‘I like parrot stew,’ Celeste says.
Manon’s mouth quirks and she nods. ‘Then you’ll get on famously. Come inside. I’ll have the servants find you a room.’ Celeste glances at Mr. Franklin, who nods, and she follows my wife up the stairs and disappears into the cool of the hall, leaving me with my visitor.
‘Your mistress?’ I ask.
‘Not mine,’ he says. Something in the way he says it suggests there’s a story wrapped up inside his denial, and a twinkle in his eye says we might get to it later. But there is, it seems to me, a calculation behind the twinkle. Just as there is a calculation in the way his clothes have changed in the years since we last met. If I had not seen him in his powder-blue frock coat in Charlot’s Parisian drawing room, smiling at the men and softly, carefully, talking his way inside the petticoats of a baroness known for her virtue, I would believe today’s brown coat and simple shirt, fur hat and sturdy shoes indicated a man who came straight from the wild American frontier to plead with France for help fighting his colony’s English masters. Mr. Franklin asks what I’m thinking and I tell him.
He smiles, and flutters a liver-spotted hand towards my faded frock coat and old-fashioned wig. ‘We wear what we have to wear to play the parts that we need to play. A man like you understands this.’
I’m flattered at his ‘man like me’, as I’m meant to be, and ask about Celeste, who is at a window with Manon looking down across the gardens. I see the black girl’s gaze sweep across us and then stop on Tigris. She says something to Manon, who laughs.
‘Your wife was not noble,’ Mr. Franklin says.
‘You heard?’ This is only half a question.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘How long is it now?’
Since we married? ‘Thirteen years. Long enough to know we’re happy.’
He considers this, and tickles Tigris’s ears while he does, drawing a rumbling purr from deep in her throat. A sound that fills his face with sudden and real happiness. I decide in that second that I like the man for all that I don’t really trust him or know why he has brought his coach south simply to reacquaint himself with me after all these years. My fame, which is slight, is for recipes, strange farming methods and an obsession with food. Court politics have long since ceased to have any interest. Those I leave to Jerome and Charlot. And the kind Emile once practised? They bore me. Emile’s friends don’t want to open the cage and return the animals to the wild, they simply want to change who owns the zoo.
‘No falls from grace?’
‘One each and both regretted.’
‘So it’s possible,’ he says, and it takes me a moment to work out what he means, and another to frame my reply, which is that it is perfectly possible for a man to be content with only one woman if it’s the right woman.
‘And he’s the right man,’ Mr. Franklin says.
I’m not sure if he means the right man for the woman or the kind of man who can be content with only one woman at a time. He tells me—and I am uncertain if he’s tying this to my fall from grace or not—that he writes on occasion to Pasquale Paoli, who mentioned that in the last days of the Corsican republic my life was saved by the pleas of a young girl I’d saved from death some years earlier.
Swallowing my shock, I tell him that at best I saved Héloïse from a broken leg, and he nods as if I’ve just confirmed something he’s suspected for a long time. ‘Call me Ben,’ he adds, before walking with me to see my gazelle, who looks at us with tired eyes and is so old she has trouble keeping her massive sweep of horns steady.
‘She’ll die soon,’ I say.
‘And then?’
‘I’ll eat her, probably slow roasted given her age. Maybe boiled and then slow roasted if the meat looks really tough when I come to prepare her.’
‘You should talk to Celeste. She has eaten snake and alligator, puma and possum. She tells me she knows recipes that mix snake with chicken.’
‘And I’ve mixed snake with cat. It’s an old Chinese recipe,’ I add, seeing his expression, and we walk on, taking a long turn around the paddock with the giraffe, and then back along the edge of the lake where the pygmy hippo floats as quietly as a log, his nostrils only just above the water and his eyes watching us pass. I’m proud of the hippo. It was almost dead when it arrived, and though I was tempted to let it die, my job as Lord Master of the Menagerie was to keep it alive for as long as nature would let it live. So maybe I was proud of myself for not giving in to temptation. Although it’s easier not to give in to temptation when one’s kitchen has a ready supply to hand of the exotic and near-dead.
Unbuttoning the flap on his breeches, Ben Franklin pisses against a tree without feeling the need to retire into the undergrowth or turn away. I’m not sure if it’s affectation or he really doesn’t consider it a matter of shame. The man interests me. He’s probably used to that. As we walk back to the chateau he tells me more about Celeste. She can quote Voltaire, and talks of the tedium of Versailles with all the boredom of a French marquise. So far as Ben can tell there is no difference between her and any other woman he has befriended, apart from the colour of her skin and the darkness of her eyes. He’s begun to wonder if our natures are a product of how we’re treated rather than to whom we’re born . . .
He tells me openly that his father was a soap-maker and the son of a blacksmith, his grandmother on his mother’s side an indentured servant little better than a slave. That he grew up poor and knows the value of thrift, and that the years he wore silks did nothing to change his early life. Nor would he want it changed since the values and virtues it instilled outweigh any hardship. He looks at me to see how I take this. So I tell him my parents starved to death when I was small and I grew up in a school for the poor; that my title and the castle behind us I owe to having killed a wolf and travelled downriver under an upturned boat. Had those boyish adventures not happened I would, at best, probably now be dead on some forgotten battlefield. Had le Régent not found me I would never have gone to St. Luce. For reasons that escape me, rescuing a trapped cat and her kittens from a thorn bush at the expense of my own skin appealed to a vicomte and helped convince a colonel that I was right for what the vicomte had in mind. Our lives are built almost entirely on a foundation of events colliding.
Ben smiles, and announces that that bon mot alone makes his trip worthwhile. He hopes we will have many more conversations in the week he would like to be allowed to stay, but adds that we should probably make our way back to the chateau to see how the marquise and Celeste are doing. He says one other thing, as we return, that gives me the frisson that comes from meeting for the first time an idea one has not had the intelligence to think for oneself. He touches briefly on the political uses of taste; not just in fashion or furniture but in wine and food. About how taste defines and separates the sexes and the classes and the cultures and the races. I had been lucky to fall so in love with Roquefort, and to do so immediately. The development of taste is like learning to read—and we live in a world where we deny most of those around us access to its alphabet.
A footman opens the door as we approach, and I usher Ben into my house and realise Manon has left the door to the small drawing room open so she can hear us return. She smiles at him, shoots me a glance that says Where have you been?, and tells him she’ll show him to his chamber herself. It is late, he’s travelled long distances and I have still to discover why he is in my house. I am delighted, however, to play host to a man widely described as ‘the First American’. The Americas claim to have no aristocrats. But this man is, despite his birth, among nature’s natural nobility.
The next morning Celeste knocks at my study door and announces that Mr. Franklin has said I might want to hear about the food of her childhood and asks if she can come in. She sits on the very edge of a chair and looks surprisingly nervous for someone willing to describe herself as bored with life at Versailles. Maybe it’s Tigris, curled around the corner of my de
sk in her usual position, her head heavy on her great front paws, who makes her nervous. She receives my suggestion that we swap chairs with gratitude, and she takes my seat and I take hers, leaning against the unfamiliar side of the desk as I begin to make my notes. Her French is heavily accented and mixed with African words. She’s not black, she tells me, she’s mulatto. Her mother was black, her father is an Arcadian octaroon—one part Iroquois—who moved south with the other French-speakers when the Treaty of Paris gave the Atlantic coast of Canada to the English-speakers.
‘You know more about your family than I know about mine.’
She looks to see if she’s being mocked, but I’m already making notes about her heritage below the four or five recipes she’s given me, and she decides I mean what I say.
‘How does alligator stew taste?’
‘Like leathery chicken.’
I can’t help but sigh.
To cook Celeste’s alligator stew
Fillet three pounds of alligator tail and put to one side. Make a basic oil-and-flour sauce, using enough brown flour to stiffen a small wine glass of oil. Add three sliced onions, two red capsicum and two celery stalks and cook until the onion is clear. To this mixture add eight diced tomatoes and cook for another fifteen minutes. Once cooked, add enough fresh water to leave a thick sauce. Now add two crushed cloves of garlic, the juice of one lime, a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of dried and well-ground chillies, a glass of dry white wine, and another eight tomatoes that have been boiled to pulp with black pepper, strong treacle and half a glass of brandy. Cut alligator meat into inch squares and put into pan, ensuring the sauce covers the meat completely. Return to the boil and cook for at least three hours, adding water if necessary. Tastes like leathery chicken.
Further questioning reveals alligator to be a white meat with a red-meat consistency, somewhat like chicken but with the texture of beef, and, if anything, a little denser and so needing a longer marinade or a slower stewing. Apparently it sits well with dried chillies and should always be served piquante. I tell Celeste crocodile tastes more like turkey, in that the meat is dry and slightly musty. But that if one draws a cross—and I drew a cross—and divides the sections into chicken, beef, mutton and pork then it definitely falls within chicken but close to the line signifying the border with pork. I show her the pages of my latest journal, where recipes are categorised into four food groups—fish, fowl, meat and plant—and arranged alphabetically within each.
‘This has a purpose beyond taxonomy?’ she asks, before adding, ‘Which has a value, obviously’, and looking to see if she has offended me. I tell her those who come after me will put a value on what I’ve done with my life. Either that or they’ll judge it worthless. Celeste smiles and takes my arm as we make our way downstairs to find the others.
We walk in the gardens, all of us together. Occasionally, one or two of us will sit and the others will keep walking until those sitting are out of sight. Manon likes Mr. Franklin’s company and I find myself impressed by Celeste’s fierce intelligence. I imagine Versailles must do more than bore her. She must find it stifling. In the overgrown maze I had planted for Virginie I kiss Celeste, who seems neither surprised nor offended and kisses me back. She grips my wrist when I begin to raise her petticoats until I explain that I want only her taste and she relents. Mr. Franklin smiles when he sees me later.
The week passes pleasantly and makes more of an impression on my memory than most of my recent weeks, which my mind discards as repetitions of weeks that have gone before and so in need of no memory. Celeste holds my arm as she walks, Mr. Franklin leans on Manon and she steadies him a little as we make our way down the red brick steps at the back of the terrace. We’re about to see an animal killed, among other things.
Celeste shrugs when I say this and tells me she watched her father slaughter hogs back home when she was a child, and Mr. Franklin tells me he’d been taught to wring a chicken’s neck, pluck it and gut it by the time he was seven. I say those are the skills we should be teaching our children and he laughs. ‘Tell me more about this experiment of yours.’
‘You can see it for yourself . . . ’ We walk round the side towards the stables and the outhouses beyond. Tigris walks at my side, her head under my hand.
‘Who’s guiding whom?’ Franklin asked.
‘We guide each other.’
He smiles at my answer but stops in the door of the slaughter yard, suddenly uncertain. The gazelle stands in the middle of the yard, back legs already tied. Her sweep of horns curves back more elegantly than any sketch can capture; but her trembling is more than nervousness, her horns too heavy for all they’re beautiful. She’s grown too old and too tired to hold up her head.
‘Jean-Marie . . . ’
‘It’s her time,’ I tell Manon. In one corner a huge range heats a copper cauldron big enough for me to bathe. Steam already rises from the water inside. The third part of today’s experiment is hidden in the shed. Usually it would be ready but I don’t want to ruin Mr. Franklin’s surprise. He is looking carefully at a tripod crane I will use later. He looks with the keen gaze of someone who has carried out his own share of experiments.
‘My lord . . . ’ A slaughter-man brings a bowl of entrails from something killed earlier and stops a safe distance from Tigris, who raises her head and sniffs the air, milky eyes restless. I decide it would be better if she remains outside the yard and lead her back the way we came.
‘She’ll be safe?’ Mr. Franklin asks me.
‘No one will disturb her.’
His bark of laughter says that was not his worry.
‘She’ll sleep,’ I say. ‘After eating she always sleeps.’ Taking his arm, I turn him back to the door into the yard and we go in together. The men are waiting. It is a blue-skied day, the kind you remember for ever as a child, and welcome for the ease it brings when old, for all it lacks the significance it once had. Celeste asks what I’m thinking.
‘You’re not old,’ she says, when I tell her. ‘Now show Ben your experiment. He likes things like this.’ She’s right, he’s watching closely.
They kill the gazelle cleanly. Now is the real moment. The doors to the brick shed open and two men drag out a hand cart.
‘A jar?’ Mr. Franklin asks.
‘Bound tight with strips of canvas.’
He walks to the edge of the cart and feels the thickness of the glass jar and looks carefully at its canvas swaddling. He’s already worked out what the canvas does and I let him tell me. He’s right, like rope wound round an old cannon, it helps to stop the glass from shattering under the pressure and heat. Mostly it does. Not every glass survives boiling. I tell Celeste we could buy a farm with what that jar cost and Manon’s glance is sharp. ‘It will become cheaper,’ I say hastily, ‘as more jars are made and the glass foundry perfects the art. Knowledge always comes at a price.’
Mr. Franklin is looking thoughtful. His face is heavy and the flesh beneath his chin rests on the starched linen of his stock. I suspect he looks better as an old man than he did when young, as if the ruined grandeur of his face was something he had to prove the right to inherit. An experimenter himself, he can see the work that has gone into this. My butchers work fast, and the newly skinned, gutted and beheaded animal is manhandled into the jar. A block and tackle then lifts the jar high enough to be lowered into the cauldron. Men scramble up ladders to tip in buckets of brine until it is almost full and then a huge cork seal is wrestled into place and hammered down. Now it must simmer, although I’m not sure for how long. Half a week perhaps. If that’s not enough I’ll try a week for something this size next time.
‘I understand the theory,’ Mr. Franklin says. ‘But what’s your aim?’
‘To make good food widely available the whole year round and abolish famine. Let me show you . . . ’ We head back to the chateau, Tigris rising sleepily to her feet and falling into step as I pass. There is sti
ll blood in her bowl and on the gravel behind us but she has licked her face clean. In the larder the air is chill and the flagstones cold under our feet, the shelves around us laden with glass jars and resting cheeses. Wind-dried hams hang from the ceiling, mixed with strings of onion and garlic. Sacks of potatoes rest by a wall.
‘Remind me to talk to you about those,’ I say.
Mr. Franklin nods, eyes fixed on our prize. A young warthog is upended in a jar, bristly-skinned and madly grinning through murky brine, its head twisted grotesquely. Evidence of the accident that killed it. Until today this was my biggest experiment. I would have liked to bottle the gazelle whole too, but her beautiful horns prevented it.
‘Would you like to . . . ?’
Celeste looks at the hammer and chisel I take from a shelf and shakes her head. Mr. Franklin tells me I should have the honour. So I chip away the sealing wax with which the cork is fixed and prise the lid free. The brine smells sweet enough and no foulness rises from the warthog as I dunk my arm into the liquid to my elbow, jab the chisel into the warthog’s shoulder and rip flesh away. Celeste, Mr. Franklin and Manon shake their heads when I hold it out, their movements synchronised and unconscious. We say we want new experiences, but the opposite is true, and ever more so as we grow older. Tigris wrinkles her nose at the saltiness of the morsel so I eat it myself. The pork is as bland and near-tasteless as only pig can be when boiled without herbs or spices. ‘A year,’ I say. ‘That’s how long it’s been in here. Just think . . . With this method we can keep meat indefinitely. Store it in times of plenty against the famines to come.’
‘Like Joseph,’ Celeste says. ‘With his dream of seven rich years and seven lean.’
‘Exactly like that,’ Mr. Franklin says. He claps me on the shoulder. ‘A noble idea,’ he tells me. ‘A worthy experiment.’
I’ve been worried this week has been about more than my company or sight of my experiments, and now I’m certain. When he suggests we take a walk round the garden as there’s something he wants to ask me, I’m not even surprised.
The Last Banquet Page 26