The empress of ice cream

Carlo

To make a sorbet of medlars; simmer two pounds of medlar pulp with one cup of sugar and the juice of a lemon, working it smooth with a spoon or stick. It will be improved by adding a glass or two of cordial made from the blackthorn or sloe berries that grow wild in northern climes.

The Book of Ices

Of all the orchard trees, the medlar must be the strangest. On the tree, the fruits are hard and bitter. But if they are left over winter, frosts break down the hard flesh. Only when the skin turns brown is the pulp soft enough to eat, with something of the smoky, musty richness of hung game, or cheese that has been aged in damp cellars. In England they call this process bletting^ a word that suggests both ripening and rotting.

I had first spoken to Louise in a copse of medlar trees.

I made an ice of medlars, and sweetened it With a fragrant, slightly medicinal liqueur made from blackthorn berries. I set it in a bed of fresh snow from the countryside, and took it to her.

In her apartments, all was activity. A wall had come down, knocking the rooms into those next door. Workmen were repainting walls with frescoes and trompe Foeil columns. Another painter was making her portrait. And a whole cluster of ladies-in-waiting watched and gossiped from the other side of the room.

T have brought you an ice,’ I said with a bow.

‘Signor Demirco.’ To the painter she said, ‘I will be with you presently.’ He looked furious, but put down his brush with a nod.

‘Come.’ She drew me towards a private alcove.

‘What is going on?’ I asked as I handed her the ice.

‘This? Oh, he is having my apartments refurbished. Apparently I must have a bedroom as big as a ballroom, for my morning ruelle^ when he visits me with his friends. And a ballroom for when he wants to dance.’ He^ I noticed. No longer the kin^ or even Charles.

Her gown was sown with hundreds of pearls. She was dressed up for the portrait painter, of course, but she had changed, too. No longer a girl, a child, but a lady - a great lady of France, polished and poised.

Or were these differences not in her, but in the way I saw her, because of the props she was surrounded with - the gown, the silks, the ladies-in-waiting, the painter of portraits, the sumptuous apartments themselves?

‘Have you had a good winter?’ she asked. ‘You got your ice?’

I nodded. ‘Enough to keep all of Europe in ice creams. And you? How are your relations with His Majesty?’

‘Oh, Carlo,’ she said heavily.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The king is in love with me.’

‘So? He was in love with you before I went away.’

‘But now he seems almost - crazed. As if he is in pain. I have mishandled him. Now we are both trapped. He can’t marry me; he can’t bear to let me go: none of us can go home until we have this war. What am I to do?’

‘What brought this on?’

‘His brother’s wife, Anne Hyde, passed away.’

‘I heard.’ It was said that on her deathbed she refused her priest, saying that she would rather die unshriven in the True Faith than blessed in a false one. The people I spoke to in the countryside were more certain than ever that the Stuarts were secret Catholics.

‘The question is, who will James marry next? Someone young, he says, beautiful, and of course, a Catholic.’

Suddenly I realised. ‘You?’

She nodded. ‘He spoke to Charles of it, anyway. There^was such a row . . . Charles thought I had encouraged him. I hadn’t, of course. I was simply trying to get his support for war,’

‘So what happened?’

‘I told both of them that I couldn’t possibly accept.’

I knew what this must mean to her: to turn down an offer of marriage from the heir to the English throne.

‘I had no choice,’ she added. ‘Colbert and Arhngton made that perfectly clear. It is Charles’s mistress or nothing.’

‘And the war?’

She shrugged. ‘I fear it is further away than ever now. I have managed to influence him in some small things, certainly. But not that.’

She looked so despondent, sitting there, that I made a sudden decision.

‘Run away with me,’ I said. ‘Now. Today. We’ll take a ship to Spain, or Sicily. Marry me or not, it is up to you. But we could be in Dover by dawn. Madrid within a week. My ice creams are the best in Europe: the Spanish are great lovers of ice, we will not starve . . .’

She shook her head.

‘You must not,’ she said quietly. ‘Carlo, you ntust not do this. The king loves me.’

‘And you him?’

She shook her head again, and I knew that she was not answering me, but only warning me that I should never ask her that again.

I went back to the Red Lion. I admit it: I stopped at another tavern on the way, the nearest one, and sank three tankards of mum.

Then I strode into the Lion looking for a woman.

It could have been any one of them. It happened to be Hannah who I met on the stairs.

‘Come,’ I said abruptly. ‘I have need of your services.’

‘Making custard for your ices.^’

‘I meant your other services. The services you give to certain men. How much do you charge?’

She looked at me levelly for a moment. Doubtless she was wondering how high a price she could name. ‘A shilling,’ she said at last.

‘Good. Let us go to my room.’

She followed me upstairs without a word. I pointed to the bed, and told her where to arrange herself. And then—

O, I am ashamed to write this. But I have sworn to set it down without embellishment or evasion.

I had her on the bed, like a beast of the farmyard, without even taking off my boots.

She made no sound while I did it, and for that I was grateful. I could not have borne it if she had squeaked and groaned and flattered in a feeble simulacrum of pleasure. There was no pleasure in that coupling. None for her, and none for me. All I felt was a little of agony of desire purging from my loins, like the letting of a vein, which only left the ache in my heart all the clearer.

Afterwards I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

‘Why do you weep?’ she said. They were the first words she had spoken since we had begun. Carefully, as if I were a fire she might be burned by, she put a hand to my face.

‘I do not weep,’ I said, turning my head away. She did not say more, but only got to her feet.

‘There is money by the window, in my purse,’ I said. I heard her go to it, the chink of coins, and then I was alone.