Chapter Four
“Miss Wrenfield says Rome was built by men who expected to be remembered.”
Theo delivered it without preamble, as he delivered most things now; as though a conversation had been running in his head all night and he had opened a door onto the middle of it.
Nathaniel set down his coffee. The small breakfast room had been laid for one until an hour ago, but was laid for three now, because his son, summoned to breakfast by his father, had sent word through Sarah and then Mrs Garnett that he would come if Miss Wrenfield came and not otherwise.
Nathaniel had decided he would sooner breach his own rule than refuse the first thing the boy had ever asked of him.
“Did they expect it?” he asked.
“She says you can tell by the drains. Men who only mean to last a winter do not build drains like that.” Theo applied himself to his egg with the ferocity of a boy who intended to get back to talking as quickly as possible. “Is it true there were nine thousand animals in a hundred days?”
“At the games for the opening, the accounts say so. Lions, bears, elephants. The emperor had them brought from three continents to be killed in an afternoon, which the Romans called generosity.”
“That is horrid.”
“It was. It was also a way of telling fifty thousand people at once that the man who could do it should not be argued with.” Nathaniel was not eating, and his hands were still on the cloth.
“Most generosity on that scale is a sentence with a threat hidden in the grammar. You will meet a good deal of it. Learn to read the threat.”
Across the table Miss Wrenfield said nothing, but her cup paused on its way to her mouth, and he saw her set the remark aside for some later use of her own.
“Were you frightened? In the Colosseum?” Theo had abandoned the egg.
“It was empty when I saw it. It was full of cats, and a man was selling oranges from a barrow where the emperor used to sit. There was nothing to be frightened of except the size of it, and how quiet a thing can be that was built for screaming.”
The boy went still over that, trying to understand it. Miss Wrenfield set her cup down without a sound.
“Tell him about the mountain,” she said.
“You tell it. You have read more about it than I troubled to learn standing at the bottom of it.”
“I have read about it, but you have stood on it. He will want the standing, Your Grace, not the reading. He has plenty of the reading.”
It was neatly done, and he saw it done, but he answered the boy anyway.
“Vesuvius. It smoked the week I was there, a thin grey thread off the top, and the people of Naples paid it no more mind than you pay a chimney. They build their houses on the slope and grow grapes in the ash, because the ash makes the wine taste of the mountain, and every few lifetimes the mountain reminds them why the ash was cheap.”
“They go on living there. After all that?”
“They drink the wine, rebuild the houses and bury their dead and plant again, because the alternative is to leave, and a man does not abandon the only ground he understands merely because it has frightened him once.”
“Even if it might bury him?”
“Especially then. The ground that can bury you is generally the same ground that fed you. They are rarely two different fields.” He heard the words leave him and did not, until they had landed, understand whose ground he had been describing.
“It buried a city.”
“Two. Pompeii and Herculaneum. They dug a little of it out while I was there. There were rooms with the paint still bright on the walls, and bread still in the ovens, turned to charcoal, with the baker’s mark stamped in it.
” He had not said any of this aloud in seven years.
The words came up out of some closed cellar of him, dusty and intact.
“A loaf of bread seventeen hundred years old, Theo, with a man’s name pressed into the crust because he wanted his customers to know whose bakery made the best bread on the street.
He expected to be remembered too. He was, though not in the way he planned. ”
“Miss Wrenfield.” Theo rounded on her, delighted. “Did you know about the bread?”
“I knew there was bread. I did not know about the baker’s mark.” She looked at Nathaniel, and there was something careful in it, a person handling a thing that has unexpectedly proved fragile. “That is the part you only get from standing there. Thank you.”
“Were there people?” Theo asked. “When the mountain came down. The books say there were people.”
“They found the spaces where people had been, hollows left in the hardened ash where a body had lain and rotted away, and the ash had kept the shape of it. You could look down into the hollow and see the very fold of a sleeve, the turn of a hand thrown up, the last moment a person had, pressed into the rock like a seal into wax.”
“That is the cleverest horrid thing I have ever heard in my life.”
“It is precisely that, and most of digging up the past is precisely that.” He turned his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “There was a dog, by the door of a house, still on its chain, caught at the full length of it.”
“I read of the dog.” Miss Wrenfield said it quietly, to her plate. “It had no name anyone could give it.”
“None. So, the diggers called it nothing at all, and it became the most famous dog in the world for how it was found, straining at the end of its rope with nowhere left to go.”
For a moment none of them said anything, and Nathaniel looked at his son looking at his governess, and understood that he had described every soul under his roof and not one of them had noticed him do it.
“What did you eat?” Theo demanded. “In Naples. Besides ancient bread.”
“Not the ancient bread.” He nearly laughed but decided against it.
“Macaroni, mostly. They sell it in the street from great copper pots, and the men eat it standing, lifting it over their heads on their fingers, no fork, and a boy goes round after with a cloth. In Milan it was rice, cooked slow in broth until it gives up and turns to gold.”
“Rice that turns to gold.” Theo turned to his governess, as he turned to her with everything now, wanting the marvel confirmed by the one authority he trusted. “Have you tried it? The gold rice?”
A small pause. Nathaniel would not have noticed it a week ago. He noticed it now.
“No,” Miss Wrenfield said. “I have read about them, but I have never tasted either of them.” She returned to her cup, and her voice did not change at all, which told him it had cost her something to keep it level.
“Some things stay on the page, Lord Theodore. It is no tragedy. The page is a perfectly good place for a thing to live.”
Nathaniel said nothing. A hundred tables, in committee and in courts, had taught him that the surest answer to a quiet wish was to note it and let the speaker believe it had gone unheard.
So, he drank his coffee, and asked Theo whether the egg was to be finished or merely persecuted, and let the moment close over the admission as water closes over a dropped stone.
But he had heard the splash, and he marked where it went down.
“Could we go?” Theo asked. “To see it. The mountain, and the gold rice, and the dog’s house.”
The question settled over the table. He had the old answer ready, the one he gave every door the boy tried, and found he did not care to give it with Miss Wrenfield sitting there to see whether he would.
“The dog’s house is still standing,” he said. “The dog is long gone to bone. Finish your egg.”
“That is not a no,” Theo informed his governess, deeply satisfied.
“It is not a yes either. Finish your egg.” She did not look at Nathaniel as she said it. “We take our victories in their proper order, Lord Theodore, and we do not spend tomorrow’s before it is earned.”
“May we go up?” Theo asked. “I want to look at the Vespasian before lessons. He looks tired, she said, and I want to see if she is right.”
“Go up. Mind, the coin is back in its tray by Friday, or your governess and I shall both be in disgrace with the steward.”
The boy was gone in a clatter. Miss Wrenfield rose, gathered nothing, owned nothing on the table to gather, and stood a moment with one hand on the back of her chair.
“That was a kindness, Your Grace. Letting him keep you here three quarters of an hour. He will not forget it.”
“It was breakfast, Miss Wrenfield.”
“It was the first breakfast of his life with his father at the table, and you know it as well as I do, but you would rather call it breakfast with eggs.” She inclined her head.
“Thank you for the baker, all the same. I have wanted that detail for fifteen years and never knew it was the one I was missing.”
She went after the boy. Nathaniel sat alone in the breakfast room that had been laid for one for seven years, and found he was in no hurry to have it cleared.
Mrs Garnett came to clear it herself, which she did not generally do, and which meant she had something to say while she did it.
“The blue rooms are being aired, Your Grace. Lady Cassandra arrives tomorrow.”
“I had not forgotten.”
“No, Your Grace. I only thought you would wish to have remembered it before breakfast, rather than after.” She stacked the third cup with the others. “Her ladyship will ask who has been sitting in the chairs.”
“Then her ladyship may ask.”
***
He found Mrs Garnett in the still-room counting jars, and the cook summoned up from the kitchen at his request, which had not happened in living memory and showed in the cook’s face.
“Mrs Coombe.” He had to consult his recollection for the name, which shamed him a little, a man who could recite the rent of every farm on the estate and had never learned the name of the woman who fed him. “Can the kitchen make an Italian recipe for the rice?”
The cook looked at Mrs Garnett.
“What recipe, Your Grace?”
“Rice, cooked slowly in good broth, a ladle at a time, stirred until it is soft and binds together. It is neither a pudding nor a soup. A hard cheese, finely grated, folded through at the end. It wants the right rice, a round grain, not the long. If we have only the long, send to London for the round.”
“I have made a rice pudding, Your Grace,” the cook offered, with the wariness of a woman feeling for the edge of a trap.
“It is the furthest thing in the world from a rice pudding. There is no sugar in it, no milk and no nutmeg, and if I find nutmeg in it, I shall know the attempt was not serious.” His own voice had begun doing the thing it did in committee, laying down a specification so precise that failure could only be a choice, but he reined it back.
“I do not expect you to know the dish. No reason you should. I am asking whether you are willing to learn it, properly, from the beginning, and to accept that the first three attempts will be poured into the pigs.”
“What rice, Your Grace? I have the long, that the late master was fond of. I have never bought a round grain in my life.”
“Then send someone to London, and pay what they ask without flinching, because they will smell flinching and adulterate the bag. If the broth is not made from a hen that worked for its living, you may as well not bother heating the water.”
“The pigs, Your Grace?”
“The pigs eat very well in Italy, Mrs Coombe. We shall extend them the courtesy.” He turned to go and turned back.
“Attempt it properly or do not attempt it at all. A badly cooked rice is worse than none. I would rather you told me to my face it cannot be managed than that you sent up something yellow and gave it the name.”
“It can be managed, Your Grace.” The cook had found her spine somewhere in the insult to her pigs. “Anything can be managed if a body is told what it is meant to taste of. I shall want to know what it is meant to taste of.”
He stopped. Behind his eyes sat a low room off a Milan courtyard, rain in the street, a cook with no English stirring a pot and tasting it off the back of a wooden spoon, frowning, adding nothing he could see, tasting again.
Four-and-twenty he had been, eating it with no notion that he was being handed a thing he would spend the rest of his life failing to describe to English servants.
“Of patience,” he said. “It is meant to taste of someone having paid attention to it for the whole of the time it took. That is the entire secret of the dish. There is no shortcut in it, and the rice can tell.”
Mrs Garnett’s pencil had stopped over her book.
“The cook will want to know who it is for, Your Grace,” she said. “To judge the quantity.”
“The estate.”
“The estate.” She wrote it down, every letter of it, her eyes on the page. “Forgive me, Your Grace. In seven years, I have known you send back a faultless dinner for arriving five minutes late and praise a burnt one for being prompt. I have never once known you to care what was on the plate.”
“Is there a question in that, Mrs Garnett?”
“There is an observation, and I have learned what becomes of those in this house when they are said aloud.” The book closed over her pencil.
“By tonight the hall will have it that His Grace has taken a sudden interest in rice. By tomorrow they will be asking why, and I shall give them nothing. Mind you, do not settle it aloud yourself, Your Grace. This house has never yet forgiven anyone for being caught hoping.”