The Missing Masterpiece

by Jeanne M. Dams

  ‘Deduced,’ I murmured. I think only Alan heard me; he gave me a little private smile.

  ‘Most of what I’ve told you both is true. Abelard really did write a number of songs. There are references to them in too many original documents for that not to be a fact. It is also a fact that we don’t know what happened to them, apart from a handful of hymns that have survived.’

  ‘Various Internet sites say that some of his work was burned as heretical,’ I put in. ‘Could that have happened to the songs? The love songs, especially, must have annoyed the authorities, if they were written when both Abelard and Héloïse were in holy orders.’

  ‘No, they were written earlier. But secular music of any kind was held in low regard in twelfth-century Europe, at least by the Church. And you have to remember that, back then, the Church had enormous power, far more than the monarchies that nominally ruled the various states. Yes, the songs probably contributed to the rancour some of the churchmen felt for Abelard. But the real troubles of his life, the “calamities” he catalogued in his autobiography, his serious brushes with authority, came later than the love songs. It’s most unlikely they were burned.’

  ‘But you don’t know that for certain,’ Alan said.

  ‘We know nothing about them for certain, except that they existed.’

  ‘Peter, I’ll know when I dig into your book, but where did Abelard live? In Paris?’

  ‘He moved around a lot, often fleeing from persecutors, though sometimes from situations that were simply uncongenial. He compared himself to the “peripatetics” – the students of Aristotle.’ Peter raised an eyebrow; Alan and I nodded our understanding.

  ‘He was born in Brittany, not far from here, and later in his life was the abbot of a monastery called Saint-Gildas, again in Brittany. You know Mont-Saint-Michel is right on the border between the two regions, Normandy and Brittany?’

  Again Alan nodded. I hadn’t known, but in view of Abelard’s travels, I was interested.

  ‘And we know the Abbey here had copies of Abelard’s works, even though he was regarded with suspicion in many quarters. That suggests a liberal bent among the abbots here. So it seemed to us, Laurence and me, that it was entirely possible that they had once had copies of some of his music, the hymns at least, and maybe, possibly, some of the other music.’

  ‘And why was that so important to you?’ Alan asked gently.

  ‘I’m a student of music and theology. Laurence is a medievalist. None of those fields promise anything very lucrative in the way of a career. But if we could discover a lost Abelard work, our names in academia would be made! We could get good positions at any university in the Western world. It would be a dream come true!’

  ‘And where does the illegal part come in?’ I asked. The wine had mellowed my mood a little, but I still wasn’t inclined to let Peter off the hook until he’d come clean.

  ‘We were convinced that if we could work out the right place to look, we’d find something here at the Mont. If not at the Abbey, perhaps in a cellar in one of the houses, or even at the Scriptorial, though that was a long shot. It’s a museum. Everything they have has been carefully scrutinized and catalogued to a fare-thee-well. Still, it was just within the bounds of possibility that there might be a palimpsest that had been reused. You know what a palimpsest is?’

  This time neither of us nodded.

  ‘It’s a sheet of parchment that has been scraped or washed clean of whatever was written on it, so it could be used again. With the right techniques, the original writing can sometimes be read.’

  ‘I would imagine that involves destruction of whatever was written on top of it.’

  ‘Not nowadays. There are all sorts of techniques for bringing up the earlier image. The whole idea is a very long shot, though, because by the twelfth century very few parchments would have been re-used. They might unearth some ancient sheet that nobody could read or care about, and clean it and use it, but it’s most unlikely that something would be cleaned just because it was deemed heretical. It might be burned, or more likely just stuffed away someplace, for later use if it became necessary. Because by the end of the century, paper was coming in, and as it was far cheaper than parchment, parchment was used less and less.’

  ‘Peter.’ My schoolteacher persona was coming to the fore. ‘All this is very instructive, but you’ve taken us off on a tangent. I want to know what you and Laurence were proposing to do that was illegal.’

  ‘Not illegal, exactly. Just a bit dodgy. We were pretty sure we could find something. And if we didn’t, we were going to claim we did.’

  ‘But you’d have to produce it!’

  ‘That’s where we come to the dodgy bit. We know – well, Laurence knows – an expert in illumination.’

  ‘So you were going to forge a manuscript.’

  ‘Only if we couldn’t find a real one.’

  ‘You couldn’t hope to get away with it, you know,’ said Alan. ‘Modern dating methods would give you away in five minutes.’

  ‘This chap has old parchment. I don’t know where he gets it. I don’t want to know. He makes the inks according to the old formulae. He copies the style impeccably. He ages the things somehow; again, I don’t even want to know how. As for getting away with it – he has done. Several times of late.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘The trickle of manuscripts coming on the market!’ I smacked my head.

  ‘I remind you again, Peter,’ said Alan in a voice so cold I almost didn’t recognize it, ‘that I am a policeman. Are you confessing to being an accessory to art fraud?’ His genial, ‘informal’ manner had vanished.

  ‘There has been no fraud, sir. There is no law in any country in the world against selling original works of art, unless they are represented as being something other than what they are. And Laurence says his friend has been very careful to make no claims about their age or provenance.’

  ‘So Laurence has been involved in this scheme as well?’

  ‘He … has had some involvement with the marketing in this part of the world. His friend lives in New York.’

  ‘Peter, you are a student of theology. Perhaps what your pals have been doing isn’t strictly illegal, but can you possibly be comfortable with the morality of their actions?’ I was aware as I said it that I sounded like a self-righteous old biddy. Tough. Someone needed to call him to account. What I felt like doing was weeping. I had liked Peter, and I was appalled by what he was telling us.

  Peter squirmed. ‘I don’t see anything so terrible about it. They’re selling what people want to buy. It’s not as if it were drugs, or stolen jewellery, or guns. A manuscript can do no harm to anyone. And the dealers who buy them, if they know anything at all about art, know perfectly well that the pieces aren’t genuinely old artefacts. They’re nothing like expensive enough, for one thing.’

  ‘And those who buy from the dealers? Are they aware that they are buying modern reproductions?’ Alan fixed Peter with a cold eye.

  He shrugged. ‘That’s up to the dealers, isn’t it? Laurence isn’t responsible for their actions.’

  ‘Oh, Peter! It’s the cynical old argument. The Nazis were fond of it. “I didn’t know what would happen, did I? I was just acting under orders. I didn’t personally hurt anyone. Nothing to do with me.”’ I stopped talking, afraid that if I kept my mouth open I was going to be sick.

  ‘I’ll need the name of your confederate.’ Alan picked up his notebook.

  ‘I don’t know his name. Laurence thought it was safer that way.’

  ‘I see. Another proof that you both knew perfectly well that what you were proposing to do was a bit more than “dodgy”, as you put it. I’m going to have to report this to the authorities, you know.’

  ‘But it’s not illegal!’

  ‘Probably not. Not yet. But the fact that he has been engaged in activities that are dubious, at best, puts an entirely new face on Laurence’s disappearance. It may be deliberate. It may not.’

  ‘And I
,’ I said, ‘am going to phone Penny and Gilly.’

  Alan nodded approval. Peter looked confused. ‘Who are they?’ he asked.

  ‘Penny is a good friend and an artist,’ I said. ‘It was she who told us about the manuscripts that had suddenly appeared on the market. She knows a good many people in the art world. And Gilly, Gillian Roberts, is a young sculptor who is beginning to make a name for herself. She has an exhibition in Bayeux right now, though she’s gone back home to Sherebury. That’s why we came to France, actually. Between the two of them, word will spread very quickly to the art world about this scam. For scam it is, and you know it perfectly well.’

  Peter looked away.

  ‘And there’s one thing you and Laurence hadn’t considered. Once the word got out – and it would have got out sooner or later, even without Alan and me – you wouldn’t have a chance of passing off an Abelard manuscript as genuine.’ I paused for a moment and then delivered the final blow. ‘Even if it was.’

  The storm had stopped while we were talking. I hadn’t noticed; I doubt the others had, either. Peter murmured something and left the room looking like a whipped puppy, his tail between his legs.

  ‘How will he get home?’

  ‘On his feet, I presume,’ said Alan. ‘It’s not far. At this moment I don’t particularly care.’ He sat down on the bed.

  I said nothing. I was already beginning to have mixed feelings about the conversation.

  ‘He’s not to be pitied, Dorothy. He’s a manipulative, deceptive young ass, and he deserved to be treated sternly.’

  ‘Yes.’ I said it without enthusiasm.

  ‘You don’t like being lied to. Neither do I.’

  ‘No.’ I busied myself with tidying up the almost-untasted snacks and wine.

  ‘Dorothy, stop fussing and sit down.’ He patted the bed next to him. I sat. ‘That frustrated maternal instinct is coming out, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose. I just wonder if we were too hard on him. I know he deserved it, but … oh, darn it all, I liked him. And I guess I still do, in spite of everything. But I’m terribly, terribly disappointed in him.’

  ‘And angry.’

  ‘And angry,’ I admitted. ‘And still wondering what all the other strange things have to do with his nasty little scheme.’

  ‘Well, it’s easy enough to see they all have to do with purported lost manuscripts by Abelard. I think we can now assume the young man who was hurt was down in the lower reaches of the Abbey looking for them. We know Sam was looking for them. And you left last night before Krider could expound on what he said, but it turns out he, too, had heard rumours about Abelard manuscripts hidden around the Mont.’

  ‘You know, I’ve been wondering. Is it even remotely possible that Krider is in fact Laurence’s mysterious friend? He lives in America. He’s been studying calligraphy and the like. He’s lied to us about quite a lot of things. What if he’s much more adept at creating manuscript copies than he’s led us to believe?’

  ‘He doesn’t live in New York.’

  ‘Not according to what he told us.’

  Alan shrugged. ‘Anything’s possible, I suppose. But I don’t believe it. For one thing, he’s the wrong sort of age to have befriended a man the age of Laurence. For another, it would be the height of folly for him to come here to the Mont and make himself conspicuous if Peter’s scheme was about to come to fruition.’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. I’m not thinking clearly. Peter upset me. Let’s go down and get something to eat, and then do you suppose there are any TV channels that carry English-language programming? Or even subtitles? I want to watch something absolutely mindless.’

  ‘First I need to put in a call to Derek, and then to the authorities in Avranches. Peter’s story has thrown a spanner into several different sets of works.’

  It wasn’t until I had eaten supper and was having coffee and Calvados (for which I was rapidly developing a taste) that I remembered to tell Alan about the hotel situation.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Another spanner. I’ve no idea what we’re to do with the chap, in that case. Henri didn’t mention him this evening, so I assume—’

  ‘Henri? Who’s Henri?’

  ‘The great panjandrum of the police at Avranches. I forgot to ask him about Sam. We were rather occupied with annoyance over Peter and his activities. But I imagine he would have told me if Sam were being released from hospital any sooner than tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Well, we have our room for another few days, but I’m darned if I’m going to let Sam sleep on a cot in there. There isn’t room, aside from any other considerations. I had thought, earlier when Jacques first told me, about asking Peter if there was any room in his lodgings, but I’m in no mood right now to ask Peter for any favours.’

  ‘Not to mention the fact that Peter is right in the middle of the Abelard conspiracy, and might well have had something to do with Sam’s … shall we call it an accident?’

  ‘I’d call it attempted murder, but I don’t honestly see Peter stooping to that. He’s a man with a monomania, and he’s not above pulling an elaborate scam. I think he might in the end have convinced himself that he really had found one of Abelard’s songs. I suppose he’s studied enough music to come up with something that Abelard might conceivably have written. But he’d draw the line at physical violence.’

  ‘There was no actual violence involved in Sam’s near-drowning. It was Sam himself who walked out into the rising tide.’

  ‘Still. I know Peter’s a liar, though not a very good one, and his views about the limits of legality are pretty flexible, but I truly can’t see him as a murderer.’

  Alan sighed. ‘You’re probably right. But who, then, enticed Sam onto the sands and into the bay?’

  And to that I had no answer.

  We were not successful in finding any television programming that I could follow. Alan offered, with a twinkle in his eye, to translate word-for-word any material I cared to watch, but I turned him down. I searched the shelves in the lounge, where books that guests had left behind were set out in no particular order. Most of them were in French, reasonably enough. I thought about trying to pick my way through a French translation of an Agatha Christie I knew practically by heart, but decided that sounded too much like work.

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said to Alan with a sigh, ‘there’s always Peter’s book about Abelard. I’m not nearly as eager to read it as I was, now that Peter’s told us a lot of what I wanted to know, but it might send me to sleep.’

  ‘If the Calvados doesn’t do it.’

  So I propped myself up on pillows on the bed, adjusted the reading lamp, and began to read about the most famous man of the twelfth century, or so the author of the book claimed.

  I found it actually to be pretty good reading. Abelard truly was a fascinating man, full of contradictions, a man both of his time and wildly far in advance of it, a man both pious and vigorously secular. I was just getting to a treatise about his philosophy, which I couldn’t follow, when Alan’s phone rang. It was on the bedside table, closer to me, so I picked it up and handed it to Alan.

  ‘Yes. Yes? I see.’ A longish pause.

  I’d given up on Abelard for the time being, so I tried without much luck to hear the other half of the conversation.

  ‘Let me ask my wife, and I’ll ring you back.’ He ended the call and gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. ‘That was Sam. He’s being released first thing tomorrow, and he’s made rather an extraordinary offer. The police have told him they wanted someone to stay with him. “Play nursemaid” was the way he put it. He has a suite at his elegant hotel – a two-storey suite, no less – and he wonders if we would care to share it. Quite private, we’d be, according to him, and he’s prepared to deal with all expenses.’

  ‘But Alan, it’s the answer! I’ll actually be sorry to leave here – everyone’s been so nice – but we can’t have Sam here, so going to him is really the only way. Call him back and say yes.’

  ‘We may have
to pay for the rest of the time we’ve booked here.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, since we’ll be riding on Sam’s ticket for that time. And anyway, I’ll bet they won’t make us pay. From what Jacques told me, they’re turning people away every day. They’ll be glad to get rid of us and rent the rooms to someone else at the high season rate.’

  ‘You may be right. I’d best dress and go down and tell them. They’ll be more amenable if I deal with it in person, I suspect.’

  ‘Yes, turn on the charm, dear. It’s a pity the staff are almost all men.’

  He ignored that and had started pulling on his pants when his phone rang again. ‘Get that, would you, darling?’

  My ‘hello’ was greeted with a spate of agitated French. I handed the phone to Alan.

  This time his side of the conversation was even less enlightening, and of course there was no point in even trying to hear the voice at the other end.

  ‘Pas ce soir, Monsieur. Ah, oui. D’accord. À demain.’ He ended the call.

  ‘I got that part, I think. Something about not this evening, but tomorrow? What’s happening tomorrow?’

  ‘The man injured at the Abbey is conscious, and wants to talk. His name, by the way, is Bruce Douglas. His parents are with him right now, but as he’s so much better, they’re going back home tomorrow, so Henri and I are going to have a conversation with him in the afternoon.’

  ‘Good. That gives us the morning to move to our posh new abode. I sure wish I could go with you to hear what Henri has to say.’

  ‘But of course you’ll come with me? Why not?’ He tucked in his shirt and buckled his belt.

  ‘Because, dear heart, I’ll be babysitting.’ He looked blank. ‘With Sam. On whom we’re supposed to be keeping a close eye, remember?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘If this business gets any more complicated, I’m going to fly back to Sherebury and take you with me, and devil take the hindmost!’

  ‘Yes, dear. Don’t slam the door on your way out.’