposed to be. Her hair was blonde, her face serene, her toes delicate where they peeped beneath fading embroidery. She reminded me of someone so much that every time I turned to go I found myself turning back for another gaze—until the thought of Virginie finally slipped into my head and I stopped, appalled. Was this how I’d seen her? Perfect, unchanging, incorruptible? A wax girl? No wonder she’d been unhappy.
The question followed me into the brightness of the afternoon where the heat and dust drove it from my head before I could force myself to answer. That night Milk Eye left me in a narrow cave in the high central mountains, with a brick wall across its entrance and a low door and a window with bars and crooked shutters. Next day I woke to find him gone. No one brought me food that morning or night. The door was locked and the hinges strong. The shutters had been nailed from the outside. It was sheer luck this had been done hastily and using only two nails.
No one came the next morning or the one after. My diet in those first few days was mostly spiders. Spiders, beetles and water found on the cave floor. I felt that if I died here my life would have come full circle. The following morning I stopped being a fool and began hunting the bats that entered the cave at dawn through a high natural chimney to sleep out the day. There were thousands of them. Well, perhaps hundreds, hanging upside down from the rocky ceiling overhead. I took to throwing stones and enough dropped stunned or already dead for me to feed myself. I ate them raw, since I lacked kindling, flint or any wood to burn. Now, looking back, I wonder why I didn’t simply wrestle apart a shutter and try to burn that. Holding the bats by their wings to give me something to grip, I would tear out their flesh with my teeth. Sometimes they were alive and other times dead. I ate several a day for maybe a week and though I never caught enough to assuage my hunger, they kept me alive.
At the end of that week I knew beyond doubt a battle was being fought because I could hear musket fire and the sound of cannon. It came and went on the wind for several hours, although I probably only imagined I could smell gunpowder. Another day passed and then I saw French troops on the road below. I shouted and they ignored me. So I shouted again. When this failed I screamed insults and that was enough to have a couple break off from the column and scramble through the scrub towards me. They came angrily and would have beaten me with their muskets had they not been stopped by the locked door.
‘Break it down then,’ I told them.
They stared at me, the pair of them. Young and sunburnt and stinking of sweat, garlic and cheap wine. They wanted to know who was giving them orders but something in my tone made them hesitate. ‘You’re French?’ one asked.
‘I am the marquis d’Aumout. Please call your commanding officer.’
They looked at me doubtfully, then looked at each other with the slightly helpless air of men who realise they’d have been better off staying where they were, and one of them stumbled his way downhill while the other attacked the door with a large rock. Since the door opened inwards he had better luck than I’d had pulling from inside. I was out, and crouched in the sunlight, when a grizzled lieutenant appeared. Up from a sergeant, I thought, remembering some of our trainers from the academy.
‘You are the marquis d’Aumout?’
I bowed slightly and he remembered his manners and bowed in return. ‘We were told you were dead,’ he said. ‘Everyone believes you dead.’
‘There were times I believed that myself.’
He asked if I could walk and I said probably, but not swiftly. So he shouted for a man to find me a mule and three solders ended up carrying the ammunition the mule had been carrying and the mule ended up carrying me. ‘There was a battle,’ I said, before clambering onto the creature’s back. ‘A day or so ago.’
‘Ponte Novu,’ the lieutenant replied. ‘It was a bloodbath. One of their generals refused to fight. Their Hessian mercenaries turned against them in the middle of the battle. Half their army cut and ran. The war is over. We’re hunting their so-called general and his gang. We’ll find them, don’t you worry.’ The lieutenant slapped my mule and we set off in a long ragged line up to the ridge of a hill and down the other side towards a small town nestled in a valley. The air smelt sweet and the crickets sang and I drank water from one soldier’s canteen and ate another’s bread. It was good, if surprising, to be alive.
The lieutenant passed me to a major who delivered me himself to the house in Corte commandeered by the comte de Vaux. Having established it really was me, the comte gave me his own quarters, found me decent clothes and had his own servant shave my head and remove my beard. He also lent me a wig and had servants bring me endless jugs of hot water until I felt clean enough to join him. For a week I was tended by a doctor and fed food only fit for an invalid. De Vaux told me again that everyone had presumed me dead. My murder had been mourned and my reputation enhanced accordingly. He was glad it had proved untrue.
I thanked him for his sentiments and asked whom I should talk to about catching the next ship. I would go to Paris if summoned, and I would see Jerome, and Charlot, and anyone else who felt the need to see me, but first I
insisted on going home. Manon and my children would be waiting. Tigris too. Tears came into my eyes at the thought of them. De Vaux made the arrangements, told me he’d sent messages ahead announcing my return, and asked, as a favour, if I could visit the gaol in Calvi where Corsican prisoners were being held. Pasquale Paoli had not been found, nor had most of his senior staff. It was thought they were hiding among common soldiers being held until the war was over. Seeing my surprise, he added that the war was over, in any real sense of the word, but a few of the Corsicans had yet to realise that and cleaning up might take another few months.
He fed me well on the last evening, and then I took myself up to bed, stopping only in a corridor to stare at myself in a flyspecked looking glass. My face was gaunt, my cheeks sunken. My shoulders had shrunk and my gut was as flat as a boy’s. I’d not looked this thin since leaving the academy. There was far more grey than I remembered in my stubble. The next morning I climbed into a coach and was driven with only two changes of horse to Calvi where I presented a letter from the comte de Vaux to a major who saluted me respectfully and walked me to the prison. The cells were crowded and stank of misery. There were French soldiers with bayonets on their muskets to keep the prisoners back if they mobbed me.
I walked through three huge halls filled with Corsicans; some were wounded and others swaying with tiredness but all gazed at me with blank hatred. In the third hall I noticed a flash of blue eyes and glanced in that direction.
‘Someone you recognise, my lord?’
Paoli had grown his hair and a beard and wore the tattered uniform of a private. He had a crutch under one arm and was supported by another man, having been shot in the leg. The man who supported him was Armand de Plessis. Without thinking, I looked round for Héloïse but realised quickly it was a room full of men.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Similar but not the same.’
The major nodded regretfully.
‘What will happen to them?’
He looked at his prisoners with distaste. ‘We’ll release them shortly. Take their names and the parole of any who are officers. Although most of those got away.’ Pulling out a fob watch, he consulted it and told me my ship, the Léopard, would be leaving within three hours and I was welcome to dine with him or else join my vessel. Pleading tiredness I made my excuses and he had a cart take me to the harbour.
In the last few minutes before we sailed a boy appeared on the jetty and begged to speak to me. A doubtful captain fetched me from my cabin with promises that he would have the urchin beaten if he was wasting my time.
‘You are the Frenchman?’
I tried to smile at him, though desperate for my cot. ‘I am Jean-Marie, marquis d’Aumout.’
He nodded, as if that was what he’d asked, and pushed a small parcel towards me. He held it out when I didn’t take it and kept holding it out until I did. Then he turned and ran, losing himself in the evening crowd.
‘Is everything all right, my lord?’
I assured the captain that it was, and took myself to my cabin with my heart hammering against my ribs and sticky liquid oozing onto my fingers. The muslin was filthy, tied by the corners into a knot that my hands scrabbled to undo. Inside was a cleaner cloth and inside that a fist-sized lump of cheese. Scraping my nail down one side I carried a fragment to my mouth. It was creamy with a slight taste of thyme and the faintest trace of lemon. I remembered Héloïse telling me the girls who gave milk were fed on the finest foods. I allowed myself a slightly larger piece and then wrapped the cheese again in its inner cloth and dropped it into a jug of water to keep it cool.
Corsica gave me back my curiosity and hardened my soul—not the way stale bread hardens in air, but the way steel hardens when put through fire and plunged into water. Long after I’d forgotten the exact shape of Pasquale Paoli’s features I could summon fierce hunger and the scent of wild herbs on hot summer winds simply by thinking about those days. And Corsica taught me something else, something unexpected about myself. I was not as comfortable and complacent as I’d thought. In the cottages and ruins and caves of my captivity I’d clung to life with a ferocity that would have done Tigris proud.
It was Signore Paoli in that prison. I know it. But he had, in his way, treated me fairly and I had come through my experiences alive. More than that, I’d rediscovered my appetite and my hunger and my passion for food. That he sent me brocciu di Dónna seemed fitting. It was the first truly original thing I’d eaten in ten years. More than this, much more than this, it tasted new. Only later did I realise he’d let me taste new ideas as well.
Brocciu di Dónna
Take two pints of whey made from an equal mixture of ewe and breast milk and heat until hand-hot in a ceramic pot over a steady heat. (I’ve never produced satisfactory results, certainly nothing that equals the brocciu de Dónna from Corsica using breast milk alone.) Add three teaspoons of salt and two-thirds of a pint of fresh breast milk and two-thirds of a pint of fresh ewe’s milk. Heat to just below the simmering point without allowing the milk to catch on the side of the pan. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. Lift the cheese from the whey and drain though muslin. The result should be ivory coloured. Tastes creamy, rich, almost silky.
Simple brocciu di Dónna
Heat a mixture of two pints of breast milk and two pints of ewe’s milk to just below simmering, add a wine glass of good Champagne vinegar (or half that of fresh lemon juice) and allow the mixture to return to room temperature. Strain the mixture through muslin to drain away the whey and mix salt into the remaining curds. Eat within one day. Tastes creamy and rich, but less elegant in its finish than the above.
1770
The Return
I returned home to a fierce hug from my son, who at twelve was on the edge of believing himself too grown-up for such things. My fifteen-year-old daughter simply curtsied. Hélène now looked enough like her mother for me to bow back. As for my cat, Tigris barely deigned to acknowledge my return for two days and then refused to leave my side for a month, sleeping across my bedroom door when Manon refused to let her camp at the bottom of our bed.
I’ll get to Manon in a moment—but first let me deal with the letters that awaited me. Jerome’s announced he was forgoing the last four years of the ten-year period in which I was not to receive my salary as Master of the Menagerie. The treasury had been instructed to remit me twenty thousand gold livres, being the money for this year and the last, when I had been so abominably held captive by . . .
I didn’t bother reading the rest. Charlot’s letter was strangely formal. He stressed his friendship and our ties. He thanked God for my safety. So much went unsaid I wondered what troubled him. The king’s letter, which was probably written by Jerome, thanked me for my efforts on behalf of France and promised me a position at court for my son. If I would rather, Laurant could have a commission in the army instead.
Voltaire wrote too. I liked his letter best.
He gave thanks for my survival, talked of the trials that put steel in men’s souls and ended by paying tribute to the rightness of the cause of those who had captured me. He understood I had met Pasquale Paoli in person. He asked me to write in return giving my impressions of the man, his followers and his politics. He’d heard Paoli had given women in Corsica the vote, that Corsican women not only fought beside their men but acted as NCOs and even commanded brigades. He wanted to know if I had seen any of this. ‘It seems the Corsicans’ principal weapon was their courage. This was so great that in that final battle near the River Golo they made a rampart of their dead in order to have the time to reload. Bravery can be found everywhere. But courage like that is found only among free people.’ Reading Voltaire’s words, I remembered those of the old Corsican on the march to the bridge. It’s everybody’s war. For the first time in my life I wondered if we were on the right side.
As I’d hoped, Manon came to my room the night I returned. She was my wife,
the marquise, she’d looked after my children and run Chateau d’Aumout while I was away as ably as any Corsican woman widowed by a vendetta. Charlot’s letter had stressed how well she’d done. Manon knocked once, pushed open my door and picked a fight.
‘Why didn’t you write? You should have written.’
‘Manon, I was a prisoner.’
‘From the day you left this chateau until this morning? Someone held you prisoner for all of that? They tied your hands and denied you paper?’
‘I was captured almost on landing.’
‘You should have written before that. From Versailles. And you should have written the moment you were released. What was it? Ten days ago? More than ten days?’ She stood in her white nightgown in the doorway between my room, which had always been our room, and my dressing room, which now seemed to be her bedroom. Her fingers were folded into fists and hard against her hips like a furious child. Sighing, I climbed from my bed and went to hold her. She pushed me away. ‘You should have written.’
There was something forced about her anger. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Everything. I thought you were dead.’
‘Manon. What happened?’
There was anger in her eyes, that was real enough. Perhaps not as much as she pretended and about something other than my lack of letters. She was right, though. I should have written before setting off from Versailles, and at the point I landed in Calvi, and when the comte de Vaux was sending news of my safety to the court. But this was about more than my neglect in not writing, I was certain of that. And I understood Manon well enough to know much of her anger was turned in on herself. I’d known her for eleven years, we’d been lovers for eight and it was five years since I’d married her.
The Last Banquet Page 23