The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  ‘The ghost of the Rubies,’ rumbled the voice of the figure in the shroud: ‘this summons other ghosts.’

  A lady in a long, crimson dress knelt by a chest and passed the red gems, now strung as a necklace, through her hands. She shuddered and ground them into her breast.

  ‘The noble widow, Mirabelle, Countess de la Tour d’Abbéville, who is contracted to give the necklace to her lover, Master Van Hoek, if he succeed but once more in stirring and slaking her lust. She would kill or denounce him sooner than yield the Rubies, for all her given word; but for her was another fate in store. Yet here we may not linger; we must go our weary journey, back and back…’

  A grave young man in long silver robes bent over a chemical retort and sniffed the contents. An elder man, wrapped in furs and with a deeply lined brow, shuffled anxiously about behind him. There was a slight stirring from where (as Len judged) the boy was kneeling at the near end of the casket; then, behind the elder man, a cowled youth appeared, stared from the depth of his cowl as it were through both other men and into the retort, then faded from the scene.

  ‘The noble Count Clovis Philippe du Bourg de Maubeuge de la Tour d’Abbéville, with the alchemist who has mixed a potion to bring him happiness.’

  The young Count lifted the retort and drank from it. The cowled boy appeared again, flashed his eyes and faded almost instantly.

  ‘He drinks to gain eternal youth; but for him was another fate in store. Yet here we may not linger; we must go our weary journey, back and back…’

  The Rubies, unseen since they had appeared as a necklace in the bosom of the Countess Mirabelle, now danced in the darkness again. For some minutes they danced. Then a hand scooped through the air and caught them. The hand lengthened itself into an arm which increased into a torso on which was discovered a skull-capped head with hooky nose and lank beard.

  ‘Jew of Antioch, old Jew of Antioch, where are the heirs of your loins? You were the last true possessor of the Rubies. Where are your heirs and by what name are they called, that we may find them and give them what is rightfully theirs?’

  The Jew cackled and poured his handful of Rubies into a goblet on which he set a lid.

  Clever, Len thought. Very clever illusions. But not all that difficult to manage, with that boy and girl to assist, no doubt, and a few son et lumière effects carefully put together beforehand. But what one asks oneself is, why is this creature so keen to impress Balbo and Co., and where, in any case, are the real jewels, which he said just now he was so keen to get rid of? Hang about a bit, Lenny boy, and you may get a few interesting answers.

  ‘Jew of Antioch, old Jew of Antioch, soon Count Bohemond’s serjeants will come to quarter you and take the jewels, and earn your dying Curse. Tell us where are your heirs, that restitution may be made and my poor body and soul delivered at last from your invocation.’

  The Jew rattled the Rubies in the goblet and cackled. No, not quite cackled, Len thought. He was saying something, something that sounded like Skandroo or Eskandroo with another word (piediker? paedica?) after it. Was this the name the conjurer wanted (or was pretending to want in order to further whatever plans he had for Balbo and his chums)? And if so, what was he going to do about it? Tell them that the real owner of the Rubies was a descendant of this Jew called Eskandroo Paedica, or something of the kind and that they must hunt round all Jewry and all the diaspora to find him? Why on earth should they bother? What sort of con was it all intended to lead up to?

  The Jew began to fade from the air; his voice cackled lower and lower, always the same sounds, then ceased completely. As the Jew disappeared the Rubies rose out of the goblet, danced in the dark, then poured themselves away into nothing, or rather poured themselves, so Len could have sworn, into the gap at the corner of the sarcophagus. But it was too dark to tell. Too dark? Here was the moon again; too late. The moon? A bird called and was answered. The red sun flared through an empty doorway in a wall beyond Syd Jones. Have we all slept? thought Len. The birds called again: the sun, the sun. Balbo blinked and stirred. Marigold stood pale and shivering. Jacquiz looked puzzled and rather annoyed. Jones, S, strode towards the sarcophagus. The black cassock sprawled over the high ridge of the lid and the white shroud, stained with red marks, hung over the side of the tomb which faced towards the approaching Sydney. The white hood had somehow become detached from the rest of the ensemble and had looped itself over one of the corner mouldings.

  ‘Where are those bleeding children?’ Sydney was saying. ‘We’ll need them to help with him if he’s ill, or worse.’

  But the boy (if boy he was) and the girl (as she certainly was) had both vanished. Syd reached the tomb, bent forward, and commenced a wary and gentle examination.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘The old bastard’s gone as well. This here is just his clobber.’

  PART TEN

  De Profundis

  Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  Hotspur: Why so can I, or so can any man;

  But will they come when you do call for them?

  Shakespeare: Henry IV, I, III, i

  What now? thought Len, as he adjusted his position behind the wall so that he might see through the gap yet not himself be seen in the new daylight. What will they do now? They’re no wiser, except for that ‘Eeskandrou Peediker’ bit, if they got it, and even if they got it, how on earth should they interpret it and to what should they apply it? It could be the name of the rightful owner of those jewels, if one is prepared to believe that this Jew of Antioch had really risen from the dead to reveal the name of his descendant; but since none of them knows where to find either him or the loot, so what? The only person who might be able to help them is that man, that creature in the speckled shroud, and he’s done a bunk, leaving the shroud and taking those two pretty kids. Or did they take him? Either way, he’s gone – and with him any hope of pursuing the matter any further. Profitable it might have been, intriguing it certainly is – but it’s all washed up for lack of more info. I’d better bugger off to London p.d.q., to drop my little parcel into Jermyn Street and collect the balance of my fee. I can then fly straight on to Crete via Athens (or perhaps direct) and use Balbo’s letter to extract those documents from this Kyrios Pandelios, thus enabling us to shut Provost Constable’s big gob for ever and a day, and be assured of what we need, Ive and me, to lead the good life as each of us sees it. Fucking amen.

  And indeed Len would have left St Honorat’s church and started looking for a way out of the Alyscamps (were the gates open yet?) without one second’s further delay, had not Sydney Jones now said: ‘There’s something funny about this here stone box. There’s no side here at the back. Yer can look straight in under the lid.’

  ‘And what can yer see?’ said Marigold.

  Syd, who was now standing where the Canon had stood to officiate as Master of Ceremonies the previous night, stooped down and shoved his head under the coffin lid.

  ‘There’s a lot of stuff,’ boomed Syd’s voice out of the hollow stone. ‘The bag of tricks they was using last night. All those robes and things. Little lights, red ’uns, on a string. Fancy masks. Fake beads. Torches.’

  ‘Somehow,’ said Jacquiz, ‘it all seemed too authentic to have been got up with fake beads and torches.’

  ‘Well, that’s what’s in here, matey. And a lot more beside. There must have been enough room for a whole family of stiffs in this thing. Piles of damp books’ – Sydney’s voice gurgled ‘with rude pictures of the devil doing it to ladies up their bottoms. Talk about a prick of steel, it looks more like ice to me. I’m glad I’m not on the end of that thing. And now here’s a ruddy great sack full of something.’ There was a long silence. Then Jones’ face, looking rather bemused, rose above the lid. ‘A ruddy great sack,’ he said, ‘full of his nibs, the Canon. Stone dead, stark nude, and covered in sores the size of saucers, some of ’em. Eating right down to the bone. His head…’ Jones grimaced ruefully. ‘Those red patches on his hood – they must have b
een the only places on his face where he still had a little flesh left. Raw, bloody flesh. All the rest – it’s a skull. Two-thirds of the nose gone. He had no business to be alive.’

  ‘How do you know…that it’s the Canon? We’ve never seen him without his hood.’

  ‘There’s a bracelet on the left wrist with his name engraved on it. There’s also a cross slung round his neck, a Maltese cross, with the name engraved again. Bernard Comminges.’

  Again he disappeared below the lid.

  ‘What shall we do?’ said Marigold. ‘If someone comes along and finds us, just standing about with this body, we’re going to look exceedingly silly.’

  ‘Police?’ said Balbo. ‘It must have been those children. But how? Why?’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Jones, appearing once more, ‘it’s under my bloody nose.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘What we’re all looking for.’

  ‘The necklace?’

  ‘No, I told you, only red lights on a string. But there’s a map, for Christ’s sake. A map…you’re not going to believe this… which is formed by the navel and the ulcers on his stomach. There are names tattooed near them. By the navel it says “Rosae” – Roses even in my Latin – and just to the right of the navel, running up and down, there’s a whole string of protruding lesions – most of them eat inwards but these are protruding – marked…“T”…“A”…“Y”…I’ve got it, “Taygetus”.’

  Georgics III, line 44, thought Len, ‘Taygetique canes’ – ‘the hounds of Taygetus’. He had been attracted, while leafing through the Wandrille MS of the Georgics, by the illumination of the capital ‘T’, an affair of sportive satyrs and responsive nymphs. The name had stuck in his mind; and Ivor, when inquired of, had explained that Taygetus was a mountain range which descended through the heart of the Peloponnese and into a peninsula now called the Mani. By Len’s reckoning, this meant that the Canon’s navel must represent some place just under the Western slopes of the range, either on the coast of the Mani or on the Eastern edge of an area which Ivor had called the Messenian Plain: which of these it was would depend on how far it lay to the North.

  By now Balbo and Jacquiz had joined Syd Jones behind the sarcophagus.

  ‘What’s that just about it? What’s that name on the edge of that mauve patch of skin?’

  ‘Itylus,’ said Balbo peering.

  ‘Itylus. A small town North of Cape Taenarus. Very old. It sent some ships to Troy. Ships. It’s on the sea. Mauve for sea – Homer’s wine-dark sea. But what scale was he using?’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Marigold.

  ‘No, no, can’t you understand? All sick people play this sort of game. When I had measles as a child, I used to look at my spots and think of them as people in a crowd or stars in the sky or places on a map. My places were imaginary, but there’s no reason why his shouldn’t have been real. We know they’re real because somebody – himself or perhaps those children – somebody had tattooed real names beside them. He beguiled his illness by making a map of his diseased skin. What more appropriate than a chart to show the location of the jewels which had caused – or so he believed – the disease?’

  ‘But to expect an exact scale, sweetheart…’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Jones, ‘In tiny figures underneath “Rosae”? Three…six…five…three.’

  Ivor had even, Len remembered, got out a classical atlas, rather to Len’s annoyance as he was already bored with hearing about Taygetus. But now, crouching behind the wall of ruined St Honorat’s, he blessed the hour and the minute at which Ivor had opened Murray for his edification. ‘Here we are,’ Ivor had said: ‘the range begins about as far North as Sparta – just above the 37th parallel – there – and runs South to Cape Taenarus, where there is believed to be an entrance to Hades.’ ‘37th parallel,’ Len thought now: parallel 37. If Taygetus starts just above the 37th parallel North, it must end, if I remember that map at all right, roughly halfway between the 37th and 36th parallels…in which case 36.53 could be – must be – the exact latitude of the Roses at the old man’s navel, obligingly tattooed into place by the Canon, to while away the weary time and take his mind off his torture. They won’t know that, not yet, he thought: they haven’t had the benefit of Ivor’s geography lesson; and even educated men seldom know their own latitude or longitude at any particular time, let alone that of anything or anybody else.

  So just you slip away quietly, Lenny boy: use your start.

  ‘But why?’ wailed Marigold. ‘Why has he been killed? Why did he get us all here? Why the conjuring exhibition? What did he want us to know and why couldn’t he just tell it to us straight out? After all, if that old Yid wasn’t a ghost but just a trick got up with masks and so on, the Canon must have known what he was going to say, so why the hell didn’t he just tell us himself?’

  ‘What did the old Yid say?’ said Jones, S. ‘I couldn’t make it out.’

  ‘Iskandrou Paidika,’ said Jacquiz: ‘meaning Iskander’s minion or male darling. Iskander, I should explain, is a corrupt form of Alexander, which would appear in some of the Greek dialects spoken in certain regions of the Middle East, after Alexander had conquered them.’

  ‘Mister Know All,’ said Marigold with some admiration. ‘Can you be sure of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacquiz. ‘Among the stuff in this tomb is a sheet of notes – obviously a synopsis or breakdown of last night’s performance.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘The last item, added in a different hand but quite clear, is written down as Juif: Iskandrou Paidika. Greek letters, incidentally.’

  ‘All right,’ said Marigold, disdaining a look at the proffered paper, ‘but how much further on does that get us? It doesn’t answer any of my questions. Least of all does it explain how we were tricked after that last item happened. You know, pitch dark one minute, bright dawn the next. There must have been an interval which was kind of…missed out…at any rate by me. It must have been then that the old man was done in. How was he killed by the way?’

  ‘No marks, other than those of his disease. He could have died of natural causes,’ said Syd Jones. ‘Heart attack brought on by stress, I dare say. Now, please, Mrs Helmut –’

  ‘– Marigold, sweetie –’

  ‘– Marigold,’ said Sydney, looking happy, ‘please, Marigold, what a nice name, please, Marigold, can we have no more questions just now? What we have to do is tidy up and go before anyone rumbles us.’

  ‘Hear that, boys? said Marigold to Jacquiz and Balbo, who were in earnest discussion. ‘No standing about like you was two yakking old dons in the Fellows’ Garden. Action and off.’

  ‘What action?’ said Balbo. ‘Call the police?’

  ‘No,’ said Syd Jones; ‘we should spend the next ten weeks of our lives in the gendarmerie in Arles. We clear this mess up and we go after the jewels. What else? Has anyone got anything different which he or she wants to do?’

  ‘Good for you, sweetie,’ Marigold said. ‘So you give the orders.’

  ‘Marigold make an exact copy of that map on the Canon’s belly. Use this.’ He thrust a notebook at her. ‘Balbo, Doctor Helmut, come with me.’

  He led the way through the gap by which, until a few minutes before, Len had been spying on them, and into the area of scattered sarcophagi. He went through the arch at the far end of the area and turned right, through a file of tombs, through a line of trees. In front of him was a high wall. He looked left, he looked right.

  ‘No way out,’ he said to Jacquiz and Balbo who now joined him. ‘except over that.’

  ‘What about the other side of the avenue?’

  They crossed to the other side. An even higher wall, even less accommodating to amateur climbers.

  ‘Clearly the Canon had some sort of right or privilege here,’ Jacquiz said. ‘He was allowed to come in late at night and bring his friends. Perhaps it was bribery, perhaps it was intimidation, perhaps it was something to do with his ecclesiastical position; but whatever it was, someone must know he�
��s in here and will be inquisitive when he doesn’t come out. Now we have no tickets, remember; therefore no official entrée here. Should we be seen to leave before he does, even if we are not immediately obstructed, after a time his failure to emerge will be connected with us, there will be a search along here – and then a police alert with instructions to apprehend four very obvious-looking Britons, three men and a girl. Problem: how to get out unseen? There may or may not be someone in the lodge by the gate –’

  ‘– No one last night –’

  ‘– But in any case the gate will be locked this early.’

  ‘How did those children get out?’

  ‘Presumably they know about that device which unlocks the gate from a distance. One of them would have pressed the switch, the other held the gate open. Still dark then, I suppose.’

  ‘Nothing for it,’ said Balbo. ‘We’ll have to give up and tell the police. We’ll never get out without being noticed or causing a shindy.’

  ‘We must, Balbo,’ said Jones, S. ‘Whatever the logic of all this turns out to be, whatever the answer to Marigold’s questions, we’ve got a map and we’re in the hunt. We cannot afford to be delayed and questioned now. Almost certainly that boy and that girl have gone for the jewels, and we want to be there first.’

  ‘But it isn’t a map. It’s just a rough sketch.’

  ‘We know the place we want is on the coast of the Mani and South of Itylus,’ Jacquiz said. ‘Enough to give us a chance, if far too little to give us a good one. But in any case at all, we must hide the body and get out of France – before anyone else can find it or connect us with it.’

  ‘Too right, sport,’ said Jones, S.

  ‘But we’re entirely innocent,’ said Balbo.

  ‘That will take time to establish,’ said Jacquiz, ‘and time we have not got.’

  ‘Too right, sport,’ said Jones again. ‘So here is what we do…’