Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker, my fearless Navigator, hated traffic. I do too. We long ago realized that a longer route was preferable as long as it kept us moving – as long as we weren’t stuck in traffic, or playing stop and go with a thousand other cars driven by people who didn’t know how to drive. Because it’s always the people who don’t know how who end up driving in front of me.

The vernal equinox has come and gone here in Los Angeles, and though Spring is a subtle season here, it has a few unchangeable markers. One of these is road work. As soon as the winter rains reach a reliable end, the road work begins. Excavations appear in all the most inconvenient portions of the narrowest freeways; traffic is re-routed, and diverted, and detoured until it meets itself coming the other way and just stops dead. And the works  continues on remorselessly, 24/7, until the next wet season shuts ’em down again.

Some will reappear in December as sinkholes and artesian springs, but that’s another whole set of problems …

Right now, it’s road work. And accidents. Daylight savings time is upon us, and for reasons I have never understood, Angelinos drive like they have three eyes and no depth perception during this season. You take your life in your hands on the freeways from March to October, from 4 PM to dark – there will be crashes, entanglements, skids, collisions, and burning barricades of steel and glass on every freeway. Everywhere. Every day. If there is nothing physically occluding the freeway you are on, then refugees from the other, blocked roads will be pouring in to slow you down.

Alas, it’s been 16 years since I was a regular on the streets of Los Angeles. They removed some of them in my absence, and inserted others. Aside form the freeways, there are few straight lines to follow – one must know the streets intuitively, learn the hidden passes and secret ways and portals … and here’s me with no Navigator.

My nephew Michael – to whom we clearly read too many doomed hero stories as a kid – is pursuing a teaching degree at Cal State Los Angeles. He doesn’t drive yet, and I’m his ride. I don’t mind – the campus is bright and modern, but is surrounded by a nest of freeways, miles of auto repair shops that were built to accommodate model T’s, acres of tiny stucco and Craftsman cottages dug into the hills that rise east of downtown. There are no easy ways to get there. There are no easy ways to get out of there. I am fairly sure there is actually NO WAY to leave the area unless you get to the right doorway while the elements are properly aligned …

But the freeways reached their annual blockage this week. I had to find enough remnants of surface streets to get between CSULA and Atwater. I spent the day poring over old maps and Google Earth (which gave me directions that obviously went through another dimension – two of the streets aren’t even there any more) and finally found a route.

And it worked! It wasn’t as easy as following Kage’s long hands, gesturing “over here” and “Left! Left! Your other left!” – when she wasn’t missing a turn because she was yelling about a gorgeous bit of tile work glimpsed under the universal cloak of morning glories on a hillside –  but it worked. The compass above my dash (which she insisted on installing) saved my aging butt three times. And I got us home despite the two collisions, one burning car and crews widening lanes on Highway 5.

Kage would have been proud.

Kage Baker, unlike most people, enjoyed her spam email. It was a daily source of amusement and surprise for her.

When she initially went on line, I set up Spam filters of various sorts; I kept them updated on a regular basis, because of her purse-seine net method of exploring the Internet. One never knew what might follow her home. Luckily, she caught on at once about not following links or opening attachments from unknown correspondents – she was naturally suspicious. Which was a good thing, considering she’d follow a trail anywhere, as oblivious of the surroundings as any focused  hound. That’s how bears get Scooby-snacks …

But when something relatively harmless came along, Kage was always ready to be entertained. Not by jokes and cartoons – she hated getting those, unless they had been selected by someone who knew her well. But the ingenuosly fraudulent, the invitations to unlikely sexual customizing or dubious financial projects: she loved reading the details of those. What most intrigued her was how the classic old wheezes and con schemes had successfully mutated to life in the electronic universe.

The ever-popular Nigerian scam was among Kage’s favourites: it’s just a modern update of the classic Spanish Prisoner Scheme, and its survival delighted her. In fact, she kept a file of really good letters she received, graded on entertaining details and verisimilitude and how funny the English mistakes were. She even sent corrections and critiques to a couple of especially ingenious ones. She said she was encouraging creative writing.

She kept newspaper accounts, too, of the idiotic city officials who occasionally fell for these – when a private man got suckered, Kage was sysmpathetic, but an astonishing number of public servants gamble with municipal treasuries and pension funds. And when they got caught, she was blackly, cynically amused. Some professional politico in Orange County – who sure as hell should have known better – was one of the better known morons in California to fall victim to this, and Kage laughed her ass off.

“The old gypsy woman says, you cannot cheat an honest man,” she would intone, and crack up. “You can, of course, but it’s easier to cheat another cheat!”

The story Mother Aegypt is, among other things, Kage’s celebration of the career confidence man. The characters of Joseph and Lord Ermenwyr owe more than a little to that brotherhood, as well. She just loved Tricksters.

And so she cheerfully read through her daily share of correspondence promising her shares in gold and diamond and uranium mines; she kept the best examples of corrupt African officials who had inexplicably done major business with her deceased uncles; she howled with laughter over the offers from  herbalists and unlicensed endocrinologists to enrich the male anatomy of her choice. “I like ’em big and stupid,” she’d sing. “But this is ridiculous!”

So that part of unsolicited mail was fun. And electronic junk mail has not only increased the amount of fancy crap in the mail, but improved its detail and finesse, as well. When all your printing and picture needs are satisfied with pixels and data packets, you can turn out a prettier grade of crap. Kage appreciated that.

What made her insane was the stream of jokes, riddles, games and surveys that come in from friends. The chain letters. The magic spells. The fans who sent actual letters were always answered promptly – but the other stuff was filtered out. When someone was especially nice and/or persistent, she would ask them politely to stop; citing (quite truthfully) her need not to be distracted when she was writing.

(When anyone proved incapable of stopping themselves from sending out photos of kittens or political jokes (and some folks apparently just can’t help themselves) I’d build them a special filter all their own and their daily yucks were consigned to the abyss.)

Folks who asked questions were answered. Folks who raised critiques were, too, if they were polite about it – Kage had no time to spend arguing her plot points with annoyed pedants. (“Are you aware I write fiction?” she would respond – once, and never again.) Folks who sent her examples of probably Company work – extinct animals , lost manuscripts, miracle drugs, Lost Cities found – were effusively thanked.

Kage liked talking to her fans. She just didn’t have a lot of time. But she tried to make sure everyone got a response. Some of you, Dear Readers, know that she she could be a faithful correspondent, if one were patient.

I still check her email from time to time, though the initial flood of mail has slacked off. Kage would have been both touched and wildly amused to learn how many people sent letters to her, saying “I’m sorry you’re dead.” The faith that she could somehow answer would have cheered her, too. Though I am sorry to report that she hasn’t managed that trick. Yet.

But today I got another Spanish Prisoner letter for her, which will go into her file. I got a lovely offer from some lady offering “comfortable methods of getting pregnant” – sadly, they weren’t outlined in the email, so I don’t know if she has come up with a better way than the old method. I thought that one was pretty cool, personally … some well-intentioned person also wanted to warn her that Prozac has been added to the Hollywood water supply, along with the long-standing evils of fluoridation – but I think not, because fluoxetine costs money and Los Angeles doesn’t have any …

Still, it’s nice to know people are looking out for their neighbors, you know? Worried about their teeth and their depression and their sex lives and their finances. As Kage observed, the smaller the world gets, the more it has to say each morning. It amused her. It still amuses me.

Kage Baker was a great believer in things unseen. Or, more precisely, almost seen; the shape glimpsed from the corner of the eye; eye-shine or a glint of crooked grin in the moonlight. Shadows with nothing to cast them, and lean shapes that paced through firelight with no shadow to warn at all.

Part of it was a genuine faith that Things Beyond Our Ken were out there – and, in fact, prowling round the back fence and just beyond the campfire’s reach. It was born as much of  a spiritual inclination in the blood, as by childhood tales of faeries at the bottom of the garden … and the garden she grew up in looked like the entire Unseelie Court probably weekended there. In fact, sometimes they did – or at least the Hollywood Contingent of that Court, all the Beautiful People from the 1950’s and 1960’s, holding orchid-coloured cocktails and feeding the fruit-spears from them to the dazzled 5-year-old Kage. Which may go far to explain her fondness for rum and plastic toys in her drinks, as well …

Kage’s interest in faerie tales transmuted to real anthropological research in adulthood. Even casual reading reveals that people all over the world report seeing much the same sort of creatures hassling the cattle in the twilight, or sneaking into the kitchen for some bread and milk and free-lance cobbling. Her own conclusion, though, was that this spoke more of a similarity in the way people’s minds work than of the reality of what they saw: not that the world really was lousy with dwarvish artisans, but that short grumpy guys who were good with tools were a universal idea.

She was also fascinated to learn of Lewy Body Dementia. LBD arises from damage in a portion of the occipital lobe of the brain – and produces hallucinations of dwarves. No matter what your cultural background is, LBD will give rise to dwarves in your field of vision.

Kage built all this research, plus our mutual interest in paleo-anthropology, into a Universal Theory of Hominids in her Company series. To wit, the denizens of Faerie are all human cousins who did not go extinct; instead, they live on the edges of Homo sapiens‘ loud, intrusive, self-centered civilization, pursuing their own ends quietly. The aliens of the 2oth century UFO flaps – whose behaviour so closely resembles that of faeries – are the same lurking kinfolk. They haven’t changed – but we have. So where we used to see cranky, clever dwarves making shoes and fancy armour, we now find grey-skinned supergeeks driving advanced technology. They’re the same guys, though.

Her views on faeries and elves were a little different. More on those at a later date, perhaps.

Since there are almost more holes in the fossil records of hominids than there are fossils, Kage could invent species when she needed them. Or simply when they took her fancy – the Little Stupid Guys she invented for a specific plot need, but Homo crewkerniensis just wandered in one day from God knows where, and stayed to become part of Alec Checkerfield’s Outrageous Ancestry. On the other hand, some of her (at the time) unlikely speculations have since been proven true – it is now estimated that Neanderthals did indeed contribute to the ancestry of modern humans; as much as 5% of the genotype in some European and Middle Eastern peoples.

So, out of glimpses and edges and folklore and exotic neuropathies and wild imaginations, are entire worlds built. Sometimes, anyway. You just never know what half-seen remnant of a distant past is going to have relevance in the present.

One of the invisible genes those Neanderthals may have contributed to Europeans, for example, is red hair. Another is left-handedness.

Makes one wonder, eh?

Kage Baker not being here to lure me out into the river current of epic adventure that was Life in her company, I am taking a time out today.

My colour has faded out. I have no thoughts, no energy, nothing fascinating to read. There isn’t even any static in my head. No interest stirs at the image of desperate workers stuffing the cracks in a dying nuclear reactor with shredded newspapers, nor the aurora borealis creeping southward over the Canadian border. Flame-falling creativity lives not in this eye today.

Depressed. I’m gonna go knit and plot.

Kage Baker often remarked upon how quickly a grey Saturday could just slip away. One moment you’re happily staying in bed until 10 AM; the next, it’s quarter to four and absolutely nothing you’ve had planned for the last two weeks has been accomplished.

I kept waiting for the weather to stabilize before trying some of the larger, spring-related things that need to be done: planting the plum tree, building the cinder-block ziggurat that will house the salad greens, moving the planters full of roses and irises. First it rained like hell, then the temperature shot into the 90’s, and now it’s grey and cool and actually threatening rain again. Even in Los Angeles we don’t expect March and April to be stable months for weather, but this is getting ridiculous.

And then there’s the way the time – just – vanishes. Kage always said, there was nothing so indicative of the existence of time warps as a grey Saturday – nowhere (or when) else will subjective Time just dissolve so inexplicably. It goes like sugar in water, leaving nothing but a glass full of cloudy tepid sweetness …it’s not, you know, an awful way to spend a day but it doesn’t give you anything back for getting through it. It just disappears and leaves you there, with the crowning accomplishment of your day having been finding a pair of socks that match.

And I haven’t even managed that. The socks, I mean. There are five shoes scattered by my desk, the laundry’s been neglected so I’m out of stockings, and anyway there is a pocket panther laired in my underwear drawer … she just lies there and gazes contentedly at me with dreamy beryl eyes, wordlessly mocking me for thinking there is anything more important on a late weekend afternoon than finding a really soft place for a nap … even Harry is hunkered down and fluffed out and generally doing his best avocado imitation, just a drowsy little green lump with his sweetpea-petal eyelids blinking shut.

Kage, endowed with a whim of iron and a year my elder, would have nagged me out into the garden by now, probably. She’d plant and prune and shovel enthusiastically, and I would stand about leaning on a broom until it was time to move the heavier objects at her directions. Poor Kimberly, though, is younger than I am and has trouble ordering me about: not even the excuse of needing my superior strength, as I am presently as vigorous as a popped balloon and she has, besides, her enormous son Michael for the heavy lifting. She has to rely on making me feel guiltily unproductive; and after 50-odd years, I have developed a limited immunity to that tactic.

Not completely, though. The vestiges of conscience have gotten this entry out of me, and there is a whole stack of notes whinging at my elbow for inclusion in the incompetent nun novel, too … And there are still 3 hours of daylight left, in a day which has settled down to a comfortable  pearly dimness. And when Kimberly returns with potting soil and sinus pills, I will really have no excuse not to do something useful.

Kage would certainly expect me to.

*One of Kage’s favourite songs, by one of her favourite groups. For no obvious reason, the video for this perfect summer song is of a snowy day …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h1oRP7FfBw

Kage Baker has actually been showing up in my dreams lately. This is an enormous relief to me, as I have a dreadful fear of forgetting what she sounds and looks like … of course, in dreams, quite odd things are assumed to be normal, and you can often find yourself taking some enormous anomaly for total granted. It’s only on waking you realize that Aunt Bessie was not, in fact, a badger.

I don’t think I am blurring Kage, though. She isn’t flying, or sporting extra limbs, or the wrong age. She looks just as she did – suddenly slender with that end-of-life boniness that -damn it! – looked good on her, in a Nepenthe T-shirt and a pirate hoodie,  jeans and her snow-white boating loafers. Her hair is short, though, as it was there at the end: it makes her look more like the cold-eyed toddler with flaming curls that she was, in my favourite picture of her. It’s a portrait in oil, painted by Momma when Kage was 4 or so – she appears quite self-composed but rather disapproving; and I have thought for years it is just as much a portrait of baby Mendoza as it is of Kage.

The beautiful bonfire dress was painted from life, on a hanger; Kage was painted from a photograph, as she was as difficult to keep still at that age as a candle-flame in a wind. She remembered the photo session perfectly – seated on a box in a sunsuit and sandals in Mamma’s cold, stone-floored, semi-underground studio. She’d been given an apple to keep her occupied, which she eventually flung at the photographer’s head in frustration, and then bolted … one can imagine the poor man as Joseph, chasing her out into the garden.

That torch-shaped shadow at the bottom of the picture, by the way, is the top of Kage’s head at age 56, where she stood with her back to the sun in Anne’s backyard and took this picture. The baby curls in the portrait had been slightly subdued over the ensuring years into the long red braid of her adulthood; but as you can tell, the front of her hair persisted in standing up like flames.

I figured it was a symptom of her brain being on fire. We used to joke about flames showing in her eyes like lantern lights – I rather expected her to show up that way in my dreams, but no. She’s got the same black eyes she always had, slightly unfocused and yet sharp as blades at the same time.  Lately, she’s usually hurrying me somewhere, impatiently assuring me that Yes she has the damned map, now get a move on, we’ve got 500 miles to cover, there’s not a moment to lose!

I’ve no idea where we are going in these dreams. I always hated that, when we were on a real charabanc; I really dislike not knowing where we’re headed. In the dreams lately, though, it really doesn’t worry me much; I am so delighted to see her, to be going anywhere at all with her. She’s quite frank about the fact that she is dead, but that doesn’t matter to me either – in fact, it is rather a comfort, as I keep telling myself the dream therefore must be real. Because in a fake dream, see, she’d still be alive. So if Kage admits she’s dead … well, you can see the dubious logic.

Maybe she wants me to write faster, or more. As it’s what I want too, I am trying to oblige. It’ll be useful even if that is not the eldritch purpose of the dreams. Because it could just as likely be my own unconscious, summoning up the perfect goad to keep me on the straight and narrow that Kage wanted me to be on. It could be perfectly normal brain static, a familiar pattern finally finding its way through the shell-shocked muteness of the last year.

And it could be Kage. I have no idea. The unknown, the unseen, the mystical and spiritual – these have never been my fortes. They were hers, though. And if anyone could find a way to give me a guiding kick in the ass from the Great Beyond, it would be Kage.

I’m just glad to be having the dreams. I’ll take all that come my way. Last night, we had stopped off at a RenFaire somewhere and were waiting for Kathy Jacob’s divine potato soup in Celt Camp … no way I’m gonna argue with that.

"I am a botanist."

Kage Baker always harboured a poorly controlled desire to direct. She re-shot movies in her head (usually while watching them) and constantly framed shots in as we drove through the many landscapes of California. She originally started writing because Momma didn’t have the time to make up more of Kage’s favourite story-books, and told her in exasperation to please write her own if she wanted more adventures.

I suspect a lot of writers start writing because of that urge. They want to make sure a certain outcome is attained; they crave control. Of course, once you really get into a hot scene or storyline, the better class of characters have a tendency to get away from you – that happened to Kage a lot, especially with Joseph and Lord Ermenwyr. But then the story goes interesting places. Kage was often just as surprised as her eventual readers about where a story ended up, and who turned up in it along the way.

Other times, she wrote to correct what she saw as wrongs – sometimes huge ones (in the Company universe, she saved the Romanov children), sometimes just small inelegencies and lacks that annoyed her. A lot of missing art, books and candies were preserved simply because Kage refused to live in a world without them – also favourite buildings, lost films, closed roads, dubious islands … and she created  backstory to support mysteries and strange phenomena that she liked. Just because there ought to be mermaids and aliens and psychic vortices in town as peculiar as Pismo Beach.

Her own honoured dead were memorialized that way: crafted into a world kinder and more reasonable than the one that took them away from her. And it wasn’t just her own friends and relatives, either: there were people she thought History was better off not losing, and she made them little refuges in her Universes. They aren’t always well-known to her audience, but they mattered to Kage; they were grace notes in the Universe, and she kept an echo of them singing.

Readers are aware Kage would not relinquish Shakespeare to the void – lots of writers have taken the opportunity to keep him alive. How could Kage resist? One of her more questioned choices for immortality was William Randolph Hearst. All I can say about Mr. Hearst is that maybe you have to have lived on the Central Coast to know how well some folks loved him. Or grown up in Hollywood to know how much harm Orson Wells did. Either way, Kage kept Hearst, and lots of other people,  closer than Fate had actually permitted.

When a dear old building was taken down, or a beloved writer died, or a species was reported as extinct – Kage would look up from where she was (usually) writing, and comment: “Nope, that would be a Company job. So-and-so would have gotten in weeks ago and saved that.” And when a rare bird was found again in the Arkansas river bottoms, or a hidden closet yielded up a perfect and intact copy of Lost Horizons, Kage would say, “Aaaah, that was that ornithologist friend of Nefer’s.” Or Einar, or Nan, or a team of mixed anthropologists and fashion experts based in the lost Morgan-Pierpont subway station under New York …

It’s an urge to comfort that is very hard to ignore. Sure, it’s contrived – and you contrive it yourself, at that – but one of the cockeyed glories of human perception is the ability to tell fantasies to ourselves. It comforted Kage to know that people and things she loved were saved. Somehow, by some operative’s hand deftly tweaking the warp and web of History, all the really good things and people did not slip into darkness.

It’s why, in the sequel to Nell Gwynne, the Ladies’ new cook has long red hair …

Kage Baker frequently observed (nay, complained) that nothing ate up time like a car problem. Non-functioning cars create fugues around themselves, and one’s entire day can be sucked down and consumed like  interstellar debris over the edge of a black hole’s Schwarzschild radius.

That’s where my day has gone. Kimberly’s car was in the shop. The household is scattered hither and yon through the day, and I was the only driver available. Between taking people places and picking them up again, I mostly slept. I must have done some of the sleeping upright at my computer, because entire hours vanished without my being aware of their passage while I sat there. I never noticed them going, and I don’t seem to have accomplished anything during the time, either.

Nothing but dissolving dust, sparkling in its dissolution in the maw of a gravitational point source. Whoosh, slither, gulp –  a hypothetical blue glare of Cherenkov radiation, and a huge flushing sound … and there goes the day.

But it’s 80 degrees here right now, a perfect spring evening. All the doors are open, and the air smells of new-cut grass, wisteria, hamburger and celantro. The damned car is back, with a new fuel pump,  and I seem to be finally awake. We’ve escaped the fell clutches of the fugue!

Let’s see what I can make of the night.

Kage Baker was a very capable walker in her youth. There were a lot of us and usually only one car (which she never learned to drive anyway), and so she was accustomed to long walks in and out of the Hollywood Hills from an early age. You had to negotiate a half-mile on the level and a vertical drop of two blocks just to make it to the Oakshire Market for a Coke and a candy bar.

When she and I moved out, it was only to another portion of the Hills; a neighborhood of narrow twisty streets above and behind the Hollywood Bowl, where some streets were nothing more than staircases dug into the hillside and no wheeled vehicles had ever gone. Being carless at frequent intervals, we walked a lot; being vigorous young women, we took the hills and slopes literally in stride. Being a pair of feckless idiots, we thought nothing of simply heading up or down hill through the neighbors’ gardens and driveways – I have climbed down to Highland Avenue a thousand times through the rear parking lot of the Veterans Legion Hall, trotting out under the impotent guardian cannons there.

Not only did no one ever shoot us, they never even yelled at us: residents who caught us climbing over the dry stone walls and city drainage channels nodded pleasantly and said Good Morning. It was a (slightly) more innocent time. And the Hills have always had their own special kind of residents. The Ladies, and Gentlemen, of the Canyons existed long before Joni Mitchell sang about them in the ’60’s. Hell, Kage Baker was one of them in her time.

While I once could sprint through the Hills like a deer, now I am old and fat. My heart has grown as eccentric as my clothes once were and I am having to negotiate the circulation to my legs. I drive nostalgically through the haunts of our youth – I don’t walk them anymore. Though I keep meaning to take it up again on a small basis, just to get back in some other kind of shape than globular …

Good intentions pave the road to hell, it is claimed. Today they certainly paved the road home from Trader Joe’s, as my poor sister Kimberly’s car croaked it just east of Hyperion Bridge. We were lucky enough to get the poor thing off busy Glendale Boulevard, and almost into an actual parking place. And Kimberly has  a tow service and a mechanic, and we both had our phones; and of course, since I moved in with her we’ve had the advantage of two cars and drivers: who were both in the one, dead, immobile vehicle.

Public transport in Los Angeles sucks, Dear Reader. There are no taxis except at the airports. And while busses do run here and there, none of them run down the tiny residential streets of Atwater Village where I live. What we did have was both of the household males stranded at school – Ray at Hollywood High where he teaches, and Michael at Cal State LA where he matriculates. So Kimberly called everyone involved, advising the stranded and requesting a towtruck, and I legged it for home to get my car.

At least it was flat and paved, and moderately shady. It was also 83 degrees and 5 blocks, which was the most I have walked in several months … kept meaning to take it up again, you know? Any day now. In easy increments, maybe a block to start with … but needs must when the Devil rides behind you, as another saying goes, which I think means you just gotta walk till you get there. And I did. And I made it back with my PT Cruiser before Kimberly’s Malibu Classic was even towed away, and was able to begin the afternoon round of rescues with her.

But now, it’s been a long, looong day. I’m gonna take a nap and dream of loping along the ridge crests of the Hollywood Hills, following Kage’s braid as she flies along the path ahead of me – easily, swiftly, long ago in the morning of the world.

Kage Baker admired culinary art. She loved painted cakes, stained glass sugar, staring fish carved from carrots, and edible gold leaf, and pumpkin-orange ravioli dyed black with squid ink. Grapes and pearls made alike from marzipan. Radish roses, even.

Colour – extraordinary, unnatural, glow-in-the-dark – enchanted her. If something looked like glass or metal but you could eat it: she was in heaven. It started with boiled frosting when she was a very small girl; Mamma, consummate cook and a professional painter, could frost a cake to an ivory finish and then paint it with all of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and stars.It fascinated Kage for life.

Kage gave those skills to Mrs. Smith, in Anvil of the World, and had no end of fun coming up with astonishing things for that good lady to cook. She indulged in them herself for cooking events at various Faires, as well. At a Northern Renaissance Faire, the Queen condescended to have lunch at the Green Man Inn once a year – food was provided by everyone,  every troupe and Guild competing politely to supply some wonder. It was all gorgeous, a breathtaking pageant of art and plenty. And Kage was in her element …

The Ladies of Her Majesty’s Court teamed with us to set and decorate the table, which was a marvel of linen and silver, strewn with fresh flowers; Kage designed the geometry so each blossom was framed by the embroidery of the gold table cloth. She argued with the Queen’s Master of the Revels over the order in which each dish was announced, so their placement on the table would be pleasing to the eye. She added flowers and ribbons and bannerets to everything.

And Kage herself usually prepared a crown roast of venison. It was served on a golden plate, surrounding by purple kale; faceted jewels carved out of fruit jellies studded the rib ends and sparkled round the base. She candied kumquats and stuck them on like gold bosses. She contrived dark red spinels out of baby beets for the frontespiece of the crown itself.

I don’t know how anyone ever got the courage to cut it – by the time it was delivered to the table, I was usually hiding my eyes at the back of the Yard …

Kage also adored the cooking contests held at Faire from time to time, especially the illusion foods at Renaissance Faires. Pies that looked like porcelain fish, cakes shaped like castles; most of the Christmas excess in Garden of Iden was based on those contests. Kage’s favourite over the years was a basilisk, contrived from a real snake, a beef roast and selected parts of a chicken – it took first prize, though as I recall no one was bold enough to eat it. The snake had a very accusing stare.

Her contribution to the first Dickens Fair cooking contest is now deathless: captured on video by the Food Channel, it’s among the bits they trot out most Christmas seasons since. Kage is immortalized in her cook’s apron and a broad Lancaster accent, explaining how one makes a spotted dick – which is an innocent and delicious boiled pudding, but never failed to convulse Americans. Her performance culminated in her pouring custard sauce over the thing, sticking a paper Union Jack into it, and singing Rule Britannia for all the brave boys at sea … try and catch it some year, Dear Readers: it’s amazing and hilarious.

Kage just loved the panoply of food. And of drink, too. My thirtieth birthday … we spent in Pismo Beach, in the old Ocean View Hotel where the family had vacationed for decades. We had our pewter Faire mugs with us, which held  20-ounce Imperial pints, and Kage mixed some appalling concoction of rum, orange juice and grenadine in them all night. If I had succumbed to alcohol poisoning – which seemed likely at the time – at least the dates on my headstone would have been symmetrical.

Still, I did not die. In fact, I don’t think I even sobered up till sometime after noon. But I was woken early next morning by the singing of Happy Birthday, and opened my eyes to the unearthly sight of Kage silhouetted against the dawn. She was holding out an enormous chocolate eclair, surrounded by clam shells, with a candle shaped like a mushroom flaming in it. It was the damnedest birthday sight I ever had, I can tell you that.

Man, she did so love a spectacle …