After baking the cake, Georgiana began preparing the salad, adding lychee cherry tomatoes (Mortelle de Balbis), which some also called saint tomatoes.
They were actually neither tomatoes nor lychees, but a nightshade plant discovered in South America, from the same family as belladonna. They had been discovered and named by the Frenchman Balbis.
After plucking all the saint tomatoes from their thorny vines, Georgiana put them in water to wash them.
Belladonna was also known as death's shadow. Its berries closely resembled black nightshade, often used as a spice; both were black, and if one could not tell them apart and ate them rashly, there was a risk of poisoning.
Saint tomatoes, on the other hand, were red, though their vivid red color always made people think they were poisonous.
She quietly watched the grape-sized fruit in the water.
An old ballad went like this:
For want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost.
For want of a horseshoe, a warhorse was lost.
For want of a warhorse, a general was lost.
For want of a general, a battle was lost.
For want of a battle, an empire was lost.
This song exaggerated the influence a pitched battle could have on world history. Or rather, in the wars of previous centuries, it was rare for a single pitched battle to reverse the entire course of a war. Take the Albigensian Crusades that broke out in France. For more than twenty years, French knights campaigned against the Albigensian knights centered in Languedoc in southern France, who had been accused of heresy. Amid the series of brutal wars unleashed there, there was no fixed decisive battle. Though the attackers and defenders often fought sieges around great stone fortresses such as Carcassonne, sieges were always accompanied by savage cavalry raids.
Defending and besieging