A Sleeve in Pea Soup

Prologue

Winter 1956. Erith Shore, Southwest Thames.

Laden with a creaking trailer, an old army vehicle trudges along the muddy track toward Erith Shore. The nebulous sun peaks over the bleak horizon, throwing impassioned winter light over the marshland. Persephony Sayers’s voice box still vibrates from the steering wheel as she slides off the seat onto the sodden earth. Hands on hips, she inhales the fermenting seagrass, the saline wind, the brackish swamp, and gull guts. She cannot get that mediaeval song out of her head, … Alas, my love, you do me wrong. To cast me off discourteously... Today, layers of silt and sin are all that stand between her and a desperate resolve to reunite with her past. It must begin with the fate of a king’s favourite food taster four centuries earlier.
“At least the anthropologists showed up.” The professor is relieved of her previous uncertainty that any university student would willingly volunteer to go grave robbing on a cold winter Sunday. Yet, with their appetites for the empirical, they are here along the windy shore of the southeast Thames, eager to finish the job.
Her students explore. Once hallowed by a perimeter of Kentish ragstone, Erith Shore’s loneliest cemetery long ago succumbed to the short attention spans of city life along the river. Rusted and twisted, the wrought-iron fences surrounding the wealthier plots sink in pitiful hope of separating good from evil. It appears status has no advantage here.
The church of the Poor Clare Nuns looks betrayed, casting its sombre backdrop low over the English landscape remnant of narrative bastion and bombs. It lies crippled on the knoll by its ode to English resilience and undying faith in the unseeable.
For now, bruised blots of deep purple cloud amongst the monotonous grey sky at least set a tone for this day’s morbid expedition. But working against the narrow window of daylight, the thick fog will soon roll up the Thames and blanket the entire area in a soup of post-modern contiguity.
Equally caliginous is the dig site. Precariously close to the river by the tidal sands of the ever-shifting banks. The stones are not Christian. Their weather-worn markings etch another narrative. Somebody cared about these souls, but it wasn’t the Christo-hypocrites. Otherwise, they would have been interred ten yards inland in consecrated soil.
“How far down, Professor?” a young anthropology student asks as he pushes a lonely stone aside with his shovel.
“Six feet, one would guess.” Greenwich University Professor Persephony Sayers of the School of Tastes and Smells replies. The Jeep and winch are positioned, and the excavation begins. Painstaking hand trowelling and sieving every sod as each student takes their turn. The deeper they dig, however, the less stable the walls become. Mud leaches from the walls, and the site becomes slippery and dangerous. Timber planks are slid on each side to prevent the hole from caving in, but it is difficult to hold back the mercurial muddy bog. When finally reaching the specimen, everyone stares into the dark crevasse someone needs to go down and secure the traps around the whole section. Before it can be debated, Professor Sayers grips the rope and harness hanging from the pulley. With one hand and a spade in her free hand, she wedges herself into position over the grave.
“Lower me down,” she instructs. Suspended over the lump, she frantically scoops either side as buckets of mud are hauled to the surface. Finally, she can gain leverage on either side and beneath the interred and loop three wide straps around its breadth. There is hope that everything will stay in one piece for the lifting.
The damp earth over centuries adds to the bulk and weight of the load. The block and tackle creaks, and the wire tightens as it rewinds onto the winch of the jeep. Inch by inch, as the wet bog sucks and slurps, Seamus, the foreperson, reaches down into the crevasse with the help of another student, guiding the cadaver to the surface.
“Slowly, keep going. Stop! Stop!” she yells, “it’s collapsing. Get me out!” The team ratchet the pulleys to a faster gear. The professor, still in the hole, tries to gain traction on the walls with her boots. Seconds after she is pulled to the surface, the muddy walls of the trench collapse and reclaim the fissure. Persey is spreadeagled on top of the suspended corpse, grabbing hold of a waterlogged object about to dislodge from the load. Shaken but safe, they watch as the incoming tide creeps up around the worksite.
The archaeology students examine the markings on the headstone: it will be taken back to campus as it might hold another clue to the life of their homme de terre. It is late afternoon, with darkness and fog approaching. Wet, muddy, and miserable, and still needing to get the specimen back to the university. They stretch open a fawn calico body bag left over from the war. Stencilled with R.A.C. on either side, designed initially to drag injured soldiers across battlefields, not hold together mud-sodden corpses from a peat bog. They heave it onto a sledge-like stretcher complete with straps and handles and drag it up the knoll with the aid of the winch. With equipment packed and specimens secured, they begin the twenty-minute drive from the southeast to Greenwich University.
“Professor Sayers? Could you tell me why wasn’t it buried in the hallowed area with the others?” A student asked.
“Because she was pagan.” Persey solemnly replied. “A decidedly climacteric one.” She glares into the blurring of modern light and rain falling upon the bitumen road. The same road that took this young ultra-taster to her death four hundred years earlier.

PART 1

Chapter One

Sours Estate, Sidcup England 1925.

It was a time of culinary celebration. The Guild of Ultra Tasters may have had many fine restaurants to critique on their global tours of gastronomic enlightenment, but few events topped the annual weekend celebrations held on the luxurious Sours Estate - a generous gift from the Tudor king to his Court Tasters many centuries before.

Certainly, there was not much purpose for food tasters and cup bearers in 1925 England, nor the high priest of the ancient society. These days, brethren were free to indulge in any pursuits providing they served the advancement of gastronomy, and ensured the survival of the Adroit - the rare taster gift that resided in the Ultra Taster – which the Guild of Ultra Tasters, or GOUT, as it was commonly known, was meant to protect.

High Priest Lord Ambrose Sayers, a descendant of the Segas Taster of King Henry VIII, never gave much thought to the anatomy of his inherent olfactory and gustatory gift. He likened it to the great painters and musicians. “Some have it and some don’t,” he said once to describe his exceptional ability to detect the ingredients of a dish to a microbial level. As long as his taste receptors were constantly stimulated, he saw no point in complicating things from a biological perspective. It was the 'pleasure principle' that informed his role as the High Priest of GOUT, and food and wine were predominately at the forefront of such pleasures.

Lord Sayers promulgated that a modern Guild must embrace the burgeoning world of gastronomy as bohemian expressions of art and culture, as opposed to the futile sacrifices forced upon his forebears. He saw GOUT as the patron of good times. His studious daughter Persey, however, had a more logical explanation for her inherent gift. She may have been fourteen years old, but her theories on gastronomy leaned toward empirical explanations; in that this inherent phenomenon of gustatory and olfactory talent should be understood through the workings of human anatomy. Persey's obsession with attending medical school no doubt perplexed her father, who made it his sole purpose in life to take life less seriously.

Retreating to his bureau aside the dining room, Lord Ambrose used the opportunity to raise his leg on to the desk. He had been on his feet all day and still, there was still much to do in preparing for the gathering of the Inners of the society and their families that weekend. His leather chair squeaked back and forth as he tried to draft his welcoming speech. He took a quick snuff of his cocaine powder to ease the pain of shrapnel in his ankle. Gastronomy is Art etched boldly across his personal stationery:

Food pleasures by being pleasured.... He began scrawling the opening of his welcome, then tore the page and crumpled it into a ball. On a fresh page, he wrote:

My father, High Priest Cleophas of the Guild, was the last of many generations of Sayers Clan Ultra Tasters to protect the royal family. However, as the world became less treacherous, and more civil, and the need for the food taster in Court has all but subsided, I am determined to use my gift to influence the future of cuisine - and the artistic processes from which it evolved.

Brethren, this summer weekend of the bounty welcomes Monsieur Escoffier and Doctor Kikunae Ikeda as our special guests. Their work on understanding the pleasures of the palate and expanding the flavour spectrum is truly fascinating, and indeed worthy of a place in the archives of our epicureum.

I also want to wish our contestants well, for this weekend's test of the palatum vivum. It’s a fun event that brings out our brightest, even though its original purpose was to challenge the incumbent family’s tenure as the English Apex of the Order. That said, I wish young Anatole of the Freebody Tasters Clan the best of luck against my equally talented daughter Persey and may the best Ultra Taster earn the honour of sealing their air and spit into the third vial of breath as surety to the survival and perpetuity of the sacred Adroit.

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Sours gardens came to life in the warmer months. Rhododendron and Azalea bushes burst from under the evergreen canopies in pinks, reds, and whites. The Sidcup Garden Club had only just departed after an early morning of potting up cuttings and carting them off for a charity fete in the high street. Now the paths had to be swept over, hedges perfected, and Lady Blodwen's 'Gastro Garden’ ready for a GOUT member tour as part of the weekend’s festivities.

It was important to impress upon members that generations of Sayers Tasters had met their obligations towards the maintenance of Sours Estate. Lady Blodwen even had her prized Plymouth rock hens washed, groomed, and running recklessly on the freshly clipped lawns. The majesty of the estate had to be on full display for the Guild's inspection. Lady Blodwen’s official role was of Kindred to her high priest husband and was greatly appreciated by the English Guild of Ultra Tasters for her services to the smooth running of the epicureum - the archival vault and private function centre at the other side of the property.

The Sours Estate had an army of gardeners, cleaners, and cooks who took equal pride in the property's keeping. The hothouse staff were preparing the various varieties of tomato, as they cleverly staggered the development of each bush to ensure a steady supply over the season. Squash, capsicum and her favourite chilli patch of reds, yellows, and greens were bursting with elongated fingers of hotness.

It was not uncommon that Lady Blodwen would recruit the whole family to gardening duties. It was her way of catching up on the busy lives of their teenage children, Persey and Basil. Lord Ambrose would join in on these working bees as he navigated the treacherous pathways without spilling his wine.

"Darling, whilst you cannot distinguish parsley from lawn clippings from a culinary perspective, your gardening skills are the real reason I married you." Lord Ambrose liked to badger his wife as she toiled away.

"Thank you, now, please follow me with that barrow of horse manure."

"I would follow you to the ends of the earth-with any type of manure, my love."

"You’re very kind husband. You shall be invited to my bed tonight," she teased.

“Really mother? You are both determined to scar your children with such images?”

"Oh, don't be such a prude, Basil. It's a fact of life."

"Private life, Mother, if you don't mind."

"Look, here come the peacocks. Throw them some of those grubs, Ambrose. I want to encourage them to eat all my pests."

"Too late, he’ gone back to the house for more wine." Persey could not help alerting her mother to her father's quick escape from his gardening duties. It was typical of Lord Ambrose to inspect, learn something new, then move on to the next source of entertainment and curiosity. Little wonder he was the life of the party. The only problem was that the party never seemed to end.

#

Deciding to see how the preparations for the weekend were coming along, his Lordship followed Mrs Ormiston around the grand dining room, checking on her work.

"Is everything alright?" She noticed him peering over her shoulder.

"Dandy, Mrs Ormiston, I'm just admiring your attention to detail."

"As you wish." Her air of familiarity could be excused, as she had been in the Sayers’ household since Ambrose was a child and was well accustomed to his obsessive personality.

Ambrose was oddly anxious about the fast-approaching event, particularly because the grand Dinner of the Inner would be held at the main residence this year. Normally such events would be held at the Epicureum, the impressive mediaeval stone structure on the other side of the Sours Estate. However, he wanted to demonstrate to his fellow gastronomes how modern house design could place its culinary heart in a more central and accessible proximity to the dining room. Victorian mansions always burrowed their kitchens out of view, usually in some damp and dark basement; but times had changed. Lord Ambrose had effectively spent the winter moving the old kitchen up to the main living section of the house.

"Imagine your father’s horror if he was alive to see that you have virtually invited the servants to live with us?" Lady Ora Sayers reprimanded her son at afternoon tea.

"Mother, I work closely with the cook of the house. I cannot go racing downstairs every time I need to discuss matters of culinary importance."

"What about the epicureum? We usually use that enormous dining room down there." She pleaded with her son to come to his senses. "King Henry's eating table, rarely used; and last time I looked there was a fully functional kitchen unless you've seen fit to tear that out as well?"

"Of course not, Mother, but won't it be nice to have a new American kitchen? I hear they are truly time saving. We can all share afternoon Pimm’s in the Atrium, enjoy Basil's clarinet playing, and I can tutor Persey for her elevation to inherit my place at the Apex."

"Well, that will depend on her defeating the Freebody boy at the palatum vivum."

"Persey is a gifted Ultra Taster - she carries my gene of the Adroit."

"She carries your gene of rebelliousness!"

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