The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  However, it was clear there was to be no dalliance in any sense of the word. As soon as Jacquiz had been disrobed down to his own brown check suit, the girl went to a small statue of Eros dicing, lifted the head like a lid, put her arm down into the trunk, dredged up a sheaf of papers, and thrust them into Jacquiz’ hand. She and the boy then nodded to each other and made for the door.

  ‘Don’t go,’ called Jacquiz foolishly; ‘stay and talk. There are lots of things I want to ask you. Who are you?’

  The boy turned. ‘I am David,’ he said; ‘this is my sister, Rebecca.’

  ‘Well then…David and Rebecca…what happened last night?’

  ‘You were there,’ said David; ‘you saw for yourself.’

  ‘We shall go now,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘No, stay, there’s so much –’

  ‘– We shall go.’

  They both turned their backs on Jacquiz and continued, hand in hand, with fingers linked, towards the door.

  ‘Where, for Christ’s sake?’ called Jacquiz.

  Neither answered. A horrible laughter, halfway between hooting and cackling, came from the pair as they approached the door, grew louder as the boy opened it, rose to gibbering climax as he held it open for his sister, and ceased instantly and altogether the moment he closed it behind him.

  As Balbo watched the gate of the Alyscamps from behind a tree some fifty yards inside, he saw Jacquiz’ Rolls drive up and park on the other side of the road, and a pale and twitchy Jacquiz emerge from it.

  He doesn’t look at all himself, Balbo thought: I hope he remembers the plan.

  He need not have worried. Although Jacquiz was certainly not feeling his best and his brightest after his encounter with the twins (for such he had decided, on no evidence, they must be), he was not a man to bungle a simple assignment. He approached the lodge, went to the ticket table, purchased his ticket and came away, after a polite ‘Merci bien, M’sieur’ to the keeper. Then he sauntered up the avenue of tombs to St Honorat’s, spent five minutes examining it in the manner of a casual tourist, came back down the avenue, and went to the ticket table again. There he started buying postcards, leaflets, maps, guide books, large volumes of coloured plates and finally a plastic model of St Honorat’s, thus flustering and exciting the concierge to such a pitch that he did not observe the demure exit of three people whom he would at once have spotted, had he seen them, to be interlopers who had not purchased tickets. Nor was he watching, so busy was he collecting and counting Jacquiz’ money, while these three people got into the Rolls Royce, in which the M’sieur Anglais had arrived, and hid themselves below the level of the windows. After he had parcelled the merchandise, the M’sieur courteously accepted his offer to help him carry it across the road, then considerately declined it when two charabancs drew up by the gate. By the time the concierge had attended to the guides in charge of the charabancs, the M’sieur Anglais, his parcels and his Rolls Royce, were gone; so that all he could have told anyone who might ever come to inquire about that day’s traffic was that after the priest had gone that morning an obviously rich Englishman arrived, alone, and had shown mild interest in the avenue and the ruins of St Honorat’s. He would not have added that the Englishman bought an eccentric, indeed lunatic, quantity of literature from the lodge, because no prudent Frenchman would disclose a cash transaction in which he had contrived to defraud his employers, in this case the Municipality of Arles, of eighty per cent of the profit due to them.

  ‘So,’ said Syd Jones as the Rolls drove towards Cannes, the coast and the Italian border, ‘the Right Reverend Monsignor is stowed away safe in that urn but generally believed to have returned home to his Cloister. No one will look for him for a very considerable time. Should they ever find him, they will be at a total loss to account for his death and they will be able to put their hand on nobody who might have been present at it.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Jacquiz, ‘that concierge at the gate was responsible for letting us all in last night and got a sight of us then.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Syd. ‘All the indications are that the lodge is left empty at night and that the concierge or keeper, for whatever reasons, tacitly abandons control of the precinct to the Canon. Or rather, used to.’

  ‘Certainly, he gave me a pretty fair grovel when I walked out,’ said Jacquiz.

  ‘That he will report – if anyone ever asks him. “The Monsignor went out of the gate that morning,” he will say, “and did not come back while I was on duty.” Therefore they will conclude that the Canon could not have returned to St Honorat’s and his death until tonight. Which lets us out,’ said Syd, ‘as by then we shall be well into Italy.’

  ‘Those…those children,’ said Marigold: ‘what about them?’

  ‘Difficult to say. They were obviously expecting someone back at the cloister,’ said Jacquiz, who had already told his story once. ‘I got the impression that they were waiting to hand over those documents I was given. In the glove compartment, if you want to take a look.’

  Marigold leaned forward and got out the sheaf of papers which the girl, Rebecca, had presented to Jacquiz in the Canon’s chamber.

  ‘Just as well you didn’t get around to inviting them to ride with us,’ she said to Jacquiz as she sorted the papers. ‘With that rubbish you bought just now, and Balbo’s stuff and Sydney’s, there wouldn’t have been much room for their luggage.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re the kind that have luggage.’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘I mean that they seemed to be setting off without any.’

  ‘They might not have been leaving.’

  ‘They were leaving; they had that…that aspect. They were off, and eager to be off, and they didn’t want any more truck with me.’

  He did not, however, tell them about the children’s hideous laughter.

  ‘Well, what’s in those papers?’ said Balbo to Marigold.

  ‘All wrapping, except two things.’

  Marigold held up something which looked like a folded map; then she opened it.

  ‘A genealogical table,’ she said at last; ‘the Comminges family, starting with the first Vidames of Comminges. What with one thing and another, one tends to forget they were once nobility. The early bit checks with everything which Jacquiz and I found out about them in Saint Bertrand.’ She turned to Balbo behind her. ‘And now…I think we’re going to find out for certain about this Andrea number whom you and Jonesy tracked down. Yes…“Poppa” Comminges, as Jacquiz and I called him, was Louis’ father, as we told you. Louis is marked here as having married Constance Fauvrelle – and there they stop, with a couple of crosses and RIP written in. That hasn’t been done for anyone else, so presumably whoever drew this thing up knew the tale about the dead Louis coming to Constance, and is expressing the hope – RIP – that there will be no more of that kind of behaviour.

  ‘Now then. Poppa’s second wife seems to have borne him two sons in quick succession, the first of them in 1655, very soon after they came to Arles. That fits, as she was heavily pregnant when she left Saint Bertrand. The two boys apparently died – mortui sunt, that’s died, isn’t it? – on the same day. It doesn’t say what of, but they must have been the two who were killed playing in the Roman Theatre – according to the Abbé’s scrapbook.’

  Marigold paused. They had climbed a little and were now coming to a heath of rock and scrub. A watery sun diffused a surprising amount of heat through the windows of the Rolls. A peasant sitting by the side of the road looked up and gave a modest salute, in honour, Balbo supposed, of their splendid equipage. Or had he been making the sign of the evil eye? Or the sign for protection against the evil eye? What with this and that, Balbo thought, we might be getting quite a bit of an aura about us.

  ‘Then she laid off for a longish time – until, yes, 1669, when she had a son called André. He married, in 1693, a woman called Lucina, no surname supplied –’

  ‘– Lucina? Obviously he was already in Italy –’
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br />   ‘– By whom he had two sons and two daughters. One son and both daughters died, it doesn’t say when, just Rosis Picardianis rupti et occisi. Jacquiz?’

  ‘“Broken and murdered by the Roses of Picardie”,’ Jacquiz said. ‘Interesting, the use of the masculine plural, when there are two girls and only one boy.’

  ‘Male chauvinism. Even more interesting,’ said Marigold, ‘that whoever made out this chart reckoned that the Roses were responsible for the deaths.’

  ‘Which confirms,’ said Jones, S, ‘that André or Andrea had them, however he got them, and explains why he dumped them.’

  ‘Poppa Comminges died in 1690,’ Marigold now said, ‘so I expect André just inherited them. It doesn’t say when Poppa’s second wife died, or the first for that matter. More male chauvinism.’

  ‘What happened to André’s fourth child – his other son?’

  ‘Some more Latin happened to him. Rather a lot this time.’

  She passed the chart back to Balbo.

  ‘He was seduced by a dancer in Ephesus,’ said Balbo after a while, ‘and went off with a troupe of actors, never to be heard of again. This misfortune too is attributed to the Roses. He could have been the ancestor of my man at Nicopolis. Ah, I see the death of André/Andrea/Andreas has only a rough date – circa 1740, Xanthis dicunt. “They say at Xanthe.” Obviously he’d been getting rather out of touch. Not so much out of touch, though, but what he let someone know where he’d put the Roses. Locum Rosarum ante adelpho nutiarat. This Latin gets worse and worse. “He had announced the place of the Roses to his brother” – bastard Greek form – “beforehand.” What brother? Yes, I see. Poppa Comminges’ next and final effort after young André was François, two years later. So,’ said Balbo, ‘it looks pretty plain that André-cum-Andrea went off, taking the Roses as his legacy, when his father died in 1690; that he became a privateer, married and had children, probably about the time that he went to Corfu; and that all the children came to bad ends. André blames the Roses for this –’

  ‘– But how does he know,’ interrupted Marigold, ‘that they’re called the Roses? How does he know they have a curse on them? No one ever told Poppa any of this. Constance never spoke of the jewels to him. Just before she died she told someone – the dead but revenant Louis, as she thought, but really Poppa Comminges impersonating Louis, or so we hope – “where her treasure was hidden”; but even then, you notice, she used the general word “treasure”. She can’t possibly have had the time to go into details. So how does André come to know so much about them?’

  ‘Louis would know it all,’ said Jacquiz reluctantly.

  ‘But Louis didn’t tell. He never mentioned the Roses as such in his letter home, for reasons of security we think, and he died too soon to tell his family about them in person.’

  ‘Unless he…did…get up…and come to Saint Bertrand. He could then have told his father everything about the Roses… before he went back to his grave in Pau…if that’s where he did go,’ said Jacquiz bleakly.

  There was a silence in the car. Marigold looked both annoyed and rather anxious.

  ‘I can answer that one,’ said Jones, S, the cricketer, ‘without any need of the dead walking. Those Roses had been famous all over Europe. If Poppa Comminges was keeping his ears open, he’d have heard, sooner or later, in an important centre like Arles, all about the Roses, their curse and their disappearance up at – where was it? –’

  ‘– Montreuil, where the painter got them off the randy Countess,’ Marigold said.

  ‘– He’d have heard all about it, and had have had a good look and done a few sums, and he’d have realized what his dead daughter-in-law had left with the family. And no doubt told André when he was old enough to understand.’

  ‘So André blamed the Roses for the death or departure of his children,’ Balbo took it up again, ‘and hid them on the Maniot coast. Then, before he dies, he lets his brother François know where they are. And from François’ – he consulted the chart – ‘the knowledge descends through…eight generations –’

  ‘– To the Canon’s grandfather,’ said Jacquiz, ‘the one who snooted up that nincompoop, Mistral, and so at last to the Canon, our Canon…’

  ‘…Who recorded the information by making a chart of the sores and lesions on his stomach,’ said Marigold, ‘observing their relation to one another and then naming them in such a way that the hiding place of the Rubies was represented by his own navel.’ She produced from her handbag her transcript of the Monsignor’s chart. ‘Well below Itylus,’ she said, ‘and on the coast of the Mani. Quite a wide area to investigate.’

  ‘Even if there’s no competition from those kids.’

  ‘How will they get there?’

  ‘That’s their biz. How shall we get there?’

  ‘Through Italy,’ said Jacquiz. ‘Autostrada to Arezzo. Over the hills to Ancona, car ferry from there to Patras. Down the Peloponnese to Kalamata…and into the Mani.’

  ‘Not worth flying? To get there quicker?’

  ‘Anyone can fly that wants to,’ Jacquiz said. ‘I don’t care for aeroplanes, especially not when there are curses in the air. I’m going there in this car.’

  No one took issue with him.

  ‘Well,’ said Balbo, tapping Marigold on the shoulder after a long silence: ‘what’s the other thing you said was there in the wrappings?’

  Marigold held up a red school exercise book.

  ‘Title in Greek this time,’ she said.

  Balbo took it from her.

  ‘Iskandrou paidika,’ he read out.

  ‘The Jew of Antioch’s phrase at the end of that fake séance,’ said Jacquiz.

  ‘Also entered as last item on the aide-memoire we found in the sarcophagus,’ said Balbo. ‘In a different hand from the rest.’

  Nobody seemed to have any comment to make about this. Balbo turned the cover of the exercise book.

  ‘Apart from the title,’ he said, ‘it’s written in French; a translation, apparently from the first-century historian and gossip, Hermogenes of Alexandria.’

  ‘Can you read in a car?’

  ‘In a Rolls,’ said Balbo, ‘yes.’

  ‘Then read.’

  ‘Right you are. Istoria ton tou Iskandrou Paidikon,’ Balbo began: “The Story of Iskander’s Catamite”.’

  Len reached London from Montpellier in time for an early luncheon, which he decided not to have since he was too busy running around and making arrangements.

  First of all, he rang up Ivor Winstanley from the airport, to tell him that Balbo was prepared to support Elvira’s accusation and had authorized him, Len, to take possession of the incriminating folder; this was new in Crete, whither, said Len, he would go instanter. To this Ivor replied that Constable had declared a state of armed truce pending the production of further evidence, but had indicated readiness to do a deal should such evidence be forthcoming. Since it now clearly was forthcoming, Ivor told Len, he would start hammering out exact terms with Constable while Len pursued his mission to Heracleion.

  Len now took a taxi from the airport to Jermyn Street, where he delivered his parcel to Theta in person, and asked if he might be considered for similar employment in the future, as messenger, scavenger or whatever. Theta thanked him for his efficient service and remarked that the blood-stained Elastoplast was a most happy discovery. He did not, however, commit himself to employing Len in any role thereafter; he merely promised to bear him in mind, and added that if Len should ever come across any information in any area which he thought might be of interest to the department, the department would take very kindly to his sharing it.

  It instantly occurred to Len that the department might take very kindly indeed to being warned that a party, which included one of their own agents and an ex-scientist with whom they appeared to be intimately concerned, was now either helping the police with their inquiries into a murder in Arles, or (presumably) in full cry after a fabulous cache of Rubies supposedly hidden in Southern Gree
ce. But it was very clear to Len that since he was probably the only person who knew the exact latitude and therefore the exact point, more or less, at which the Rubies were hidden, he would do far better to hold his tongue on that topic and to operate, as far as the Roses were concerned, in a strictly private capacity.

  It also occurred to Len that Jermyn Street might be grateful to know that Lord Constable, the Provost of Lancaster College, Cambridge, stood accused by his wife of having appropriated Blakeney’s notes, years ago, and of having communicated their substance to the enemies of King George VI; but this might be to destroy Lord Constable, the very last thing which Len or Ivor wanted: they wanted Constable to remain secure of his throne and sceptre, providing only that he was prepared to wield the latter in their protection and advancement; and this, at the moment, was almost certain to be the case.

  However, it seemed to Len that he could be of immediate and ingratiating service to Theta in at any rate one particular. Theta, as Len now reminded him, had expressed interest in seeing the notes for which Len was searching. Since these had now been traced to Greece, Len said, he would be happy to let Theta peruse them at leisure as soon as he himself had secured them and returned from Heracleion.