by Simon Raven
‘What followed on Hubert’s horrible resolve? And how did he persuade Lalage to assist him? This latter we shall never know, but persuade her he did, for she herself relates the ghastly events which ensued: Xanthippe’s revelation to those about her, that she was now of the living dead; the obscene vigil while the shrine was prepared; the farewell Xanthippe spoke through lips which she said were already poisoned by the worm. About all this Lalage, if we make allowance for her hasty short-hand, gives very much the same impression as we get from Hubert’s narrative of the same happenings.’
‘Except,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘that Hubert owns to no guilt. In Hubert’s version, Masullaoh exists, he is not an illusion conjured by Lalage, Hubert and the herb. In Hubert’s version Xanthippe’s soul is really and truly confined to her corpse – not tricked into believing this by her own hand-maiden and her own guardian. And here, of course, we have the explanation of Hubert’s technique. His motive was not as I once hazarded, to make a more mysterious and awful figure of Xanthippe (though he in fact does this), but to explain everything that occurred, if ever he should be called upon to do so, in terms of factors and forces which are beyond his control or understanding. Thus Hubert hoped to stand exculpated from the whole filthy business – and indeed did so stand until the unfortunate Lalage, with her ad hoc exegesis, turned up again in your chapel’ (he bowed to des Veules-les-Roses) ‘so pray resume your story.’
‘As we know,’ said des Veules-les-Roses, ‘the Lady was taken to her precinct or shrine by her weeping companions, who left her there with that jewelled creature which is before us. A great interdict is put on the shrine. Henri Martel turns up again, is not told the truth or any part of it, and writes his sad little Ballad. The days pass. And now, Lalage and Hubert tell each other, Xanthippe will be dead indeed. They go to the Castellan, of whose services they have need now and will have need in the years to come. They tell him what is in the shrine “A third of all this may be yours,” they say, “if you will help us.” The Castellan is an honest old soldier and like all honest old soldiers has his price, which is not a high one as the world wags, though it may be by the standard of the poilu. So the Castellan will help them. He picks a small party of diggers. They go to the shrine. They dig down deep, and they take from the crypt of the shrine the dead (yes, now really dead) Xanthippe together with her brilliant toy, and they stow them right away down by the well shaft (though not too near, the Castellan will see to that). Lalage then uses the last of Aristarchos’ herb on the diggers and commands them to tear each other to pieces. Thus their knowledge of the affair dies with them, and they also make a colourful warning to the curious not to trespass on Xanthippe’s precinct.
‘The shrine is resealed. Hubert and Lalage and the hand-maidens and the baggage train depart with Henri. All are scattered. Hubert goes to Avallon where he satisfies “the Bishop of Sens” for the time being by giving him some stones which he has taken (with the consent of Lalage, who has done likewise) from under the tail of the Écrevisse.’
Des Veules-les-Roses leaned across the table, gently tilted the beast by the tail, and showed eight empty housings.
‘More than these they dare not trade as yet. They have taken only minor stones: the greater might be recognized. But the honest Castellan will guard them in Xanthippe’s tomb till the time is ripe.
‘Lalage, with Henri, goes on to Greece. They have congress together and are married. The Lord Phaedron inspects his dead daughter’s dowry, finds that it is en règle except for the Écrevisse, hopes in vain that her spirit will come to him with news of it, decides to go to Arques to investigate, and takes Henri as a companion. Henri as yet knows nothing of the Écrevisse. Lalage, of course, says nothing, trusting in the honest Castellan.
‘Many weeks later Lord Phaedron’s party arrives at Arques, Henri Martel by this time knowing pretty well what Phaedron is after. The Castellan, after a show of reluctance, allows them to open the shrine –’
‘AND WHAT HAPPENS?’ cried Jo-Jo triumphantly. ‘According to Henri’s poem, he, Phaedron and the priest all saw the Écrevisse under the altar – before it was removed or scuttled off. Either way, your version must be wrong, because according to you the Écrevisse had already been hidden away under the donjon with the remains of poor Xanthippe.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘the dismal state of female education. The priest,’ he said kindly to Jo-Jo, ‘didn’t really know what he saw. Phaedron, and Henri too, by now, were both expecting to see the Écrevisse somewhere around. So what more natural than they should have thought they saw it, when in truth they saw the brilliant spectrum of the sun’s rays, which were striking through the thick plain glass of the shrine’s east window from the direction of south-south-east and an elevation of seventy-five degrees?’
‘How can you know all that?’ said Baby.
‘I don’t. Not exactly. But I do know that the appearance of a spectrum at the foot of the altar is at least scientifically possible, whereas any idea that the Écrevisse had come out of the earth to station itself in that place, and had then, in whatever manner, vanished from it, must be sheer lunacy. On my explanation the sudden disappearance of the vision is easily explained by a cloud over the sun.’
‘I’m afraid I must agree, my ladies,’ said des Veules-des-Roses courteously. ‘The glass of the window must have acted as a prism and splashed a rainbow at the foot of the altar. Lord Phaedron, nevertheless, thinks that he has seen the Écrevisse, and the hunt is on. The honest Castellan allows it to continue until it is approaching its quarry, when he very correctly forbids further excavation lest the donjon’s water supplies be endangered. Phaedron has poor Henri killed in a fit of pique, and then skulks off back to the Mani, where Henri’s widow, Lalage, is waiting with a fine baby son. Although she gets up a bit of a fuss about “What happened to my darling Henri?”, and although she learns that Henri wrote some poems which annoyed Phaedron and so might explain his demise, she is far more interested in the Prince of the Morea’s plans for recognizing and providing for his infant kinsman and the infant’s mother. Before long she is despatched to Henri’s manor at Longueil, where she will live and hold the lands in trust for her son until he comes of age, carefully supervised in this and all other matters by a warden or “Vidame” appointed by the Villehardouins.
‘Carefully supervised in all matters except one: her great secret. After a discreet interval she summons the Castellan from Arques, under the pretext of wishing to greet an old companion. “Alors, mon vieux,” she says, as soon as they are alone in the rose garden, “and is that joli Écrevisse still where he should be?”
‘“Mais oui, Madame. After Lord Phaedron came and went, we dispersed the materials of the shrine, as this had been totally dismantled. You would not now know, except for a small bump in the grass, that there had ever been a monument to the Lady Xanthippe…who sleeps tight under the donjon with the creature she loved.”
‘“Very soon, honest Castellan, it must be taken from her. Can you extract it without making works in the Castle that will be heard of over half the dukedom?”
‘“Very easily, Madame. I can announce that I propose to strengthen or repair the shaft of the well in the donjon. I can then descend, by myself, as though to investigate. It should not be difficult to burrow from the shaft to where the Lady Xanthippe is resting with her toy and to extract the latter, which I can hide in my tool box when I ascend.”
‘“Bravo, honest Castellan. Now, if you are wise you will leave the disposal of the jewels to me. It will be a difficult business, because some of them are famous from ancient records, while in those places where they are not famous there will be only poor, dirty, ignorant people (like the Scots or the Irish) who have no money to purchase them. Nevertheless, if I sell them one by one on certain markets I know of, we should both be very rich – in time.”
‘“I have little time left, my lady. And incidentally, where is Messer Hubert of Avallon?”
‘“Messer Hubert took to bad courses. He
is dead in Argos… of the Crusaders’ Malady. They say that a bad conscience drove him to debauchery.”
‘“A bad conscience?”
‘“He had married a close cousin, in defiance of the commands of Holy Church.”
‘“It is certainly imprudent to disregard them… And so, my lady, only you and I are left?”
‘“Evidently, Sir Castellan.”
‘“And yet I am old and tired and need but little. I shall claim but one jewel, Madame, which I shall ask of you when I have taken the creature from the earth and brought it here to you. This will be in one month’s time.”
‘“That is good. Go well, honest Castellan.”
‘“Stay well, noble lady.”
‘And now,’ continued des Veules-les-Roses, ‘we come to something of the bizarre. The Castellan duly went back to Arques, unearthed the Écrevisse, brought it to the Lady Lalage at Longueil, and claimed the jewel he wanted, which was, as you will have guessed, the pearl between her thighs. Old soldiers are often oddly innocent in their corruption. The Castellan seems to have had little idea of the immense value of the prize which he had guarded so faithfully, and he also appears not to have realized that he could have had the randy widow at any time, just for the asking, without surrendering his share of the treasure. But this is by the way. He came, he asked, his suit was granted. After he had made love to her with the precision and gusto of a drill serjeant, and just as they were warming up for another bout, Lalage noticed two small, raw, pussy patches on the inside of his hands, and asked what they were. Whereupon he told her, in his naïve old soldier’s way, that in the course of extracting the Écrevisse he had disturbed the corpse of the Lady Xanthippe, since when he had had a slight itch in the palms which would doubtless go away before long. And now, if the lady would care to lift her robe once more…
‘Lalage did not in the least care to do any such thing. One did not have to be a doctor of medicine to know the probable state of poor Xanthippe’s flesh after the period she had been interred. Realizing, with a combination of superstitious horror and forensic divination, that she too might have been infected, she sent the Castellan packing, applied every unguent in sight to herself, spent the night in prayer, and found in the morning that she already had patches of decay on her breasts, arms and thighs, patches which seemed to grow in size and purulence even as she looked at them. She then bethought herself of making penitence before it should be too late: she draped herself in a religious habit and wrapped the sharp-scaled Écrevisse, as cause of her crime and burden of her guilt, within the folds next to her bosom. She then had herself scourged along the high road from Longueil to Barville (twenty-five kilometres; poor, plump Lalage) where was a chapel in a demesne which subsequently came to our branch of the family but was then owned by a cousin of Henri. She beseeched the cousin to give permission that she should be mewed up in the chancel of his chapel, for only so, she said, could she atone for the vileness of her life. And so, like Xanthippe, she passed her last hours, walled up and slowly weakening, comforted, perhaps, by her candles, as they shone on the beautiful and pernicious work of art for which she had destroyed her life, but in all things, so far as she could, condemning herself to the same agonies as those to which she and Hubert had consigned Xanthippe. True, she was not under the same unspeakable illusion as Xanthippe, that her soul must stay among putrescence forever: but then she, Lalage, must watch the decay of her contaminated flesh, as it spread and devoured her, whereas the body of the entombed Xanthippe must have remained fresh until it died and she with it.
After some minutes’ silence, during which Ptolemaeos’ guests digested these remarks, Madame la Princesse said:
‘The immediate problem was how to get our find out of France. If once that article was known about, the Government, in the person of the Minister of Monuments and Antiquities, would have seized it the next minute. Now, we made the discovery the morning after Madame Canteloupe and Mademoiselle Jo-Jo (as she still was then) had their vision together in the Castle. My brother spent the rest of the morning deciphering the characters on and round the sedilia, while I considered the question of the Écrevisse and its security.
‘Since no one else except Claudine, who would be silent if so commanded, knew the thing had been found, it should not be difficult, I thought, to smuggle it out of France. The Fat Pharaoh – M’sieur Tunne – surely deserved a sight of it, after all his effort and expense of many years, and also a share of it too.’
‘You needn’t worry about that,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Although I pretended to be in the hunt for the money, pour encourager les autres who hoped for some, I always knew that an object like this could never be sold…or not without breaking it up, which would be a crime of the first magnitude. I was in the chase for the fun of it and out of pure curiosity about the fate of that poor little girl from the Mani.’
‘Darling Ptoly,’ Jo-Jo said.
‘So in deciding to bring it to you, I was right,’ said Madame la Princesse. ‘After all that you have done, and after such a speech as you have just said, you deserve the privilege of sitting in judgment. Come then: let us all debate further, and then let the Pharaoh, Ptolemaeos the Judge, pronounce: to whom does this creature rightfully belong? and who shall have it at the last?’
‘It belongs to France,’ said Jean-Marie Guiscard. ‘Had I known that it was travelling over in the same ferry as myself and my bride, I should have warned my Department before we left.’
‘That would have been very tiresome of you, darling heart,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘You know that it would simply have been used by that horrible Directeur, or whatever you call him, to get himself promotion.’
‘Even so, it would have been where it belongs – in France,’ said Jean-Marie stoutly; ‘and I am minded to alert the French Government by cable to set about retrieving it this very minute – were it not,’ he said, bowing from the shoulders to Ptolemaeos, ‘that this would be to breach M’sieur Tunne’s so elegant and generous hospitality.’
‘Your courtesy does you only less honour than your patriotism,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘I am glad my niece has chosen so decent and thoroughly amiable a man as her husband – although I shall greatly miss her cooking. But see here, Jean-Marie, if so I may call you: if we all debate this matter, and then I, as Madame la Princesse suggests, shall judge it, will you accept my judgment? After all, as the Princess has remarked, I have spent much money and labour in the search – even though it was not, in the end, my agents that found the prize.’
Jean-Marie looked round at the faces of those who would argue the matter and then at the face of the Pharaoh who would finally give verdict. He thought of M. Socrates, his Director, not an unsympathetic man but somebody to whom the Lady Xanthippe had simply been a possible factor in his career as a scholar and a public servant; he thought of his colleagues in the Department, conceited, quarrelsome, envious clock-watchers, who boasted about their weekends in Trouville with their silly, brittle wives; he thought of his landlady in Eu, and of her sour complaints about the electricity he used in late reading; he thought of Sunday luncheon with his mother and father in the suburbs of Clermont-Ferrand.
Having thought of all this, he looked once more at those assembled. He looked at Jo-Jo, whom he had begun to love, overwhelmingly, for her gallant service to Xanthippe. He looked at her friend, the little Canteloupe, who out of a loving heart had conceived this service, though it needed the courage of Jo-Jo to bring her to it; at the little Canteloupe’s father, the scholar who held that history depended on the factors which men, by chance, forgot; at the old man who was the little Canteloupe’s husband and wanted only her happiness without regard to his own amour propre; and at the young man, Len, who might now become the little Canteloupe’s lover, a common man, as they called such men in this country, but far from commonplace. He looked at Madame la Princesse, and M. le Marquis, whose ancestor had ordered herself to be buried alive as the only fitting penance for her worse than murderous cruelty and greed; at Barraclough the Voyager, wh
o had come from the land of Agamemnon and Odysseus; and finally he looked once more at the sweating, fleshy face of Ptolemaeos, ‘the Fat Pharaoh’, who had sat in these Fens for so long, teasing out the mystery of the little Despoina of Ilyssos.
‘Yes,’ said Jean-Marie to Ptolemaeos, ‘I shall hear their argument and accept your judgment. But you will permit me to enter my own for France.’
Ptolemaeos nodded.
‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘But let us now ask ourselves, not where, but to whom this work of art belongs? Apart from eight minor jewels purloined from beneath its tail, and apart from a clockwork engine now destroyed by rust, it is just as it left the hands of its anonymous artificer in Constantinople. He had constructed it of materials which had been looted from Trebizond by his employer or patron, a Sebastocrator in the strategic service of the Emperor. In so far as looting is – or was – a legitimate part of warfare, the materials and therefore the work itself rightfully belonged to the Sebastocrator as the spoils of battle. Did he have heirs? If so, where are they now?’
‘The last male in his line deceased in 945,’ said Ivan Barraclough, ‘leaving issue one daughter who was married to Nicophoros Philotimos, Count of the Thracian March. Since she proved sterile, he put her away.’
‘Away?’
‘In a cemetery. There are therefore no heirs either through the spear line or the distaff line to the Sebastocrator Demosthenes Commenos.’
‘And so,’ said Canteloupe, ‘since privateering is time-honoured as a profession, this creature became the property, de facto if not de jure, of the Lord of Ilyssos who first won it at sea, and of his successors. The Lord Phaedron was the last of these actually to possess it, but it still rightfully belongs to his heirs, if any.’