The Devil's Larder by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page A

day. Fevers, headaches, vomiting, throughout the town.
    Now, she wondered, could it be that in a world where there were evidently at least three cases of sexually transmitted indigestion, that there could be – that she could even cause –
a single case of gastronomically transmitted venereal disease? Could that old devil, lurking in the bedroom, flourish in the kitchen too? Might she discover recipes to feed and satisfy and
aggravate those famished lovers at her door?

20
    F OR THE 500 TH anniversary of the ending of the siege, Professor Myles McCormick, the big, bizarre Chicagoan who’d made our
town his ‘project’, arranged a study week for amateur historians, ending with a celebratory feast. The fourteen participants – mostly, like the professor himself, Americans
– could tour the burial site, the recently discovered (and augmented) earthworks and emplacements of the besieging army, the museum with its sad collection of wills and testaments, the
still-intact harbour chain that had once stretched across the sea channel to the port. They could inspect the little statue of the city prefect chewing on a shoe and the memorial obelisk with its
roster of the wealthy dead. In seminars, they could consider the day-to-day minutiae of living – and dying – without fresh food for more than fifteen months, and then discuss the
broader, nagging questions of historical principle. And they could read and buy (in the professor’s own translation from the sixteenth-century text) the merchant dell’Ova’s
contemporary accounts.
    The study group was surprisingly easygoing for such a mordant subject, cheerful, attentive and intelligent, delighted with the hotel and the town, and keen to be as stimulated as possible on
this short, testing and expensive vacation. So Professor McCormick must have judged that they would appreciate the ‘fitting’ menu he’d prepared for the closing feast. The hotel
chef, a Dane with an unexpected sense of humour, had volunteered his services. ‘Anything for a change,’ he had said. The professor presented him with a copy of dell’Ova’s
diaries, in which he’d highlighted one of the final passages. ‘Do what you can with that.’
    We have been reduced to eating slop that might have been intended for my good host’s chickens and his pigs, had not those chickens and those pigs been speedily
     dispatched some weeks ago [dell’Ova wrote, elevendays before he died from the insupportable pain of ‘hunger headaches’]. I have always hoped, despite my many travels, that I
     would not need to sacrifice my dignity so much that I could sup on baser foods, as savages, but in these last few weeks I have discovered myself tasting – and, indeed, relishing –
     lascivious flesh from mice, ebb meat and worms, and also from dead creatures that have perished from their want of sustenance, all flavoured by our only condiment, the salt from shore weed. My
     vegetable dishes have presented only the very best grasses from the city lanes and leaves of such variety that autumn seems to have bared its branches at us in the courtyard, though it be only
     early spring . . . Today we were called to table and an unexpected stew of leather goods. Within the steaming tureen our spoons located the tooled remains of a once-fine saddle, cut strips of
     bags and purses, a bandolier with the buckles thankfully removed, and a good pair of tanned shoes, which all too late I recognized to be my own. I can report that, given my condition and the
     rarity of any meal, this was the finest and sweetest-smelling preparation, as good as any beef, which it has ever been my fortune to savour or to chew. Hardship and hunger sophisticate the
     palate and the nose.
    The chef was not required to go down to the market hall. He already had provisions in the lost-property cupboard behind reception. There he selected a child’s school satchel, a calfskin
handbag (a little spoiled by talc and leaking biros), a half-dozen