The Roses of Picardie

by Simon Raven

  However, sage reader, my contention now will be that it is the Curse of the Roses of Picardie, wherever these may be, that has undone the Vicomte du Touquet. How can this be? you will cry. For while the alternation of high winning wagers with sudden death is typical of the bouleversements once effected by the Curse of the Rubies, neither curse nor rubies, the latter long vanished, ever attached themselves to M. du Touquet.

  But wait. We know, from the evidence recorded at the inquest, that a few days before his death M. du Touquet was ‘expelled penniless’ from a lodging house in the slums of Lille. The present writer, recently proceeding to these lodgings in order to uncover for you what was there remembered of M. du Touquet, was received by a 12-year-old girl, the rest of the family being out on their occasions. As it transpired, this little girl clearly remembered that, on the morning of the day on which the Vicomte was expelled from the house, a letter had arrived which she had carried to him and by which he had been much excited. She remembers nothing of the postmark or the envelope, but her mind was much impressed by the avidity with which the addressee tore open the missive, by the emergence therefrom of what appeared to be a money order, and by the almost hysterical manner in which M. le Vicomte kept repeating: ‘The pretties. I must make haste. Oh, the pretties.’

  The girl further remembered that she went to inform her father of all this, and that her father, having heard of the money order, went to M. du Touquet to demand considerable arrears of rent. Chancing to overhear the ensuing conversation through an open door, the little one gathered that M. du Touquet had an important journey to make, that he would need all the money he had been sent to make it, but that as a result of it he would be rich for life (so he claimed) or at least well able to pay her father what he owed him and a generous bonus to boot. Not surprisingly the father was sceptical and began to demand what he was owed with vicious menaces…until all of a sudden he fell to the floor in a ‘foaming fit’ of something which sounds from his daughter’s description like epilepsy. The child’s mother then appeared, so I was told, and threatened to call the police. But the child (who, notwithstanding that she had informed her papa of the money order, had a tenderness for M. du Touquet) then threatened to tell the police that all violence had been initiated by her parent; and an arrangement was reached whereby M. du Touquet was allowed to leave immediately and without paying in return for his own and the little one’s silence about the criminal assault on him. M. du Touquet therefore departed ‘penniless’ only in the sense that all he had was a money order as yet uncashed; and as for the fiction of his ‘expulsion’, it was later put round the district by the woman in order to save face and prevent further scandal or inquiry. (It was from the same motives, doubtless, that she suppressed the true facts of M. du Touquet’s departure when questioned in the Court of Inquest.)

  And now, my sage and charming readers, is it idle to propound a theory? Is it vain to speculate that the ‘pretties’ which so excited the Viscount were the Roses of Picardie, that the letter he had received was from some person who had them (or knew where they were) and wished (from whatever motive) to see them returned at last to their true and former owners, and that the money was sent in good earnest of this intention – to enable the Vicomte to make the necessary expedition?

  The thing is wild, you will cry, there is nothing to support it, how ridiculous to suppose that the Rubies should suddenly be offered back (by whom, for God’s sake?) after the lapse of three centuries, this writer has culled the whole idiocy from the fickle winds of disordered fancy. Perhaps. But kindly note, censorious reader, that the theory does after all explain, and make in a manner consistent, everything that occurred from the moment the Viscount had his letter. For once granted that M. le Vicomte was in a practical way to repossessing himself of the Roses, he could in a fashion be deemed to be their owner; he would therefore be subject to the Curse of the Roses, and also apt to receive the benefits conferred by them. All this he would know for himself. He could therefore expect, as indeed he received, their influence on his behalf in the Casino (hence his strange comments to the croupiers and others), their potential desertion and even hostility (hence his words of foreboding), and his own early destruction…though he might have expected, as would we, that he should be allowed to collect the jewels first – which, for all we know, he did, only to have them stolen at his macabre demise. Also explained by my theory would be the nagging matter of the ticket of admission. Once understand that the Vicomte was under some form of supernatural guidance, and it is not difficult to conceive that the forces concerned to provide that guidance might arrange for him the procurement of a ticket and the placing of it in his pocket as an indication to him of whither he should next propel himself.

  One posits, in short, that M. le Vicomte, being en route to collect the Rubies, was compelled to pause overnight in Aix before continuing on his mission; that the ‘influence’ or ‘spirit’ of the Roses (more than one, perhaps: did not the Vicomte refer at the tables to ‘twins’?) guided him through the mechanism of the gratuitous ticket, into the gaming-rooms; there allowed him to win a fortune; then, as he foretold, abandoned him; then finally destroyed him. Whether or not, when he left the Casino, he went to collect the Rubies and was then robbed of them – the motive for the murder – we cannot say; it seems more in the spirit of the Roses’ past record that death should have been violent and sudden simply for the sake of being violent and sudden. But in either case, if my theory be true, what we can assert is this: that Clovis di Cannaregio Baudouin du Bourg de Maubeuge, last Vicomte du Touquet, having unexpectedly had restored to him the ownership if not the actual physical possession of the Roses of Picardie, came once more under the ancient curse of his family, by which he was briefly exalted only to be pitilessly destroyed.

  concluded

  PART TWO

  Gentlemen in Attendance

  ‘Yet,’ said Miss Wade, looking full upon them, ‘you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’

  Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit; Chapter 2

  And a great load of rubbish it was, thought Jacquiz Helmut as he put down the Paris Fiche which contained the final instalment of The Case of the Dead Gamester. All that about the Curse – silly season stuff at its silliest. True, Marigold and her father Johannes would probably go along with it (at any rate to judge from what Marigold had been saying the other day, that she and Johannes believed that there was something very nasty in among the Roses), but then both of them, for all their intelligence, had a very silly streak.

  And yet, thought Jacquiz Helmut, as he looked over the meadows, past the cows and the sedge to the Cam, and yet…If that wretched scribbler in Paris Fiche had got his facts even half way right, one thing was quite apparent – that Clovis du Touquet believed that something special was running for him, that something was going to present him with a fortune or at least a competence. He had had a letter with a money order, and he had come south to Aix-en-Provence to seek whatever the letter promised him; furthermore, if the little girl in Lille had correctly reported what he’d said on receipt of the letter, and if the author of the article had correctly reported the little girl, Clovis had believed that there was urgency (‘I must make haste’) and he had believed that whatever was promised was beautiful and plural (‘Oh the pretties’).

  And more: not only had Clovis believed that a treasure of ‘pretties’ was waiting for him in the south, he had also believed, if one might infer from the remarks attributed to him, that this treasure exerted a supernatural influence, part protective and part malign, on his affairs. Now, Jacquiz himself and any other sane man might know that any such belief was nonsense, but the fact that Clovis had held it almost certainly meant that Clovis equated the
treasure that was waiting with the Rubies, the Roses of Picardie, which had been alleged for centuries to have exerted just such an influence on the affairs of his family with just such a combination of blessing and bane.

  Ergo, thought Jacquiz Helmut, if one pared the thing down if one stripped away all legendary and magical accretion, if one did not allow oneself to be dazed or diverted by the incidental melodramas of baccarat and murder, one was left with this plain deduction: there had been evidence, sufficient at any rate to convince Clovis, that the Rubies still existed. That he had been infatuated by the old myth of their powers, did not necessarily mean that he had misjudged the new evidence of their survival; though gullible in the first respect, he could well have been shrewd enough in the second.

  In sum: if Clovis had believed that the Rubies still existed, then very possibly they did still exist; and if they did still exist, then they were somewhere, perhaps somewhere near Aix-en-Provence, in any case somewhere, to be found. Which being so, why should not somebody start looking for them? And why should not that somebody (Marigold and Johannes notwith-standing) be himself?

  But first he would need to know everything that was to be known, far more accurately than it had been purveyed by the French hack in Paris Fiche. He must go to his father-in-law, Johannes Faff, direct descendant of the seventeenth-century Fauvrelles of Montreuil (Faff being the inelegant but economic anglicization effected when the family came to Sandwich) and persuade him, reluctant as he might prove in any way to assist this enterprise, to rehearse once more the story of the errant Constance Fauvrelle, of how she had the Rubies of her lover who had them of the young widow Countess’ naked corpse.

  Balbo Blakeney, having contrived to commandeer Ton-ton’s new copy of Paris Fiche, read the last instalment of The Case of the Dead Gamester at about the same time as Jacquiz Helmut. His reactions, since he was a Natural Philosopher and not an Historian, were rather different. Like Helmut, he was interested only in fact, but unlike Helmut he was prepared to recognize as such only what had been observed and sworn to by a trustworthy witness, allowing no validity to unconfirmed reports, however plausible. As he walked from Madame’s establishment near the docks of Heracleion towards the centre of the city, where he was due to give an English lesson to one Kyrios Pandelios (an estate agent), Balbo listed the few facts in the case which he would regard as absolute and incontestable, and therefore to be accepted as evidence by himself as a scientist. They amounted to these: Clovis had died a year ago of a battering; his body had been found by the police in the Impasse Diane, near the Casino in Aix-en-Provence; and at the time his body was found he had on his person 142,000 francs in banknotes, which had been paid out to him by the cashier in the Casino the previous evening. For the first item he was prepared to accept the testimony of his own eyes, as he himself had identified the body; for the other two items he was prepared to accept the word of the police inspector who had informed him of them (thus officially corroborating what he had read in Marseille Soir) while accompanying him to the morgue. Even here, he felt, he was being somewhat less than scientific; and as for any allegations made in Paris Fiche, about lodging-keepers or their children, about croupiers or their attitudes, about the manner in which Clovis had wagered or what he had said while wagering, he simply dismissed them entirely. Some of them might well be true, of course, but how was one to tell which? The whole corpus of such allegation was beneath the notice of a scientist, and there was an end of it.

  And so, he asked himself as he walked uphill from Madame’sby-the-Harbour, what could he deduce from the three facts which he did allow as proven? Only this: that Clovis had got lucky in the Casino and had later died in a brawl, the other party or parties to which had, for whatever reason, left his loot intact on his body. Certainly, there were questions to be asked, but not the questions which the writer in Paris Fiche was asking and if the latter kind of questions were asked, they could be very curtly answered. ‘Is it idle to propound a theory?’ the hack inquired. Yes, was the answer to that, totally idle, unless he had facts to support it, which he did not. ‘Is it vain to speculate…?’ the man had continued. In Balbo’s view it was always vain to speculate, and he had the ruin of his family’s merchant bank to uphold him in that opinion. As for this article, then, it just did not begin to hold together; for even if one believed the hack’s second-hand reports about what Clovis had said (e.g. about the ‘twins’ and so forth) one could not be sure that Clovis himself had meant it, and even if he had meant it that did not mean it was true. To conclude from a few alleged utterances, which might as well have been the result of drink or of a disordered sense of humour as of anything else, that Clovis believed he was protected or threatened by supernatural powers, was merely wilful; so project from his supposed belief a whole revived apparatus of jewels and Curses was positively dishonest.

  Once and once only had Balbo and Clovis discussed the Rubies and the Curse, and that had been during the night of the May Ball at Lancaster which Clovis had attended with his intended in 1949. The subject had come up because Mlle de Stermaria had a ruby hanging from either ear.

  ‘Some say they are unlucky,’ Clovis had said at supper. ‘Certainly those of my family were supposed to be. Lucky too, of course.’

  ‘Do you believe in any of that?’ Balbo had asked.

  ‘In the Rubies, the Roses of Picardie, of course. We know they existed – and are long since gone for ever.’

  ‘What about the Curse?’ said Mlle de Stermaria.

  ‘As with all families, there were good times, and bad; as with all great families, there were conquests and catastrophes. And that is all.’

  A very sensible remark, Balbo had thought at the time. Of course, it had been made twenty-five years ago, and Clovis, much affected by drink and adversity, might have changed his mind on the subject before he died, might have come to believe that the rubies had, after all, bestowed both bane and boon on his family and that they might, even now, be recoverable. But whatever Clovis had or had not believed – here was the nub – made no difference to reality. Even if Clovis had believed with all his heart and all his brain that he was on his way to collect the Roses, now at last to be restored to his line, this belief in itself, unsupported, that was to say, by proven fact, meant nothing. It mined no Rubies, conjured no Curses, magicked no cards. Clovis had been lucky at the tables, and had then been killed, and that, as he himself had put it twenty-five years ago, was all.

  What a pity, thought Balbo, as he walked into the little square in which Kyrios Pandelios lived, that the 142,000 francs had been snapped up by the creditors. What a pity Clovis did not live long enough to stand a few treats; he always liked splashing it round if he had it. He might even have paid me back what he owed me, thought Balbo, looking with pleasure at the carved Venetian wellhead (vine and acanthus) in the centre of the square. Some hope, God save his rotten soul, thought Balbo, as he approached the barley sugar columns and ogee arch of the Kyrios Pandelios’ front door.

  ‘Ah, it is you, old trout,’ called the Kyrios Pandelios from a window above. ‘Push on the portal, my dear one, and it will open sesame – then I will find the bottle of rot-gut and we shall ’ave a bloody great snort.’

  ‘What can I possibly tell you,’ said Johannes Faff to Jacquiz Helmut, ‘that I haven’t told you before?’

  They were walking by the narrow canal that ran under the southern rampart of Sandwich. Small boys sat whispering on the shady bank, their fishing-rods dipping down to motionless floats. On the far side of the canal some cricketers crept heavily over scurfy yellow grass, while amid languid applause a ginger-haired youth with huge shoulders and calves approached the wicket in dirty pads.

  ‘You know the story,’ said Johannes Faff. ‘I have told you the story. You know what happened to the Rubies until the time when they came into the hands of my ten-times-Great Aunt Constance Fauvrelle, and you know what happened then. She married an army contractor, Louis Comminges, who took off her and the jewels both. Since he was a Catholi
c, her Huguenot family would have no truck with it, and any chance of reconciliation or communication was finally finished with when the Fauvrelles moved over here to Sandwich a few months later. The Fauvrelles, soon to be Faffs, neither knew nor cared what happened to Constance and her pork-broker, or to their descendants, then or ever. What more can I possibly say?’

  The ginger-haired boy opened his shoulders and hit the ball up in a huge hyperbola which descended sheer as a rainbow into the canal. The floats swayed briefly in the wash and then once more were still. A reluctant fieldsman fished the ball out with a net. Jacquiz looked over the field, to where the ginger boy lounged on his bat by the stumps listening to the congratulations from the pavilion. The wicket-keeper was saying something to the boy, who smiled awkwardly out of a face that could have been Apollo’s had it not been just too heavily jowled. God, to be young and strong and beautiful, thought Jacquiz, oh God, to be applauded on a summer’s afternoon.

  ‘What more can I possibly say?’ repeated Johannes Faff.

  Jacquiz looked for a last second at the big-boned smiling face on the cricket field, turned back to his father-in-law, took three deep breaths, in and out, in order to collect himself, and then said: ‘The circumstances of Constance’s departure. Did she give her family any warning? Or did they just find an empty bed? Did she leave nothing behind, Johannes, which might have hinted to them where she was going? After all, they knew with whom she had gone.’

  ‘Knowing that, they wanted to know nothing else…even if she told them. They put her from their minds.’

  ‘Did she correspond, afterwards, with nobody in Montreuil?’

  ‘What if she did?’ said Johannes Faff, stonewalling.

  ‘Her correspondent…the descendants of her correspondent …might have some clue as to where she went.’