The empress of ice cream

Carlo

However sharp your rhubarb, the juice of a lemon will strengthen its flavour.

The Book of Ices

In the very midst of winter, the English grow a strange crop: half vegetable, half fruit. It looks a little like celery, but the stalks are bright pink, a curiosity made all the stranger by the fact that they have to force it, as they say, growing it in upturned buckets and dark sheds. It seems to thrive in the dark and cold; indeed, it is necessary, if the rhubarb is to develop the sharp, almost strawberry-like flavour that they prize.

I made her an ice of winter’s fruit, the first forced rhubarb of the year, its bitter shoots a reminder of all the harvests yet to come.

Once the decision was taken, she did not waste time regretting it. It was too late to change her mind, and besides, any sign of indecision would only have weakened her position. !

Only once did I see her worry about how it might be seen.

‘Can you make sure this reaches Brittany.^’

I looked at the envelope she had given me. It was addressed to the Compte and Comptesse de Keroualle at Brest.

‘You know it will be read anyway? If not by the English spies, then by,the French?’

‘I know it. I have tried to be circumspect. No doubt they will hear the story from others soon enough, but I wanted them to know that, despite everything, I am still their daughter.’

Other than that, she was all business. Until one day she said, ‘Carlo?’

I waited.

‘How does a lady who . . She hesitated. ‘How does a lady who is in love behave.^’

Her voice was as practical as ever. But her pale skin had a little more colour in it than was usual.

‘To the man she is in love with, you mean?’

She nodded.

‘In his bed?’

She nodded again.

‘Do your novels and books of letters not tell you?’

‘Oh - those.’ She made a dismissive gesture. ‘Apparently I must sigh and swoon. Or I must protest shrilly every minute he is not with me. Or act the jealous shrew. None of which, I suspect, would endear me to Charles.’

‘Nor would they seem much like Louise de Keroualle,’ I agreed. ‘But do I take it from your question you are worried that, because you do not love him, he will know it?’

‘He has so much more experience than I.’

‘Well, I am not the best person to ask, since I am not sure that I have ever been loved by a woman in the way you describe. Nor should you be too quick to disparage your own innocence, since for many men that is itself a kind of aphrodisiac. But I can tell you what little I do know.’

‘Then please do so.’ She was quite pink now.

I thought back. Olympe had not loved me, but she had had an ease with herself, a confidence, that had made lying with her a kind of feast. She had made me feel like a person of the world, a sophisticate, for whom sex was just another of the sensual pleasures a cultivated person should enjoy.

With Emilia there had been no coupling, yet when I recalled the eager delight of her kisses, the excitement we had both felt, the joy of discovering that the loved one felt the same way about you as you did about her, there had been something even sweeter than Olympe’s perfumed skin.

I thought how it might have been with Louise, if fate and fortune had been different.

I said, ‘You must make him feel that you are both new continents, waiting to be explored. That every time he touches you, it is like some new discovery - that like Hooke’s microscope, or Newton’s telescopes, some new wonder is being revealed which was previously hidden. You must be eager, but your eagerness must seem to astonish even you. Your kisses must be as exciting to him as the first pineapple his gardeners ever grew, and when he kisses you, you must think of the most surprising, most delightful, the most extraordinary thing you ever saw or did.’

‘Then I will think of the first time I tasted ice cream.’

‘But do not gulp, or shriek, or clasp your throat and say it has gone numb, as people who try my ices often do.’

She smiled.

But I could not.

‘Like this?’ she said softly, kissing me.

She kissed me.

She kissed me.

‘No, not like that,’ I said hoarsely, when at last we pulled apart. ‘That was too gentle, and too sad. If you kiss him like that he will think you pity him.’ *

Back at the Lion I said to Hannah, ‘Upstairs.’

Silently she followed me to my room.

A wordless coupling, as of animals.

Except that this time I could not finish. A great weariness came over me, I stopped, fell limply to the bed, and lay still.

I said to the ceiling, ‘You can go.’

Perhaps she was worried that I would not pay her for this failure, or that I was becoming bored with her and there would soon be no more. Whatever the reason, I heard her'say softly, ‘I will bring you a cordial.’

It was on my tongue to retort that I was a maker of cordials myself, and hardly had need of more.

But I did not.

Later I heard the door open as she returned. ‘Here.’ She handed me a tankard. The smell was of fragrant herbs - something grassy, like the taste of spring wheat when you pull a fat white stalk from its sheath of leaves, and crush its milky richness between your teeth.

Something bitter, too, in the aftertaste.

‘Valerian,’ she said, guessing my thoughts. ‘Willowbark, and klamath weed, and extract of nettles.’

‘Physick?’

‘Of a kind.’

I grunted. ‘I am not usually so unmanned.’

‘It is not for—’ She stopped. ‘Drink it anyway.’

I swallowed it down. ‘Thank you,’ I said grudgingly, handing the tankard back.

As I lay down I heard her go to my purse, the chink of coins. Then, surprisingly, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Later, when I woke, all was silent. I went downstairs. Hannah was not there. I was glad of that.

On the counter in the pantry, something caught my eye. A book.

I picked it up. The Compleat Herbal^ by Nicholas Culpeper. I glanced at the shelf where she kept her books of recipes. There was a gap where it came from, between Excellent Receipts in Cookery and The Housemdid^s Companion.

I picked it up and flicked through the pages. It seemed to be about astrology as much as herbs. You know Mars is hot and dry, and you know as well that winter is cold and moist; then you may know as well the reason why nettle-tops, eaten in the spring, consumeth the phlegmatic superfluities in the body of man, that the coldness and moistness of winter hath left behind . . .’

I flicked through until I found a reference to klamath weed. Oddly, Culpeper did not seem to prescribe it for impotence, but for heart sickness.