‘He loves apples,’ Donna Friussi said.
Juan glared at me, and Miles looked offended on my behalf, but given Ser Niccolò’s origins, I didn’t think he meant a slur. At any rate, I rose and took my beautiful glass of wine to the kitchen, following a page.
The cook was a big man with a pair of enormous knives in a case in his belt, and he frowned and then shrugged. ‘Whatever my lord and lady require,’ he said, ‘it is my task to provide. You wish to make an apple tart? So be it.’
I found that the darker of Donna Giulia’s ladies was at my shoulder. ‘This may take an hour or two,’ I said.
She shrugged and sipped her wine.
By the time I’d made my dough and was rolling it out, I had a little crowd. Ser Nerio was there, and Ser Niccolò, and Donna Giuglia. I had flour on my best doublet, and I was having a fine time. In fact, I was the centre of attention, and I like that well enough. And the cook had decided to humour me – better than that, he was actively supporting me, so that when I was at the point of forgetting salt in my crust, he slapped a salt horn on to the table beside my hand.
A pair of boys chopped apples for me. I discovered that the palazzo boasted a majolica jar of cinnamon, a fabulous spice from the east – you know it? Ah, everyone does, now. I ground it myself, and held my fingers out to the dark lady-in-waiting and she breathed in most fetchingly.
More and more of the guests found their way into the kitchens, and Ser Niccolò served a pitcher of wine to the cook’s staff. He had rented the house, and none of the staff knew what to make of him: cook’s apprentices do not usually mix with the guests. But Donna Giuglia brought musicians into the kitchen, and there was dancing, and a lady began to sing. And then, as I assembled my little pies, Donna Giulia took a tambour and raised it, and everyone fell silent, and she whispered to one of the lute players. Accompanied by only a single lute, she danced and sang to her own song.
She was magnificent. Let me add that she was so good that the fifty guests and twenty kitchen staff crammed into the corners of a great kitchen gave her both silence and room – and that she had an open strip of tiled floor no wider than a horse’s stall and not much longer, and she held us all spellbound.
I finished my pies. I put Master Arnaud’s mark on them – I don’t know what imp moved me to do that. Perhaps just the memory of every other apple tart I’d ever made. The cook swept them away into the great oven by the fireplace, itself big enough to roast an ox.
Donna Giuglia finished, her honey-coloured hair swaying, and every man and woman whistled, shouted, clapped their hands or laughed aloud, and she stood and swayed a moment, eyes closed.
Ser Niccolò went and threw his arms around her and kissed her – a lover’s kiss. I had seldom seen outside of army camps a woman kissed in such a way in public, but I gathered that there were few rules that applied to Ser Niccolò.
After the dance, it was difficult for any of us to reach the level that Donna Giuglia had set us, and we chatted. I began to tidy up the mess I’d made, and the cook and his apprentices began to look at me reproachfully, but in truth, it gave me something to do, and I didn’t want to stand idle and silent among strangers.
Ser Niccolò came and put an arm around my shoulder. ‘Now I believe that you were truly a cook,’ he said.
‘While I confess, my lord, that I have trouble believing that you were ever a stingy banker,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Perhaps I became a knight because I was such a very bad banker.’
My little pies emerged from the oven, no thanks to me, and carefully watched, no doubt, by the professional. But they were golden brown, and the scent alone – I’d used more eastern spices in six small pies than one of Prince Edward’s cooks would see in a month of Sundays – the scent alone suggested that the gates of heaven might be close.