The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  A chair squeaked. Jacquiz rose from the dressing-table in the far corner of the room, and came across to her. He put both hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Jacquiz. You’re trembling.’

  ‘It’s not nice, Marigold. What’s in that scrapbook.’

  ‘You’re frightened.’

  ‘Well. Rather appalled. I think…that we should give this whole thing up.’

  ‘No,’ said Marigold.

  ‘When we started, you said…that if there was ever a nasty smell, you’d sheer straight off.’

  ‘There have already been nasty smells, sweetheart. But I haven’t sheered off, have I? I’m not going to. Whatever I may have said at the start, now I want to see it through.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Go on then, tell. Tell about that scrapbook.’

  ‘Not now.’ The palms of his hands were sweating through her dress. ‘In the morning. Time enough then.’

  She sighed. ‘Love now, Jacquiz.’ She put a hand up to clasp one of his hands, where it gripped her shoulder. Even the back of it, she thought, seemed to be sweating; but perhaps that was her. ‘Sweet love.’

  ‘Quiet love.’

  ‘Not like you, Jacquiz. You used to make such a production of it.’

  ‘I was silly. Sweet love, quiet love. I see that now.’

  ‘Love. And then, in the morning, you shall tell me what you’ve read in that scrapbook.’

  Jacquiz shivered and pressed his lips down on to her hair.

  PART SIX

  The Gods of the Shore

  ‘Very pretty,’ said Balbo Blakeney.

  ‘Magnificent, I should call it.’

  ‘No, Sydney. Imposing at first sight, I agree, but only theatrical if you look at it a bit longer.’

  They stood on a beach and looked up, as from the stage of an ancient odeon, past tiers of terraced houses and up again into a narrow re-entrant of rock.

  ‘Yes, theatrical,’ Balbo said.

  ‘Still, I’m glad Jermyn Street allowed us to come here,’ said Syd Jones.

  ‘Were they keen?’

  ‘Not at all. But I said I must have more time to talk to you, and that meanwhile you must be humoured.’

  ‘Thank you. But if you ask me, you seem to believe in my search rather more than I do. I sometimes think that I’m humouring you.’

  ‘Well, do that. Remind me, Balbo: exactly what is this treasure we’re looking for?’

  ‘Rubies. Rubies with a curse on them.’

  ‘Rubies are supposed to be lucky…to confer prosperity and distinction.’

  ‘So do these. They also have a curse on them. Every now and then they turn nasty with their owner. If, that is, they still exist.’

  ‘You said…that you were searching back into time for them.’

  ‘Searching back to the time…and the place…at which they were last known about. And for the person who knew about them.’

  ‘Well. Here we are at the place at which Andrea Commingi was probably painted in 1699. Or rather, the place indicated, not by the picture itself, but by the literal part of the code in that picture, which was painted in 1699. Therefore a place which was important to him, almost certainly the place in which he lived, and from which he operated, before he moved on to Corfu. Now then, Balbo: what can this place tell us about Andrea Commingi – if we use the rest of that code right, I mean the visual parts of it?’

  ‘It may show us his house, if we look. His…habitat.’

  ‘And might we see the glitter of rubies in all this? The ghost of their glitter, perhaps?’

  ‘You go too fast, Sydney. I see nothing yet. Are you sure we’re in the right place?’

  ‘Yep. The letters on those temple cornices. “P”, “O”…“N”, “A”, “O”, “S”…“I”, “T”. Wanted: a sea port on the West Coast of Italy, as per previous instructions. Answer, the anagram of the letters – POSITANO. And here we are.’

  ‘It almost seems too simple.’

  ‘It always does – once you’ve got the answer.’

  ‘Even I got it – after a time. That makes it very simple.’

  ‘You solved the anagram, when you’d been told what the letters were. You wouldn’t have seen them, tucked away on that musty old canvas, if I hadn’t shown them to you.’ Then, as Balbo looked hurt, ‘Sorry, old man,’ Syd told him, ‘but we have our professional pride.’

  ‘So here we are. What now?’

  ‘The picture, Balbo.’

  Syd Jones took from his pocket the envelope on which he had copied the Commingi portrait and its landscape.

  ‘Remember: we are not looking for a direct resemblance. We are looking for a code of visual clues or puns.’

  Balbo looked up at the re-entrant.

  ‘There are three famous heights along the coast,’ he said: ‘at Sorrento, at Amalfi, and here. This town is between the other two. Perhaps the forefinger that blocks out the central height in the picture indicates that Commingi had control of the height above this, the central town. Perhaps it had an observation post or a fortress. He’d have had a lot of enemies after him – not least the excise men.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jones, S. ‘Coming at him both by land and sea. He’d need a tower looking out to sea and at the same time tactically situated so as to deny access by land. But what about the snow on the heights?’

  ‘A way of telling us that he was particularly prone to operate along the coast by winter? The whole picture had a wintry feel. Bold pirates favour rough weather.’

  ‘So far, so good, Balbo…may be. But this is getting us no nearer to the man. There is a ruined tower up there which could well have been his fortress and his observation tower; but it tells us nothing of what we want to know about him.’

  ‘We don’t so much want to know about him,’ said Balbo; ‘we want to know what he knew about the Rubies. Which member of the family, if any, had possession of them; or when, where and by whom they’d last been sighted.’

  ‘Yep. Not the sort of thing you find out in a ruined tower. But we’re not done with that picture yet. We agree that the fingernail blocking out the central peak probably confirms Positano (the central town with a famous height above it) as his base, and also tells us that he had control. What does the rest of it tell us? What a pretty little girl.’

  ‘Where?’ said Balbo.

  ‘Just gone behind that rock. Long dress and a basket of flowers. About fifteen.’

  ‘An interesting age, I’ve always thought. Physically nubile yet still so innocent.’

  ‘Let’s keep our minds on our work. That picture. It must tell us more about him – him and his ways of going on.’

  ‘The two Sicilies,’ Balbo said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘When Commingi lived here, this coast was part of the Kingdom of Naples – which was the second half of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the other half, of course, being Sicily itself. That causeway in the picture – it could symbolize a route or voyage between the mainland and the island of Sicily.’

  ‘Why should that island be Sicily?’

  The temples. They could stand as a conventional sign for Sicily. There are celebrated groups of temples all along the Sicilian coast, notably at Agrigento and Selinunte in the South.’

  ‘Come to that, there is a celebrated group of temples at Paestum – just down the coast from here,’ said Jones, S.

  ‘Then Paestum is another place he might have been sailing to. Wherever it was, that causeway, the one and only way to it, could indicate that Commingi had a special route, known to him alone, a route suitable for winter, since winter is so strong in the picture. Or that he, and he alone, ran a special line in goods.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Syd. ‘The picture could mean that and a great many other things beside. None of them is bringing us any closer to Commingi, or helping us to find out what, if anything, he knew about the Rubies.’

  Balbo twisted the toe of his left shoe in the sand.

  ‘If those temples do indicate Sic
ily,’ he said, ‘or Paestum, for that matter, why are the letters which make up Positano written on them rather than elsewhere in the picture?’

  ‘Because it’s a natural place for them to be. Carved on masonry, to which, on the face of it, they bear explicit reference. Remember? PO, NAOS, IT – Poseidon’s temple in Italy. Your translation. All quite obvious and above board; nothing there to invite suspicion.’

  ‘But it did invite your suspicion.’

  ‘Oh yes, cobber. The serious codebreaker, as opposed to the casual nosey parker, is bound to see through the camouflage, and the chap who devised the code would have realized this. So he arranged that as soon as the trick had been found out it should start to operate on another – level his intention being no longer to reassure but to confuse. If anyone gets as far as realizing that those letters are an anagram of Positano, he is then faced, as we are, with the question of why they are carved on the cornices of temples which, we think, stand for Sicily or possibly Paestum. But once again, Balbo, even if we answer the question, we shan’t be getting any nearer to what we want to know about Commingi, which is what, if anything, Commingi knew about the Rubies.’

  ‘I just saw that girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The one you said you saw. With the flowers. Sitting on a rock, she was, arranging them in her basket. “Rose girl, bearing your posies”,’ Balbo quoted,

  ‘“What are you coming to sell?

  Is it yourself or your roses,

  Or yourself and your roses as well?” ’

  ‘Was it roses she had?’

  ‘I think so. She’s gone now.’

  ‘This is getting us no further at all,’ said Jones, S.

  ‘Hardly surprising. Why should the ghosts talk to us? Just because we’ve been clever enough, or think we have, to discover where Commingi lived before he came to Corfu, why should that tell us anything about the Rubies?’

  ‘If only we could find out something about his life here… We can’t just give up now. It would be such a shame, old Balbo, to give up now.’

  How sad he sounds, Balbo thought. I wish I could come up with something for him. I like this man. I’d like to impress him. I’d like to give him pleasure – the pleasure of going on with this hunt. I can’t really believe in it myself, but clearly it excites him, and anyway I’d like to go on leading this kind of…wandering life…with him for a while longer. I wish I could find a clue for him, a clue to tell us where to go, what to do, next. Desperately, he said, ‘That crumbling nose – which the sea had formed out of the rock…?’

  Syd Jones shook his head.

  ‘Don’t clutch at straws,’ he said. ‘Try to reconcile the contradiction. Letters which make up Positano…carved along the cornices of a group of temples which symbolize Sicily.’

  ‘Or Paestum…which isn’t far from here.’

  Keep it going, Balbo thought. Something may turn up. ‘Where’s the map?’ he said.

  ‘In the car,’ snapped Jones, S.

  ‘Never mind. There’s one that’ll do in the guide book.’

  Balbo took a paperback edition of The Companion Guide to Southern Italy from his coat pocket and consulted the table of contents. Keep it going, he said to himself; just a chance I may find something for him. And then aloud, ‘Map One. No,’ he said a few seconds later, ‘it gives out just too high up. On to Map Three…page 182.’

  ‘What the hell good is all this?’ grumbled Syd Jones as Balbo turned the pages.

  ‘You may well ask,’ said Balbo, and plucked with one hand at Jones’ sleeve, balancing the guide book on the other. ‘Oh, Sydney, you may well ask. We have been very silly, Sydney. We have been far too clever and very, very silly indeed.’

  In a first-floor room above a famous perfumer’s shop in Jermyn Street, a thin, ratty man said to a smooth, plump one: ‘He can’t go on chasing all round Europe at the department’s expense.’

  ‘It is very important,’ said the plump man, in a voice brittle with suppressed irritation, ‘as you have been repeatedly instructed, that he should bring Blakeney in gently. For it is important that Blakeney should co-operate, and Blakeney is the kind of man who requires, as a necessary condition of cooperation, civil and civilized treatment. This he is receiving from Jones, who must be allowed some licence in such very tricky circumstances.’

  ‘So you have said before, sir. Allow me to remind you, once again, that time is running out.’

  ‘We have a good five weeks before the start of Operation Falx.’

  ‘We shall need at least one week for the precise training of Blakeney. And a week before that to set him in the right frame of mind, sir. We also need time for medical check-ups and so on.’

  ‘Jones will bring Blakeney in when he’s ready to come. He will be of little use to us unless he is ready to come. Jones will be a sound judge of that.’

  ‘I sometimes think, sir,’ said the ratty man in a rich, level tenor, ‘that your life-long partiality for county cricket has caused you to overvalue the capacities of Jones in our own very different professional sphere.’

  ‘And I sometimes think, Q,’ said the smooth man with a bland look but jagged utterance, ‘that your life-long dislike of the game has caused you to undervalue them – and to resent Jones’ presence here. But let us not argue about that now. As things are now, Q, Jones is in the field…“preparing” Blakeney, who, he reports, is rather disturbed and very intrigued by the story he has been told about the mutant rats, but must nevertheless (in Jones’ view) be allowed to settle his own personal obsession with some private piece of antiquarian research before he will be fully ready to join us. So let Jones watch over Blakeney while he settles his obsession – no better or more patient man for the job – and then bring Blakeney quietly in.’

  ‘And suppose Blakeney is still pursuing his obsession three weeks from now – by which time it will be essential to us that we should have him here within hours?’

  ‘Then, said the plump man, lightly but tightly, ‘we shall have him here within hours. It would be a pity, because Blakeney would not be at his best under compulsion, but it would be our only course. However, I don’t think we need worry. Jones knows the schedule; that is, he knows when we need Blakeney.’

  ‘He was told to bring him in straightaway if he could.’

  ‘And we must certainly keep up our pressure on him. But he must still have licence if he makes out a good case for it.’

  ‘I yearn,’ said the ratty man with a throb in his voice, ‘to have Blakeney safe here, under our hand and eye.’

  ‘It will certainly be a great relief. Jones will have prepared him, with his account of the rats front the marshes, for something pretty disagreeable; but we shall need quite a lot of time and tact to reconcile him to the – er – detail of Operation Falx.’

  ‘Map three,’ said Balbo, ‘is on page 182. By the Grace of God my eye strayed to page 183 opposite.’

  ‘God has nothing to do with it,’ said Jones, S, as he edged the hired car on to the coast road and turned right for the South. ‘It’s just that you’re improving.’

  ‘Thank you, Sydney. Page 183 explains that Paestum was originally a Greek colony called Poseidonia, that it is famous for three magnificent temples by the sea, and that one of these, though in truth dedicated to Hera, has for many centuries been wrongly but universally called the Temple of Poseidon.’

  ‘Yer going well, sport.’

  ‘Now, consider that inscription in the picture: “P”, “O”; “N”, “A”, “O”, “S”; “I”, “T”. Poseidonos Naos Italianus. Normally the Latin for the Temple of Poseidon would be Templum Neptuni, but since this one was built by Greeks it is named in Greek – Poseidonos Naos – albeit in Roman letters. However, to make it quite clear to all that, though Greek, it is situated in Italy, we have the epithet Italianus. The clue is then complete. A Greek Temple of Poseidon – commonly so called – but situated in Italy. It must mean the famous one at Paestum or Poseidonia. And just in case we’re still in do
ubt, the picture tells us that it is by the seashore and one of a group of three. Where else in Italy, other than at Paestum, are there three Greek temples, by the seashore, one of them a reputed Temple of Poseidon?’

  ‘I’ll buy it, sport. So Paestum is in some way very important to this Commingi. But do those letters also mean Positano, like we thought at first?’

  ‘Perhaps, and perhaps not.’

  ‘And our interpretation of those three peaks – do we still think we got them right?’

  ‘Again, perhaps, and perhaps not. Perhaps we were right, in which case the causeway now definitely stands for a voyage from Positano to Paestum…in those days far more convenient by sea than by road…a voyage of singular importance to Commingi. Perhaps we were wrong, and Positano has nothing to do with any of it, the anagram being purely fortuitous. What we do know,’ Balbo concluded his exegesis, ‘is that Commingi, beyond any doubt, must have had associations with Paestum.’

  ‘Which brings us back to the old question, Balbo. What do we look for in Paestum? What is there, in Paestum, which can tell us anything about Andrea Commingi or about his knowledge, if any, of the Rubies?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that when we get there – if my hunch is right. If it’s wrong, I shall be so disappointed and embarrassed that I shan’t want to talk any more about it, in case you laugh at me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, old Balbo. Not after the way you’re trying.’

  ‘Even so, I’d prefer not to tell you about it…unless I’m proved right.’

  Jones, S, looked curiously for a moment at Balbo, then quickly turned his eyes away, before Balbo could notice them, and concentrated on the road to the South.

  When Q had finished his conversation with his superior on the first floor above the perfumer’s shop in Jermyn Street, he returned to his own office on the second floor and decided to use the rest of his afternoon completing certain simple but tedious preparations for Operation Falx.