The Devil's Feast Page 6

  At the word “murdered” the other members of the committee visibly shuddered. Molesworth seemed to me to enjoy this. He went on, “We need to establish what Mr. Rowlands died of, if there has been, as Captain Beare calls it, ‘foul play’ and, most importantly, where it comes from and who has perpetrated it. And it must be done discreetly, so as not to spread alarm. I think that is everything?”

  Soyer spoke, and there was a hint of desperation in his voice, “Captain Avery, if you and Mr. Blake might be prevailed upon to help, I should be forever in your debt.”

  “Of course, the greatest likelihood is that nothing is amiss,” said Lord Marcus soothingly. “But we have to be sure.”

  “What was the earlier case? The one similar to Rowlands’s?” I said.

  “It was not very similar,” said Lord Marcus. “Some three weeks ago, one of our members was taken ill in the street after an evening at the club.”

  “After dining rather lavishly at the club,” Molesworth corrected.

  “Everett Cunningham was his name. He was not a young man and had a weak heart, but even so.”

  “He was perfectly healthy,” said Molesworth, “if given to gluttony. He vomited in the street and was dead by the following morning.”

  “Did a doctor diagnose a cause of death?”

  “The club doctor was sent to attend him. What was the diagnosis?” Once again, Molesworth seemed amused.

  “I am sure we can find a record of it, if Captain Avery thinks it necessary,” said Lord Marcus.

  Another man stood up. He was exceedingly plump, with a soft, pink face reminiscent of blancmange. “Captain Avery, I am Edward Ellice, the club’s founder,” he said. He had an air of considerable satisfaction, proceeding, I suspected, from a considerable bank balance. “I should like to add that we would remunerate you well—very well—for any time and effort you expend on the matter.”

  “Thank you, Ellice,” said Lord Marcus. “I believe also that Mr. Percy has arranged for your belongings to be brought here. Should you decide to depart for your home, you may do so immediately. Should you stay, as we hope you will, it would be a great convenience to us if you took rooms at the club—naturally, at our expense.”

  “But my account at the Oriental—” I said.

  “—has been paid,” said Mr. Ellice.

  I blinked. I felt the familiar stirrings of excitement and was flattered by their persistence. Another week in London would not be too great a hardship, nor would the fee. Perhaps I might persuade Blake out of the Marshalsea and watch over Matty for a while longer. Then I brought myself back to reality.

  “Gentlemen, I am sensible of the honor you do me—and my associate, Mr. Blake. But I cannot accept. Firstly, I promised my wife I would return home today. Secondly, I am a Tory born and bred. I should not really have set foot in the Reform at all, I meant only to visit the kitchen—”

  “We will not tell if you do not,” said Lord Marcus Hill. “More than a few men of your party have been tempted to cross the threshold by virtue of Monsieur Soyer’s skills.”

  “Thirdly, Mr. Blake is indisposed, that is to say, he is not available, being engaged—”

  “Surely he will come if you ask him,” said Soyer.

  “And if he cannot extricate himself, which is highly likely, you would be left with just me, and I neither know London well, nor have his skills—”

  “Captain Avery, you are too modest.”

  “Truly, I am not.” Truly, I was not.

  “Please, Captain Avery.”

  I had always been bad at saying no. “My Lord, gentlemen, I assure you I would be little use to you on my own, but I will see what I can do about Mr. Blake, and I promise to put myself at your disposal, for one day at least.”

  “Excellent news,” said Lord Marcus Hill.

  “So,” said the red-faced Captain Beare, “what is your first move, Avery?”

  “Ah,” I said.

  I had not the faintest idea.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Molesworth, the skeptic, “I have taken the liberty of summoning a surgeon to conduct a postmortem examination of the body. I expect him here very shortly.”

  “A surgeon?” said Captain Beare suspiciously.

  “A medic, and a brother.”

  “A brother?”

  “A brother MP. A radical.”

  “Not Wakley, the member for Finsbury?” said plump Mr. Ellice.

  “The very same,” said Molesworth, amused.

  “Oh, no!” Ellice dashed his hand against his forehead. “Wakley is the least discreet man. You have been very hasty, Molesworth. And a postmortem will involve a coroner and a police report, will it not? I thought the one thing we wished to do was not draw attention to Mr. Rowlands’s demise.”

  “We cannot hide it, and Wakley is a coroner as well as a surgeon, and indisputably honest.”

  “Far too honest, if you ask me,” said Ellice. “He is a troublemaker and a busybody.”

  “What do you think, Captain Avery?” said Lord Marcus.

  “If there is any more to Rowlands’s death than there appears,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, “then a postmortem is the only way to discover it.”

  “I wonder if it would be possible,” Ellice mused, “to have the postmortem but perhaps to delay making public its findings?” He gazed at me questioningly.

  “You will have to ask Mr. Wakley. I think it unlikely and, even if Mr. Blake could carry off such a thing, as I said before, I would not know how.”

  “No, no, of course, Mr. Ellice should not have asked,” said Lord Marcus.

  I suggested that the club should be aired and fumigated to remove any lurking cholera. And that we send to Soyer’s other guests of the night before to discover if any of them had been taken ill. The committee readily agreed to the former, and footmen were set to opening every window in the building—to the exasperation, I later discovered, of the members. As for sending to discover the state of the other guests, they were extremely reluctant. I let the matter go, promising myself I would revisit it later.

  Then, with a good deal of relief, I retired to my room “to think.” My belongings, such as they were, had already been laid on the daybed and a fire had been lit in the grate. Clearly, they had been confident of convincing me.

  I made my letter to Blake as persuasive as I could: brief and straightforward as to the circumstances of Rowlands’s death, the club’s request, the possibility of conspiracy and Soyer’s worry. I also made no bones about how at sea I was and how in need of his advice. I arranged for it to be delivered to Collinson, since I could not let the club know where Blake was, with a covering note mentioning that it might just change Blake’s mind.

  I turned—uneasily—to the letter I owed my wife, Helen. I explained that I had been asked to undertake a task in London which I felt I could not refuse. I rushed over the matter of my lodging at the Reform, of which she would disapprove, and instead mentioned Collinson, by whom I knew she would be impressed. I told her I would return home as soon as I possibly could, asked her to kiss the baby for me and signed myself her devoted and affectionate husband. To my sister Louisa I wrote more honestly, a fact that, as usual, provoked guilty feelings and yet seemed unavoidable, confessing that I had succumbed to the Reform Club’s flattery, that I must spend a little more time in London for Blake’s sake, and that I had little idea of what I should do.

  • • •

  I SHOULD HAVE LIKED to have slept, but I feared I would lose the rest of the day. So I took myself down to the kitchen to see if I could find Soyer, or even Matty. There was no trace of them, or indeed any sign of what had passed the night before. Instead, a group of fifteen or so ladies and gentlemen hovered in the middle of the kitchen next to the oddest-shaped table I had ever seen. It was about twelve feet long, though, given the size of the kitchen, it did not seem that lar
ge, and was shaped like a lozenge or a Christmas cracker without the ends, with some twelve sides. In its middle stood a great iron cupboard.

  Percy appeared. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. He had to shout a little to compete with the clatter and whistle of the kitchen. “Welcome to the kitchens of the Reform Club. I am Mr. Percy, steward of the Reform Club. I order and oversee supplies, see to their storage, marshal the accounts. And I am the cellarman, ordering wines and spirits—under instructions, of course, from Monsieur Soyer and the Wine Committee.” He smiled, and brought out an enormous ring of keys. “Today, I shall be your guide on our tour.” Even I had heard of the Reform’s famous kitchen tours.

  There was a hum of disappointment. Mr. Percy smiled sympathetically. “I regret to say that Monsieur Soyer, or ‘Chef,’ as we call him, is unavoidably detained. He would have moved heaven and earth to be with you, if he could.

  “As you know,” Percy continued, “the kitchens opened almost a year ago to instant acclaim, and so remarkable, so novel, and so impressive have visitors found them, that we have taken to giving regular tours for the discerning. In the last year, the kitchen has served almost twenty thousand meals”—he paused for the gasp of amazement—“and that does not include the thousands of hot beverages, amuses-bouches and breakfasts we also prepare. There are well over sixty staff, from potboys to kitchen maids to skilled cooks. The cooks, you will note, wear tall white hats called ‘toques.’ The staff are divided into sections. One, for example, prepares sauces, another roasts, another sees to the grilling and frying of meats, another prepares fish, another the soups and vegetables; another, known as the garde manger, prepares cold savories, such as aspics, terrines, hams and salads; and, finally, we have the pâtissier for sweets, desserts, ices and special cakes, as well as our own baker. Heat, light and ice are produced with the help of our six-horse-power steam engine, which sits in a purpose-built room well below the kitchens. We have gas pipes throughout the kitchen and the club. I can tell you that the club spent the sum of six hundred and seventy-four pounds on pots, pans, knives and utensils.” There was another gasp of amazement at the vast sum. “By the end of your visit, I hope you will agree that the Reform’s kitchens are a temple to science and innovation, to England’s genius in progress and, if I may say so, the genius of Monsieur Alexis Soyer, who is responsible for so many of the brilliant and new ideas exhibited here.” There was nothing showy about his speech; indeed, one might almost have described him as a little dry, but somehow this served to make his words all the more persuasive. Since I could spy neither Soyer nor Matty, I decided I would join the tour.

  “Let us start with this strange but ingenious table,” said Percy. “It is made of elm and it has twelve sides. Monsieur Soyer came up with it, so as to allow twelve cooks to work upon it at one time without getting in each other’s way. But look underneath. There are special drawers for knives, chopping boards that slide out on casters, and copper buckets with mops so that the table is always clean. And see, around the two pillars in the middle of the table, the little shelves at arm’s height contain boxes of herbs and seasonings which spin about. The iron box in the center of the table is a steam closet for keeping finished dishes warm. Everything is thought of, no space is wasted. This is typical of Monsieur Soyer.”

  Percy led us around the kitchen, pointing out each clever innovation: a tall and shallow fireplace for roasting game and poultry on spits under which the coals were piled vertically upon themselves, like a wall, to present more heat. The heat kept small ovens and trays of shallow water set in the sides of the fireplace warm so that sauces and soups could be kept at a constant temperature. In the corridor between the cold meat and sauce larders and the principal kitchen was a sloping iron table upon which salmon, turbot, Dover sole and half a dozen lobsters were kept chilled by the action of iced water coursing over them. Orders from the dining room upstairs were communicated by speaking tubes to a kitchen clerk who sat at a high desk tucked away in the main kitchen. Dishes were delivered to the dining room without delay by cupboards called “lifts,” which were moved up and down a shaft by a series of pulleys operated both by hand and with the application of steam. Never had I seen anything so clever.

  And the smells! In one corner, the scent of sweet, yeasty baking; nearby, the tang of juiced lemons; in another corner, gentle, soupy aromas emanating from cauldrons of simmering veal and beef that made the stomach groan; and in a third, the spitting, fatty savor of roasting meat.

  Perhaps the most remarkable things of all were the two vast gas stoves: great, square, cast-iron boxes, the fronts of which were divided into five separate compartments, each with its own little door, not unlike a chest of drawers. The wonder of them was that heat could be produced instantly the moment it was needed, and extinguished the moment it was not; and that the temperatures could be regulated so that one compartment was blastingly hot while the one next to it was merely warm. The same was true of the top of the range, on which sat a series of trivets under which circles of flame were fed by gas flues. One stew pan bubbled wildly while that next to it barely simmered. The greatest miracle was that it was clean: there was no coal, with its noxious fumes, and no ash casting blackened dust over every surface.

  “On these two stoves, ladies and gentlemen, we can cook a dinner for six hundred people in the time it would take a housewife to roast an ordinary joint. These stoves save the club not only time but two hundredweight of coal a day. Moreover, they produce no carbonic acid, the unfortunate result of burning charcoal, a trial and poison for every chef. It was carbonic acid,” Percy said, lowering his voice, “that took the life of Monsieur’s own brother Philippe, chef to the Duke of Cambridge, only last year. Monsieur Soyer believes that, one day, there will be a gas stove in every kitchen in England.” We half-laughed, impressed but disbelieving.

  “We are nearing the end of our tour,” said Percy. “Come this way.”

  We followed him to one of the side kitchens, and there, standing before a paneled wall, stood Soyer, velvet suit, tilted cap, diamond rings and all. In his hand he brandished a wooden spoon—his one concession to his trade.

  “Welcome, welcome, my friends,” he said, “to the kitchens of the Reform, the most advanced, the most remarkable and well-arranged kitchen in the world! You may have heard of me”—he smiled coyly, for of course everyone knew who he was—“I am Alexis Soyer, the architect of this extraordinary enterprise. Here, you witness history. Here, we employ dozens of technical innovations which I have perfected in order to create hundreds of dishes every day, and we ensure that each one is produced perfectly and served in precisely the correct state, and at precisely the correct temperature, as I intended when first I invented it. What you see here is not merely novelty but the triumph of science, the kitchen of the future.”

  The audience applauded enthusiastically.

  “Three things are of immeasurable importance in this place. One is cleanliness. Cleanliness is the soul of the kitchen,” he said, wagging his spoon. “This kitchen is the cleanest you will ever see. The second is timing. You will see clocks on every wall. In cooking, precise timing is the difference between perfection and failure. Finally, there is the precise control of temperature. Here, we command the elements: fire, water, air in the form of gas and steam; and earth in the form of coal and charcoal. Ladies and gentlemen, in this kitchen, we are alchemists, magicians even.”

  Soyer half pirouetted on his shiny pumps and began to move the wall before which he had been speaking. It was, we now saw, balanced on well-oiled casters, and slid smoothly sideways, folding slightly.

  We were suddenly buffeted by a heat so intense we had to step back.

  “You are safe here. No harm can come to you,” said Soyer. Before us was a great fireplace in which a vast mound of charcoal glittered and over which hung two enormous turn-spits, each large enough to roast a whole sheep.

  “A little conjuring trick of mine,” said So
yer, grinning. “You had no idea that the fire was here, non? Things in this kitchen are not always what they seem. The screen prevents the rest of the kitchen from becoming too hot. It is lined with tin on the fire side, so the heat is reflected back upon the spits and cooks the meat more evenly and quickly. But the fire is not merely for these. Behind it is a boiler which provides us with gallons of hot water for the kitchen. And around it, also benefiting from its heat, are boiling stoves, charcoal grates, small ovens for soufflés and pastry, and a steam closet. The spits are caused to turn by hot air from the fire. We waste nothing here. Waste, as I always say, is abominable ingratitude to God.

  “And within our movable wall, there are little warming shelves.” He swung the screen around to the side to reveal a small space in the thickness of the screen, and pulled from it a small tray of tiny tartlets, each one filled with a shiny yellow custard and topped with a dark cherry. “Please,” he said, encouraging us each to take one. Eager gloved hands seized the dainty pastries. Even I did not resist. The first sensation was warmth and crispness but, just as one appreciated this, the tart melted on the tongue. The filling was an almond cream, not thick like a paste but whipped and airy. The cherry, which had slumbered in brandy since its harvesting, trembled then burst gloriously.

  “And another?” said Soyer. We did not hold back. “When the Duchess of Sutherland came to view the kitchens, she was so impressed with my screen that she ordered one for her own kitchens!”

  No one else seemed much surprised by this egregious piece of boasting.

  “And now, mesdames et messieurs, you have seen the pots and pans and stoves, but you must, before you go, see what is cooking!”