The empress of ice cream

Carlo

Gather ice in winter, that you may have the pleasure of ices in the heat of summer.

The Book of Ices

‘A harvest’, I had called the gathering of ice in conversation with the king; and that is exactly what it was. Seeing the first frosts in St James’s Park was like spying the first small sprouting of a longawaited crop. Each day the shoots grew a little sturdier, a httle stronger, nourished by the dark and the increasing cold. Men hurried through the streets now wrapped up in furs. Dray horses stamped their hooves where they waited to unload, and blew trumpets of warm breath as they laboured over the uneven roads.

Then the snow came. If the frosts were the shoots, this was the blossom. Great, fat petals of snow, drifting over the city, turning roofs white; setthng a little longer, a Httle deeper, every time it fell.

The ice did not harden yet, though. The ice was winter’s fruit, ripening slowly. First a tiny brulee of clear toffee on the surface of a puddle. Then a disc of glass. And finally a thick, white plate of porcelain, crazed with cracks where children had tried to stamp it through and found they could not.

Tee,’ I told EHas, ‘even ice that seems frozen, needs time. It sets slowly, over the course of a week or so. And the harder the ice, the more slowly it will melt. We want iron, not porcelain.’

‘We wait.^’

‘We wait,’ I confirmed.

After a week, the ice rang hard and true as iron. It was time to move out to Hampton. Where, of course, aU was chaos. The steward had neglected our arrangement; the labourers were idle; the

barn I had ordered was being used by cattle. Only the ice was perfect, thick enough to ride a horse across, as hard and unyielding as the frozen ground itself.

I invoked the king’s name, and swore' volubly in Italian. Litde by litde, my harvest was gathered in.

One morning I awoke to find that the air itself had turned white. A freezing sea mist had come in from the east, bringing with it a cold so bitter that holly leaves could be snapped in two like biscuits, and every twig and branch was furry with ice.

I remembered Louise talking about Brest, and wondered what she was doing now. I tried to put her from my mind. But sometimes, through the frozen mists, I thought I glimpsed a figure in a threadbare gown, dancing in the snow.