A Rather Charming Invitation

by C. A. Belmond

  I kept staring, and zooming in, then stepping back and trying to get some perspective. There was so much to look at it, and it was all too easy to get lost in all the images. But finally, I saw something I’d barely noticed before.

  “Hey,” I said, peering at the enlarged photo of the central, bottom section of the tapestry. “Look at that little cartouche, right in the middle of the lower border.”

  “What’s a cartouche?” Jeremy asked, intrigued.

  I pointed to a small ornate rectangle. It resembled a miniature work of needlepoint on a cream-colored fabric, that was “mounted” in a brown frame. The “frame” was woven to look as if it was made of decorative ribbons that were tied into two bows, one at the top, and one at the bottom. This frame overlapped beyond the inside edge of the border, right into the body of the tapestry.

  Inside the frame was embroided, elegant lettering that appeared to be a Latin proverb, written in black and gold, with violet flowers and silver-green leaves twining around its letters like a vine.

  To me, the whole thing was like a tiny, fancy, ancient version of a framed “Home Sweet Home” or “Bless This House” that a lady might stitch and then frame and hang in her living room. This little framed picture in the border was flanked on each side by white swans and cupidlike figures known as putti. These decorations also overlapped beyond the border’s edge, into the main body of the tapestry.

  I peered closer to scrutinize the Latin lettering. Usually such inscriptions are archaic admonitions on the order of A stitch in time saves nine or Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. The sort of advice that makes you feel somewhat doomed anyway. I carefully copied down the Latin words that were inside the cartouche. Here is what it said:

  BIBE PROFUNDE EX CISTERNA VITAE, COLE CONJUGALEM UXOREM.

  “You studied classics, didn’t you?” I asked, pointing.

  Jeremy squinted at it, then re-copied it on another piece of paper. “Hmmm. Hmm. That’s the verb ‘drink’, I think . . . hmm . . . don’t know what this word is, but . . . it’s about a ‘wife’ . . .” He glanced up at me. “Have a drink with your wife?” he suggested facetiously.

  “Surely you can do better than that, Mister,” I said.

  “Wish I had my old Latin schoolbook around,” he muttered. “Wait a minute.” He went over to the computer and did some rapid searching and clacking. Every now and then he’d stop and jot down a few words on his paper. Finally he came sauntering over to me, and slapped down his translation on the table. It said:

  Drink deep from the well of life, And treasure a faithful wife.

  “I made it rhyme,” Jeremy said modestly. “If I had been literal about it, that last line would have been on the order of, ‘A faithful wife be your treasure’.”

  “That figures,” I said, temporarily distracted. “Just once I’d like to see a work of art exhorting men to be faithful.”

  “Let’s concentrate. Look up here, in the main part of the tapestry. On the bedspread where the flower fields are,” Jeremy said, pointing to one of the oval insets on the left. “There’s a water-well, see?”

  I peered at it. Yes indeed, it was the scenario with the young man and woman carrying a bucket of water to the well, like an elegant Jack and Jill.

  “You get it?” Jeremy said triumphantly. “Drink deep from the well of life. With so little time to act, Armand may have just thrown his treasure down that old well—”

  “Of course!” I cried. “Armand could be saying, ‘Drink deep and find the treasure of your faithful wife’s dowry.’ It makes sense, because a well is the perfect place to chuck your valuables, if you’ve got the king’s soldiers on your trail, and no time to spare! Why, they used to do that back home in Connecticut, you know; the American colonists would throw the family silver and jewels down the well so the rotten Redcoats wouldn’t be able to steal it.” I paused. “Whoops,” I said. “My apologies, but you must admit you Brits behaved very badly indeed in our Revolution.”

  “On the contrary,” Jeremy said. “We English, in the end, simply decided to let you rowdy colonists go free, because Americans are clearly a far too troublesome lot.”

  “While we are arguing about history,” I suggested, “Parker Drake is out there stealing Honorine’s dowry. Let’s go find out if there really is an old well in those fields!”

  “I think we ought to have Monsieur Felix with us,” said Jeremy, “so he can watch out for trouble and make sure we’re not followed.”

  When Jeremy called him, Monsieur Felix quickly cautioned against saying anything on the telephone, just in case. He drove over, but met up with us out on the road, and he followed us at a slight distance. As we reached the turnoff for Mougins, he flashed his lights to signal that we weren’t being followed, and it was okay to proceed.

  We drove on to the château, with Felix still not far behind us. Jeremy warned me, “If this well really existed, it would have been centuries ago, so remember to tell Leonora that it’s just a guess on our part, nothing definite.”

  I tried to be mindful of his caveat, but when Honorine came to the door, I figured there was no time to waste on social niceties. So I blurted out, “Honorine, we’ve got to see if there’s an old water well out in the flower fields in Grasse. Armand may have hidden his treasure in it!”

  She let us in, and brought us to see Philippe and David in the library. They looked mildly surprised to have us pop in on them unexpectedly, even though we were working on their case. Honorine spoke to them in rapid-fire French, to which they responded just as quickly, and I couldn’t keep up. There was a long pause as she listened to them; then Philippe glanced up and realized that I couldn’t make out his answer, so he translated, with an amused gleam in his eye.

  “Yes, there was an old well, out in the fields,” he said slowly. “I remember playing there, and stumbling on it when I was a boy. My governess scolded me for going too close to it, and nearly falling in; so, after that, it was boarded up.”

  He turned to David, and said, “Get the map of the fields, and I will show you. Then, we go and dig for buried treasure, oui?”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  When we arrived at the flower fields in Grasse, it was late afternoon, and most of the field workers had gone home. David rounded up a few of the remaining men, and, without explanation, he told them we needed to do some work on an old well. They armed themselves with shovels, spades and other equipment, then followed David, Jeremy, Honorine and me, with Philippe leading the way. Monsieur Felix remained by the gate, so he could keep an eye out for any unwanted newcomers.

  Philippe headed down the main path, then crossed the fields with a purposeful stride, as if, even at his age, the boyhood memory of discovering the old well was seared into his mind. The earth was still warm from the day’s sunbath, and the plants still plump from their irrigation in a land where water—and soil—is a precious commodity. The heady, mingled floral and herbal fragrances were mesmerizing; in particular, the lavender was so soothing that the act of marching across it became almost hypnotic.

  As we veered off toward the western side of the field, Philippe came to an abrupt halt, and pointed at an area which received partial shade from ancient nearby trees. The rows of plantings simply ran right by and around the area, as if detouring around a boulder.

  I gazed at where Philippe was gesturing and I could see a low, circular stone wall, topped by splintered wooden planks. As we came closer, I realized that the wall was actually an extension of the well itself, the very top of the stone cylinder. Some of the wood planks that covered it appeared to have fallen into the well. The earth directly around the well seemed to be turned over, raked up, occasionally clumped in mounds here and there; and some of the plantings nearby were a bit flattened, as if they’d been stepped on or rolled over by a vehicle.

  “Has this ground been disturbed?” I asked.

  Philippe shrugged. “Perhaps. But that is not unusual. Workers come and go here, and sometimes the earth is dug for use elsewhere.”

/>   “What about the planks?” Jeremy asked. “Have they been broken into?”

  David examined them, then said, “Hard to say. They could just as well have deteriorated and fallen in on their own.”

  Under his direction, the workmen began to tear aside the remaining planks. Philippe’s men assessed the well to be about thirty-two inches across and about twelve feet deep. One of the men, wearing a helmet with a light on its front, tossed in a rope ladder and hooked it over the top, then began to lower himself into the well, all the way down to the bottom.

  “These old wells were originally dug by hand,” Philippe told us, peering in.

  “Is there any water still in there?” Jeremy asked, fascinated.

  The man in the well said something in French that I couldn’t hear. Philippe smiled and said, “He says there are tree roots pushing into it, but it’s pretty much intact. A little water, yes, but not much.”

  One of the other workers handed a shovel to the fellow inside the well, who dug and explored for a while, while the rest of us waited to hear any news. The sound of his spade echoed back up to us. Chip, chip, chip. Honorine and I spread out a blanket that Leonora had given us, and we sat there, waiting. Philippe pulled a pipe out of his pocket, and stood apart from us, smoking thoughtfully, gazing out across the fields.

  Jeremy was seeing these fields for the first time, so he went hiking around, pausing every now and then to gaze about, taking it all in. David, obviously a city boy at heart, paced along the path restlessly, then pulled out his mobile phone for messages, sending a few.

  “My brother is a desk man, who must fill every moment with activity,” Honorine murmured while watching him, not without affection. “How often I have heard him say that it bores him to do ‘nothing’. Whereas Papa says ‘doing nothing is one of life’s sweetest joys’.”

  I glanced back at Philippe, who had closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun, like a flower.

  “The way he does it,” I said, “it’s not ‘nothing’.”

  Finally, the man in the well stopped digging. He called up to the other men, but he couldn’t have said anything exciting, because nobody summoned David back. The guy only handed the shovel to his coworkers, and then climbed out, looking a little muddy. Philippe walked toward him, asking him something in French. The man shook his head. Then I heard him say a word I recognized.

  “Rien,” he said, shrugging. “Rien.”

  “Nothing?” I said in huge disappointment. “At all?”

  “What if it was buried around the well, not in it?” Philippe suggested to us. So, the other workers, under Philippe’s orders, began to dig around the well’s immediate circumference. Honorine and I eventually had to move to get out of their way as they dug closer. But when they were done with this, the answer was the same. “Rien.”

  They had made lots of holes. Everyone was very careful, but it was simply inevitable that we had uprooted a number of precious plantings. It did not escape my notice that David, who’d come back to survey and inspect the damage, was now glowering at Jeremy and me with undisguised disapproval. Jeremy pointedly ignored him, but I could feel myself blushing apologetically.

  I turned my attention to some of the sketches and pictures which I’d brought with me. The tapestry borders and cartouche were decorated with a flower pattern that was very pretty—a bright, violet-colored bloom comprised of four separate petals, that were as delicate-looking as those of a sweet pea. The leaves, which looked like oval pods, were a silvery green color.

  “What is that?” Honorine asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “Moonwort,” I said. “It was all over the tapestry. I looked it up before we came here. It was considered a ‘magic herb’ that protects against evil spirits, and enhances memory, so that a person can ‘recover that which is lost’.”

  Glancing meaningfully at Jeremy, I added, “Moonwort also stands for honesty, integrity . . . and money and prosperity. It’s known by lots of other names, too: silver bloom, silver dollar, ‘twopennies-in-a-purse’ . . . and penny-flower.”

  Jeremy said affectionately, “Penny-flower? So you have a flower named after you, for honesty and prosperity. Not bad.”

  “Well, I was just thinking,” I said. “Moonwort. The Latin name for it in the flower books is Lunaria annua. See? Like Lunaire. If we found it growing here, that might mean something.”

  “You won’t find any moonwort here,” David said crossly. “It’s not the sort of thing we’d ever grow for perfume!”

  “Not ever?” I persisted. “Even in Armand’s time?” But by now even the kindly Philippe shook his head and was looking a bit exasperated. After all, we’d dug up his expensive flowers, and for what?

  I simply couldn’t believe it. Had the path gone cold? Was the whole thing a wild figment of my fevered imagination, while I was lost in the cryptic world of the tapestry? Its images surely would have been instantly recognizable metaphors to the people of its day, but perhaps the meanings were now lost forever to a modern world that has long forgotten what such symbols once meant.

  Jeremy was thinking along more practical and possibly diabolical lines. “It’s possible that Armand hid his treasure here. But I wonder if, centuries ago, somebody else got here first, and dug it up!”

  “Ah! Anything is possible,” Philippe agreed.

  Disappointed, we all tromped back across the fields to the gate by the side of the road, where Monsieur Felix was calmly waiting for us. Jeremy had a brief chat with him; then, everyone headed for home—Honorine and her family to Mougins, and Jeremy and I to Antibes.

  It was only when we were pulling into the driveway of our villa that Jeremy told me another possibility he’d been considering in private. “Someone may have gotten there first, all right,” he said darkly, “but maybe not so many centuries ago. Suppose it was Parker Drake who somehow figured it out and beat us to it?”

  I said worriedly, “The ground around the well was a bit disturbed, and it may or may not have been field workers who did that.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Jeremy said ruefully. “If Drake has found it, he won’t be able to resist blowing his trumpet and letting the whole world know. So, all we can do is proceed as if he hasn’t found the gold,” he concluded. “And keep moving full speed ahead, to get there first.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  When we entered the villa, we were both so exhausted that we went right to bed, and slept the deep slumber of little kids who’ve been outdoors playing—or digging—all day. The next morning, I awoke thoroughly refreshed, and ready to do battle again. Jeremy was sleeping soundly, so I crept downstairs, made coffee and then went to take another look at the photographs still spread out on the dining table.

  Later, when Jeremy came searching for me, I was still peering through the magnifier, examining two photographs in particular, very closely. “What’s up?” he asked. “Find anything?”

  “Take a look,” I said, passing the magnifier to him. “Something doesn’t match up here.”

  “What do you mean?” Jeremy asked, peering at it.

  “This is the photo we saw yesterday, the one of the cartouche, in the bottom border of the tapestry,” I told him.

  “The cartouche,” Jeremy muttered. “Oh, right, that tiny framed picture with the Latin on it,” he said, staring at it.

  “Notice how most of the cartouche sits inside the lower border,” I said. “But, the little bow-ties at the top of the picture frame overlap into the main body of the tapestry.”

  “Right,” Jeremy said, staring at it. “The top loops of the bows. So?”

  “And the stuff on either side of the cartouche—the head of the swan, and the wings of the cupids—they also overlap beyond the border, into the main part, too, right?” I continued.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Okay,” I said excitedly. “Now, take a look at this photo of the top border of the tapestry.” I slid the other photo over to him, and he moved the magnifier there. “See where the i
nside line of the border meets the top section of the main body of the tapestry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s the first thing you see, beneath the top border?” I demanded.

  “Looks like some curlicues, and some bunches of white grapes, and maybe some white feathers,” Jeremy reported, squinting hard now.

  “But—I think all that stuff is actually the bottom edging of another cartouche!” I said triumphantly. “See? What you describe as ‘curlicues’ could be part of a bow-tie on a cartouche. And, the white feathers could be swans’ wings. And as for the ‘white grapes’, why, those aren’t grapes at all, those could very well be the little toes of the cupids.”

  “Let me see yesterday’s picture of the bottom cartouche again,” Jeremy said, sounding excited. I shoved it back to him. He scrutinized it, then went back and forth between the two photos. “You know, you’re right,” he said slowly. “It’s as if there was once a matching cartouche on the top border of the tapestry, but most of it got chopped off, leaving only the bottom part of it—these snippets that overlapped into the main body of the tapestry.” He looked up at me now. “But where’s the rest of it? Maybe Armand started out making a matching cartouche for the top, then, what, he changed his mind?”

  “Or,” I said triumphantly, “he did put a matching cartouche on the top border. But this isn’t the original top border!” I waited a moment for the significance of this to sink in. Then I said, “Suppose somebody replaced the original top border with a new one?”

  Jeremy looked up at me and said nothing, at first. Then, when he spoke, it was in a low, quiet tone—because Jeremy is the exact opposite of me, and when he’s on the scent of something important, he doesn’t jump up and down about it, he just gets very, very quiet.

  “Can they do that?” he said. “Can they replace one border with another?”