He clapped his hands. The servant entered promptly, and stopped dead on seeing my plate practically as full as when he had handed it to me.
“Your dish does not meet with the approval of my guest,” the Baron said. “Remove it. Bring fruit and nuts to the salon”
Pushing back my chair, anxious to leave the room, I found the fellow glaring at me. And took stock of him properly for the first time. I cannot say he was ill-favoured; he was of a type one might pass by the thousand on the streets of any city in France. But, as though he had been insulted to his very marrow by my unwillingness to eat what he had prepared, he was regarding me with indescribable malevolence. For a heartbeat or two I could have believed in the Evil Eye.
How had the Baron, a person of taste, hit on this clown for his “gentleman’s gentleman”? Was this some hanger-on of his aunt’s, tied to him as a condition of her will?
Well, doubtless I should be enlightened soon enough. The time for speculation was over.
As soon as he had recalled Gregoire to his duties, which were sullenly undertaken, the Baron escorted me into the salon and from a corner cupboard produced a bottle I thought I recognised. Noticing that I was staring at it, he turned it so that I could read the label. Yes, indeed; it did say Le Digestif du Tertre. When he drew the cork and poured me some, I acknowledged the aroma of violets and strawberries and woodruff like an old friend.
The bottle was full; in fact I doubt it had been previously opened. Yet the Baron poured none for himself. Now I could brace myself to ask why.
He answered with the greatest possible obliquity.
“Because,” he said, “Gregoire is more than two hundred years old.”
I must have looked like a figure in a cartoon film. I had a cigar in one hand and a burning match in the other, and my mouth fell ajar in disbelief and stayed that way until the flame scorched me back to life. Cursing, I disposed of the charred stick and licked my finger.
And was at long last able to say, “What?”
“To be precise,” the Baron amplified, “he was born in the year the American Revolution broke out, and by the time the French Revolution was launched in imitation of it he was already a turnspit and apprentice saucier in the kitchens of my late aunt’s chateau near Guex . . . which did turn out to devolve on me as her closest surviving relative, but which unfortunately was not accompanied by funds which would have permitted the repair of its neglected fabric. A shame! I found it necessary to realise its value in ready money, and the sum was dismayingly small after the sacre lawyer took his share. I said, by the way, my aunt. This is something of a misnomer. According to incontrovertible proofs shown to me by Gregoire, she was my great-aunt at least eleven times over.”
I had just had time to visualise a sort of slantwise genealogical tree in which aunts and uncles turned out to be much younger than any of their nephews and nieces, when he corrected himself.
“By that I mean she was my eleven-times-great aunt. Sister of an ancestor on my father’s mother’s side who was abridged by the guillotine during the Terror, for no fouler crime than having managed his estates better than most of his neighbours and occasionally saved a bit of cash in consequence.”
Having made those dogmatic statements, he fixed me with an unwavering gaze and awaited my response.
Was I in two minds? No, I was in half-a-dozen. Out of all the assumptions facing me, the simplest was that the Baron—whom I’d suspected of setting me up for a confidence trick—had himself been brilliantly conned.
Only . . .
By whom? By Gregoire? But in that case he would have carried on with the act when I refused to finish my meal, not scowled as though he wished me to drop dead.
And in addition there was the matter of the food itself. I was having to struggle, even after one brief taste, against the urge to run back and take more, especially since its seductive aroma still permeated the air.
My uncertainty showed on my face. The Baron said, “I can tell that you are not convinced. But I will not weary you by detailing the evidence which has persuaded me. I will not even ask you to credit the argument I put forward—I shall be content if you treat it as one of your fantastic fictions and merely judge whether the plot can be resolved on a happy ending . . . for I swear I can’t see such an outcome. But already you have proof, do you not? Consult the cells of your body. Are they not reproaching you for eating so little of what was offered?”
Gregoire entered, favouring me with another savage glare, deposited a bowl containing a couple of oranges and some walnuts more or less within reach of me, and went out again. This gave me a chance to bring my chaotic mind under control.
As the door shut, I managed to say, “Who—who invented it?”
The Baron almost crowed with relief, but the sweat pearling on his face indicated how afraid he had been that I would mock him.
“Gregoire’s father did,” he answered. “A failed alchemist who was driven to accept a post in the kitchens of my family home and there continued his experiments while becoming a renowned chef From Gregoire, though he is a person exceedingly difficult to talk to, I have the impression that his employers believed him to be compounding the Philosophers’ Stone and hoped, I imagine, that one day they might find themselves eating off plates of gold that yesterday were pewter . . . But
