The empress of ice cream

Carlo

Cinnamon, galangal, sassafras and cloves are all good spices for ices. Nutmeg ice cream, indeed, can hold its own with the very grandest of gelati, and makes an excellent ice in winter. Serve it with some warm apple pie and a glass of mulled ale.

The Book of Ices

England was glutted with snow now, groaning with it, surfeited. My workmen grew desperate, forcing carts laden with ice through the endless deep drifts. The horses’ hooves had to be wrapped in scraps of fur; even so, picking their way through the cold and wet, some got the rot and had to be turned loose to fend for themselves as best they could. Sometimes we were trapped for days by howling bhzzards that scoured the skin from our faces and pushed pellets of snow inside every crevice of our clothes. At other times the sky was blue and brilliant and calm above a world turned white, the still air sparkling like the dust from a garble-cutter’s drill; pillars of snow heaped on every cottage and frozen cart like the freshly baked crusts of pies.

I was in my element.

It was not only ice to fill the king’s ice house I required. That might have provided enough for his own household, but the court, and his feast, had greater needs. That meant finding and filling caves where the air would stay cold all year, granaries of ice from which I would refill the larder in St James’s.

Caves are rarely near good roads, and even good roads were impassable now. The horses’ v^thers were soon striped indelibly with the marks of our whips.

It was mid-January by the time Elias and I returned to London, at the head of a caravan of carts. Although it was not long after noon, darkness was falling - there were few good hours of daylight in those midwinter days. We passed through Ludgate, and saw the great river below us. For a moment I thought they must have lit the famous beacons that warned London of invasion. Then I realised that - a thing of wonder - the bonfires were on the river itself, actually on top of the ice, a line of flames that stretched away towards the west as far as the eye could see.

It was like the gathering of a circus, or the encampment of an army. There were castles made of canvas; fire eaters and dancing bears; jugglers and fools; fire balloons, and the glittering sparks of coloured gunpowders illuminating the faces of the crowds. Pennants fluttered in the breeze, and the sound of music drifted towards us.

‘It’s the wherrymen’s doing,’ Elias said, from his perch by the carter. ‘When they can no longer work their boats, they declare the frost fair open. No one has jurisdiction between the riverbanks but them.’

The road we were on led down to the river. Soon I could smell roasting chestnuts and the warm, spicy odour of mulled beer.

‘Want to stop.>’ the carter said, licking his lips.

‘No,’ I said shortiy. ‘We must get our ice to its destination.’

When we finally reached the Lion, exhausted after a night spent unloading the ice carts, I found the place deserted except for a solitary tap-man. Titus Clarke had opened a fuddling tent at the frost fair, he explained, and Hannah was selling her pies.

Curious, I accompanied Elias down to the river, where a coach and six was taking passengers from one bank to the other. The driver assured me that it was perfectly safe, but I had too much respect for ice to toy with its dangers, and stayed on foot. At the Red Lion’s tent Elias was reunited with his mother: she hugged him and told him that he must have grown at least a foot. He

looked a little uncomfortable at this display of affection. Not all his growing-up had been done on the outside, I thought, amused.

To me her smile of welcome was warm. ‘Thank you for looking after him,’ she said. I nodded, and left them to catch up.

Each tent bore the sign of an inn, and, by agreement, sold only one style of drink. The Three Bells was an arak tent; the Coach and Horses dispensed wormwood, while the Red Lion was serving mum.

‘Why is it called that.>’ I asked Titus Clarke.

‘Because mum is what you become if you drink enough of it,’ he said cheerfully as he handed me a foaming tankard. ‘Has the power to take away speech, mum does, as many a man has found out to his cost before now.’

I tried some: it was a frothy mulled ale spiced with sassafras and cloves, pleasant, if a little too aromatic, in a way that reminded me of a linctus for the cough. All around me Englishmen and women were taking great drafts of the stuff. I drank mine a little more moderately - in Italy we are not inclined to drunkenness, as the English are. Rather to my surprise, it felt good to be back in London: I had not realised, out in the countryside, how much I missed its rough, perpetual energy. I strolled on. There was ^ome bull-baiting going on, and a cockfight or two, which diverted me for a while. People were eating apple pies and sweetmeats, and the warm smells of nutmeg and cinnamon filled the ain

Then I heard a shout: The kin 0 .1 looked up. A procession of a dozen coaches was driving down the ice from the direction of Whitehall. As I watched, they pulled up and the court disembarked from them, men and women spilling onto the ice. Many were wearing skates beneath their fine clothes, and as they set off, as graceful as dancers, the crowd gave them a cheer. I saw Louise among them, skating backwards in a circle, her dress of golden silk billowing. Then the king stretched out his hand to her, and the two of them went speeding down towards the Great Bridge together, outstripping all the rest, their legs moving in perfect

unison, her long black hair streaming behind her; as if they were two gorgeous birds, flying away downriver.

I turned back to the fair, which suddenly seemed a litde darker, a little colder, without them there.

The next thing I can remember I was waking up, painfully, in my room at the Lion. Someone had undressed me: whoever it was had folded my clothes neatly beside the bed, and even put my boots outside for cleaning. I swung upright, alarmed, then wished that I had not: my head ached unbearably, like a rock that had been split open by a mason’s hammer. It seemed that I had succumbed to the vice of the English after all, and drunk too much.

Groaning, I made my way down to the dining rooms. I could tell the kitchens were open - the smell of baking pies was wafting out from the back - but there was no one about, and I was in no condition to shout. Eventually my breakfast was brought to me by Rose, the lowest of the sluts.

It took me a little while to realise that she had sat down at a nearby table and was now watching me eat.

‘How’re you feeflng.^’ she enquired, with what was clearly intended as a sympathetic smile.

I frowned. ‘My head is a litde thick.’

‘Not surprised, if that was the first time you’d tried mum.’

So she had seen me the night before. ‘I take it I became speechless? Stupefied with drink?’

She threw her head back and laughed. ‘You? Speechless? No. You it took the other way. Speechifying like a priest, you was.’

Needless to say, I had no recollection of this. ‘What was I . . . speechifying about?’

‘You really don’t remember?’

‘If I did,’ I pointed out, ‘I would have no need to ask.’

She nodded. ‘Eair enough. Let’s just say most of it went over my head. Mary’s too. Especially the bits in Italian. Pretty, they

were, and very persuasive, but not in any way that was what you might call intelligible,’

I wondered at that ‘persuasive’, But at least, it seemed, I had not blabbed any of my secrets. It was another reason to vow never to touch mum again, had the condition of my head not already resolved me to just such a course.

Whatever had happened that night, it had another unforeseen consequence. Far from being horrified by my lack of self-control, the regulars at the Lion seemed to take it as evidence that I was now, as they put it, ‘one of them’.

‘We thought you were stuck up to start with,’ the other slut, Mary, confided to me. ‘But you’re all right really, aren’t you.^’

I was rather in two minds about this. On the one hand, I was tempted to point out that, as the confectioner to His Majesty, I was hardly one of them; on the other, I was glad these people no longer considered me an outsider, and so I judged that the best thing to do would be to accept their friendship in the spirit in which it was offered.

Mary and Rose, in particular, loved to gossip about the court, and now that I had - somehow - signalled to them that I was more approachable than I had hitherto given them reason to believe, they often came to bother me as I worked.

‘What about Lady Casdemaine? Is she as beautiful as they say?’

‘I have not had the pleasure of seeiiig that lady yet.’

‘What about the king? What’s he like?’

‘His Majesty is very gracious. And tall. That is his most distinguishing characteristic; his height.’

‘Is it true that Lady Arlington has a hundred gowns?’

‘I have not counted them myself. But at Versailles, a hundred gowns would not be considered so very many, by a true lady of fashion.’

In particular, they were fascinated beyond all imagining by Nell Gwynne - ‘Our Nell,’ as they called her. I might look askance

when I heard the name, and venture the opinion that the actress was a coarse and unappetising creature, but for them that was simply part of her fascination. The fact that Nell had started out as a common whore - ‘a coal-yard cullymonger’ Mary called her graduating to^the stage, fame, and thence to the royal bed, seemed to them a kind of fairy tale, all the more so for the way that in its sordid beginnings it reminded them of their own lives.

T was an orange girl like her, only at the Duke’s, not the King’s. Eleven, I was, when a gentleman decided he wanted to unpeel more than he’d paid for,’ Mary said. I quickly changed the subject, although the discomfort was all on my side, not hers.

They had heard of Louise de Keroualle, but their impression of her was formed by a different prejudice: that as a Frenchwoman, she had been sent to the English court for the sole purpose of bewitching their king. All my protestations that this was not in fact the case were met with polite but stubborn disbelief. One of the girls even had a book purporting to be Louise’s biography, and, not being able to read, asked me if I would describe its contents to her. It was, of course, more filth, and after taking one look I declined in no uncertain terms.

There was more gossip and chatter to which I paid little heed; but to my surprise, when Robert Cassell dropped by on his regular visits, it was this tavern gossip, and not my progress with making a smoother ice cream, in which he seemed most interested.

‘Anything else.^’’ he said, leaning across the table and fixing me with his bright military gaze. ‘What about talk of other nations, for example .>’

‘Well, they ^^are quite convinced that the Dutch started the Great Fire.’

‘Are they indeed.^’ he said, with a slight smile.

‘I told them that it is far more likely that God is punishing their country for its regicide.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I think, for the time being, you should perhaps keep that point of view to yourself. Opinions are going to get rather heated on subjects such as that one in the coming months. In fact, it would be better for many reasons if you were to say that you have heard several eminent people at court also say that the Dutch were behind the burning.’

One person who took little part in the gossiping was Hannah. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, I found myself disputing with her almost as much as with the other two. For if Rose and Mary were too credulous, Hannah was too dismissive.

‘Hann,’ they would call to her as she passed through the front rooms, ‘Come and Usten, do. Signor Carlo is telling us about the time he served goblets of snow mixed with a rosewater conserve to the Countess of Sedburgh at a ball.’

‘The Countess of Sedburgh is not an acquaintance of mine,’ Hannah said without stopping. ‘So I am not very interested in what she has to eat.’

‘But she is beautiful—’ Rose called after her; but it was too late; Hannah was already out of earshot. It seemed to me that she was shorter with all of us since the night of the frost fair; then again, winter was the busiest time of year for her pies, so she might simply have been pressed for time. I

Then there was the occasion when I was repeating some remarks the king had made concerning the forthcoming feast for the Garter Knights at Windsor, and my own central role in those festivities.

‘So he has money enough to spend on palaces and banquets, but none for wells or hospitals,’ Hannah said, overhearing me. ‘And every single penny of it paid for from our taxes.’

‘What the king spends his exchequer on is a matter for His Majesty and his advisors,’ I observed mildly. ‘How can we, with our limited information, presume to question the decisions of great men?’

She did stop then - stopped dead, in fact: a rare enough occurrence for me to mark it. ‘And what, pray, makes one person great, and another not.>’ she demanded.

‘His birth, his manners and his blood,’ I said immediately. ‘You may not always like those whom God has set above you, but you surely cannot doubt that He has the means to do so. Just as the king is entitled to some of the respect that is due to God, whose representative he is, so his courtiers are entitled to some of the respect that is due to the angels.’

Perhaps I did not express myself very clearly, because Hannah simply threw her head back and laughed sarcastically.

‘And I suppose you include yourself in that.>’ she said when she had stopped laughing. ‘Because if you’re an angel, then I’m a Frenchman’s arse.’

I stared at her, baffled as to where this new animosity had come from. I was certain she could not be referring to my own humble birth: that was a shameful secret I never alluded to. Unless I had somehow betrayed my lowly origins when drunk.> I watched her, trying to gain some clue from her expression. But she had already turned her back on me and moved away.