The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  Len solved the problem of egress from the Alyscamps by hiding behind the trees, until the keeper arrived to open the gate at nine, and then slipping out unseen while the man was busy fetching from inside the lodge all the rubbish which he hoped to sell to tourists. Such an escape, as Len rightly reckoned, was very easy for his inconspicuous party of one, but would not be possible, so early in the day, for four more unauthorized and ticketless visitors, together or separately, with or without a dead and naked Monsignor. With any luck, they should all be arrested for trespass, if not for something a great deal more serious, and considerably impeded. However, thought Len, he could not afford to presume on this and would do well to be speedy. It occurred to him, as it had to Syd Jones and the others, that the boy and the girl, whoever they might be, had very probably gone after the jewels already (likely enough with more accurate information than anyone else’s, as they appeared to be connected with the old man in some way) and therefore that if he, Len, was to have any hope in the hunt, he must put on his racing skates. At the same time, he must not neglect the interests of Jermyn Street, for there were long-term possibilities in this region that must be looked upon with respect. Nor, of course, must he neglect the affaire Constable, with its substantial bearing on his own future and Ivor’s.

  Taking this with that and one thing with another, Len decided his most satisfactory plan was to fly straight back to London from Montpellier; to deliver his package in Jermyn Street; to telephone to Ivor that Balbo was co-operative and had told him where he could collect the notes in their stained folder; to fly to Crete and collect them; and then to try to pick up some form of air passage from Crete to Kalamata, whence, having hired a car, he might run down the Mani to where the latitude 36.53 (if latitude indeed it was), as tattooed on the corpse and read out by Syd, intersected the line of the coast. There or thereabouts must be the place, represented by the Canon’s navel, in which the Rosae or Rubies were to be located; though precisely where the jewels were hidden was of course another matter. He might well, thought Len, arrive too late to take his chance there, which would be a pity; but then from what he had heard the previous night it seemed that the Rubies might not be a very desirable acquisition (that curse had certainly done the old man a power of no good whatever), whereas the good will of Jermyn Street and the containing of Constable were both, so to speak, bankable assets. All of which things being so, his plan decided and his heart high, Len put his best foot forward from the Alyscamps and within thirty minutes of leaving them was driving, very fast but very carefully, along the autoroute to Montpellier.

  At about the same time as Len drove across the river and out of Arles, Jacquiz Helmut, acting under the plan devised by Sydney Jones, strode out of the Alyscamps, dressed (over his own clothes) in the cassock, hood and head-shroud of the late Monsignor Comminges, the whole topped by a biretta which had been found near the sarcophagus. ‘You’re the nearest in height to him,’ Sydney had said, ‘and you don’t carry yourself much different from what he did. Whoever’s in charge of the gate will say, “There goes the old bastard”, and if things round here are like we think they are, no one’ll interfere with you.’

  Nor did anyone interfere with him. The only notice taken of Jacquiz’ departure was a servile nod, or rather bow from the shoulders, with which the man behind the ticket and tourist muck table (now established at the door of the lodge) greeted him as he passed.

  ‘Then push on like the devil and all his works back to the old bugger’s place in that Cloister,’ Syd had instructed him. ‘The more people that see you, the better. We want the world to know that Canon Comminges is alive and back home. When you get there see if you can spot the boy or the girl. They’ve probably scarpered by now, but if they are still around, see if you can get anything out of ’em or, better still, line ’em up on our side. But don’t hang about. If there’s no sign of ’em, drop the clobber at once, get back to the hotel, pay the bill for all of us (refunds later). Nah then: is there room in yer Rolls for those two children, as well as for all of us – if you should find them and bring ’em round?’

  ‘Just about,’ Jacquiz had said.

  ‘Delicious: sardines,’ Marigold had contributed.

  ‘Then tell the hotel to ring Avis and have them pick up the heap they hired to me. Keys on my dressing-table. It was done on Diners’, so no cash problems either way. From now on I reckon it’s safer, and more friendly, with everyone together.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ from Marigold.

  ‘So whether we’re carrying those kids or not, that’s how we’ll do it. All in the Rolls, okay?’

  ‘Okay. But how will the rest of you get out of here without being spotted?’

  ‘Like this,’ Syd had said, and told them.

  All pretty well cut and dried, thought Jacquiz now, as he crossed the canal by a road bridge: a sensible plan in all the circumstances; though I’m sorry, very sorry, it involves my wearing this mask. Marigold had turned it inside out and repeatedly doused it in a very strong eau de cologne from a bottle in her handbag, thus eliminating any risk of infection; but this still left, as Jacquiz pointed out, the possibility that something – something, well, impalpable – might be transferred to him along with the linen.

  ‘Rubbish,’ Marigold had said. ‘Skin complaints may be contagious, but not Curses.’

  Jacquiz wasn’t any too sure of that. A month ago, he reflected, he would have pooh-poohed the entire notion of the Curse (allowing it to exist only as a foolish legend), while Marigold would have shuddered at the thought of it. Now their attitudes had been reversed. Jacquiz, though not converted to any very substantial belief in the powers of darkness, was uneasily aware that more seemed to have been going on around them than met one full in the eye. Marigold, on the other hand, though by no means entirely sceptical, had developed a cheerful determination to face down any obtrusion of the apparently supernatural. It was she, for example, who insisted that the death of Constance could be and should be treated as a rationally explicable occurrence (if not exactly of an everyday character), whereas Jacquiz had caught a whiff (to put it no stronger) of greed and malignance revenant. By much the same token, she now made light of his assuming the Canon’s persona, whereas he himself had an uncomfortable feeling that the pose, if not the garments used for it, might well bring some kind of retribution.

  However, it was his clear duty to help his friends if he could, so he had made no more fuss but briskly put on his disguise and marched off. In any case, he now admonished himself as he crossed the main road into the public gardens, provoking many looks of distasteful recognition (that would please Sydney) – in any case, there is surely a far more weighty objection, far more firmly grounded than any superstition of mine about this mask, to this course of action now in train: it is, incontrovertibly, a very grave offence to be present at the scene of a murder (and murder this well could be) without reporting it to the proper authorities. True, none of them had been in the least aware of the Canon’s death or what had caused it: even so, to find the corpse and say nothing about it, nay more, to mislead the citizenry by rendering an impersonation of the dead man, and then to rush off about one’s own business, surely amounted to criminal collusion with the murderer or murderers.

  ‘We’ll hide him away good and tight in this here masonry,’ Syd Jones had said before Jacquiz departed. ‘There’s not much left to stink, and by the time it does, and if anybody smells it, we’ll be halfway to the Mani. Maybe no one will come near him and he won’t be found for months.’

  Sydney had then gone on to point out that even when the corpse was discovered, and even if it could be identified, there could be nothing, given the scheme he had worked out for the evacuation of the Alyscamps, to connect any of them with Comminges’ death. All of which had been all very plausible, thought Jacquiz as he turned off the street towards the entrance to the Cloister, but he, Jacquiz, was a man who had a lot to lose and therefore looked to live within the law. As far as he was concerned, stone walls very defin
itely did a prison make and iron bars a cage if Marigold (with her newfound love for him, or so it seemed to be) and the Rolls Royce were outside them. However, he had, in the end, allowed himself to be convinced by Jones, he had consented to obey his immediate orders and follow his overall plan, because when all was said, he was confident that Sydney was thoroughly experienced in these sort of areas of behaviour and knew very well what he was doing. Jacquiz had a high regard for people who knew what they were doing and liked to watch them doing it. Something in Sydney Jones’ tone and bearing told him that the man was competent to bring them through all this; and it was also to be remembered that Sydney, being in the trade, so to speak, might be allowed special licence by other (French) practitioners of it if there should, at any stage, be trouble,

  In any case at all, thought Jacquiz, we are now committed. He tried the low door out of the courtyard, found it unlocked, and started up the stairs to the balcony over the Cloister.

  Sydney Jones and Balbo Blakeney gave a combined heave: the still pliant corpse of Monsignor Comminges slid slowly down through the neck of a funerary urn.

  ‘Pity they lost the stopper of this thing,’ said Syd, rapping the urn; ‘it’d look much tidier. But this slab should do the trick.’

  The urn was six feet tall. With some difficulty, Sydney and Balbo between them managed to lift a loose flagstone, about a yard square and two inches thick, to the height of their heads and then to shove it over the mouth of the urn.

  ‘That should keep him from advertising himself,’ said Syd. ‘Not that anyone much will be coming down here, I’d imagine.’

  ‘We’d better be leaving,’ said Marigold, ‘before my torch conks out.’

  She led the way up the winding stair out of the crypt of St Honorat’s. After the thirtieth step she rounded a bend into the dim light of the ruined but still partially roofed North transept, extinguished the torch which she had prudently brought along for the outing, and returned it to her handbag.

  ‘Right,’ she said, looking at her watch: ‘Jacquiz has now been gone thirty minutes. How much longer do we give him?’

  ‘If he doesn’t meet either of those mysterious kids,’ said Sydney, ‘and it’s my bet that he won’t because they’ll be hightailing it into the Mani by now, then par for the course is one hour flat. We’ll start discreetly down the avenue in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘They need some explaining, those kids,’ Marigold said, ‘in some lights they look nearly twenty, in others about twelve. The boy seems to have been, well, keeping an eye on me and Jacquiz for some days now. And from what you say, the girl’s been doing the same with you two. But how did they – or the old man – get wind that we were all on the trail?’

  ‘He must have known that the Roses have received a lot of publicity,’ Balbo said, ‘because of Clovis’ death. He may have guessed that someone would start looking. So perhaps he stationed the two children at key points on the two possible routes: the route back into the past which I was taking, starting with Stavros Kommingi in Nicopolis, and the route leading out of the past which was the one you took via Constance.’

  They had already had some discussion of their respective journeys. It was as though both parties had been marching in opposite directions along the same historical line, Jones and Balbo out of twentieth-century Greece towards the past, Jacquiz and Marigold forward out of eleventh-century Antioch towards the future; and now they had met in what was, in respect of their search, late seventeenth-century Arles. For their true meeting place was not so much the Canon’s chamber, where they had physically encountered one another, as the ‘fair, tall house by the Priory of the Knights of Malta’, the house into which ‘Poppa’ Comminges and his second wife had removed from St Bertrand.

  When both parties pooled information, Jacquiz and Marigold had been able to tell Balbo and Sydney how they had picked their way towards Arles through Montreuil, Jumièges and Pau, while Balbo and Sydney had been able to tell Jacquiz and Marigold how they had tracked down Andrea Commingi, the pirate from Provence, and had followed him back (aided by colossal luck) to the region of his origins.

  Just as Balbo and Jones had known nothing of Poppa Comminges, so Marigold and Jacquiz had of course known nothing of Andrea; but now, as it seemed to both parties, the probability must be that Andrea Commingi and Poppa Comminges were two leads which locked together to join the historical line in the fair, tall house by the Priory; for surely Andrea (André) Commingi (Comminges) could have been, must have been, a son of Poppa Comminges and the fertile slut he had married, a son born after the deaths (recorded in the Abbé’s scrapbook) of the ‘two fine men-children’ and in the year 1669 (why not?), thus growing to be thirty years old in the year 1699, when his portrait by Giocale At Thirty Years Old was dated and by which time he had already become Andrea Commingi, the privateering ship-master of the Tyrrhene sea, and was well on the way to becoming Andreas Kommingi (’Ανδρἐας Κομμι′γγι), the prosperous merchant of Corfu, nearly but not quite ennobled, who subsequently took off with all his riches for Lycia.

  It did not matter now that they had not identified, and might never identify, the ‘fair, tall house’ itself. Very possibly it no longer existed. It was the point in time that was vital, and the fact that at this point the two strands of investigation met together: the strand which ended in Poppa Comminges (the last man known actually to have had the Roses in his keeping) and the strand that had led Jones and Balbo to Andrea Commingi, who was now almost certainly revealed as ‘Poppa’s’ son. For although this had yet to be absolutely proved, it was felt to be a sound working hypothesis. Once it was assumed that Poppa Comminges had sired Andrea, then clearly André/Andrea/Andreas Comminges/Commingi/Kommingi (Κομμι′γγι) was as likely a fellow as any to have had the Roses from his father, whether by fraud, theft or inheritance. If so, however, where had he taken them), what had he done with them? A very broad question, granted – but one which, it now seemed, was to be answered by the map on the dead Canon’s abdomen. As Marigold pointed out (while decking up Jacquiz in his hood, shroud and biretta), somewhere on the coast of the Mani would have been a perfectly probable and sensible place for an adventurer in Greek waters to have dumped the Roses, whether before or after he left Corfu for Lycia.

  Yes, indeed; but now came difficulties. Why should Andrea have wanted to dump them? And how had knowledge of their whereabouts come to the Canon centuries later? Presumably it had been passed down to him through a line of Comminges which must have inhabited Arles (so the goitrous cashier at the Musée Arlaten had indicated) since ‘Poppa’ had acquired his ‘fair, tall house’ there. But exactly what line of the family was that? Had Andreas or one of his children (if any) eventually returned to Arles to settle? If so, why had he left the Roses in the Mani? Or had Poppa fathered still more males, from one of whom the Canon was descended? If so, the other question yet remained: how had they or their successors, and through them the Canon, come by their knowledge of the Roses’ hiding place, far away on the Maniot shore of the rude Sicilian Sea?

  All these questions were in Marigold’s mind now, as she, Balbo and Sydney waited in St Honorat’s until it should be time to leave the Alyscamps. Associated with them were rather similar questions about the amount of knowledge accorded (when and how) to the two children, the boy and the girl.

  ‘We might accept that theory,’ she said after Balbo had tendered his explanation of how the children had come to be watching them on their various journeys through France and Italy. ‘Let’s agree for now that the Canon posted them on the routes which treasure-seekers might come along – and indeed did: us. But there’s a lot more inquiring to be done. How long have they known where the Rubies are stashed? Sydney here says he reckons they’ve gone after them now. But why now? Why not before, if they fancied them?’

  ‘Because they didn’t know where to go,’ said Syd Jones.

  ‘So you think they killed the old man last night in order to get a look at that chart on his tum-tum?’


  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So how did they know it was there? And if they did know it was there, don’t tell me they couldn’t have managed a good look at it without having to kill him. And if for some reason they did have to kill him, why last night?’

  ‘A good opportunity to land the corpse on someone else? On us.’

  ‘Perhaps they were hoping it wouldn’t be necessary to be so extreme,’ Balbo said; ‘until finally he held out on them so long that they got desperate.’

  ‘Who the hell are they, anyhow? Where are they from? For Christ’s sake,’ said Marigold, ‘where do they fit in?’

  ‘A nuisance the old bazza’s dead,’ said Jones. ‘He’d promised to tell us all the answers…in his own good time.’

  ‘Now we depend on the children themselves to tell us – if we can ever find them – and I don’t like the smell of them.’

  ‘They’re both beautiful,’ Balbo remarked.

  ‘Sure they are. The thought of that boy makes me wringing wet in the panties. But that’s no reason to trust him.’

  ‘The girl at least looks innocent.’

  ‘You ever read a poem called Lamia?’ said Marigold. ‘Keats. There’s this beautiful maiden who looks as if butter won’t melt in her armpits. She turns out to be a snake. It’s a way they have.’

  ‘Time to go,’ said Syd Jones. ‘Remember, none of us is to be seen more than necessary, and we are not to be seen at all until Doctor Helmut arrives and starts doing his stuff. Until then we stay behind cover. There’s plenty of that right along to the gate. What with the tombs and the trees you could take a bleeding circus down and no one the wiser. It’s getting past that lodge – that’s the big ball-ache.’

  ‘Lucky for me I don’t have balls,’ said Marigold.

  Sydney Jones had been wrong in thinking that Jacquiz would meet neither of the children. In fact they were both in the Canon’s chamber when Jacquiz arrived, the girl dressed in nun’s black, the boy in a fawn skiing suit of expensive material and very close cut. Both looked about fifteen years of age, unsmiling and determined. When Jacquiz entered, they came forward as if they had been expecting him and at once helped him to remove the hood, shroud and cassock that he had been wearing in impersonation of their late ‘uncle’. Neither of them spoke a word. The girl’s touch, Jacquiz noticed, was marvellously soothing, though she did no more than accidentally twitch his hair, once or twice, with her fingertips and brush the back of one hand against his arm. The boy did not soothe; he excited: every time he touched Jacquiz, who had never before known the faintest physical desire for a member of his own sex, Jacquiz felt a swift frisson as of an intense but highly pleasurable electric shock, a feeling (no matter in which part of the body it occurred) comparable to the sensation which one had in the tip of one’s penis at the height of orgasm.