by Simon Raven
‘No, thank you,’ he said aloud. ‘Nothing more now, Sydney. A bath, I think, before dinner.’
‘They’re moving north to Provence,’ said Q to Theta. ‘Tarascon and Arles. Jones thinks that Blakeney’s inquiries are going to fizzle out. The scent’s going dead, he says.’
‘Provence,’ said plump Theta. ‘Already halfway home from where they first met. I told you we could put our trust in Jones.’
‘Can we put our trust in Blakeney?’
‘In his competence, you mean, or in his co-operation?’
‘Both.’
‘His competence depends on some…charisma…rather than on intellect. From what Jones says, the charisma is still there.’
‘And his readiness to co-operate?’
‘My dear fellow, how should I know? Jones thinks that he will only co-operate after he has finished with these inquiries of his. Well, it seems they have almost finished with him. Therefore no further obstacles.’
‘The influence he is supposed to have with rats must mean that he has some affinity with or affection for rats. Which in turn means that he might not be too pleased by the plans that we have in store for him.’
‘He will obviously have no objection to clearing them out of Canterbury Cathedral.’
‘But it’s not as simple as that, is it?’
‘There is, as you indicate, another dimension to it all. The question is, will Blakeney find it out?’
‘He’ll have to be told certain things which would make it possible for him to find it out.’
‘By that time he should be so far committed that he won’t be able to back down…or make public complaint.’
‘He’s a drunk, remember. Drunks don’t always see these things quite straight.’
‘Perhaps it’s better he shouldn’t. Perhaps we want him confused…charismatic and confused…in all things accepting the advice and instructions of Jones, S, who has nursed and protected him all across Europe.’
‘You mean,’ said Q, ‘that he’ll do for Jones what he might not do for us?’
‘Jones seems to be soothing him along quite well so far. It seems that Blakeney is becoming increasingly attached.’
‘Perhaps Jones is too. In which case…?’
‘…In which case, Jones knows his duty to us, and also his duty to his friend, which will be to prevent Blakeney from annoying us and bringing our odium upon him when everything might be so comfortably and profitably arranged.’
PART SEVEN
The Relict
‘Nothing more we can do now, Ive. Nothing except wait for the monthly check-up on the thirtieth.’
Len and Ivor were walking in the Fellows’ Garden of Lancaster College.
‘You’re sure no one will get wind of that Swiss bank account of yours?’ Ivor said.
‘As sure as a man can be. I employed no intermediary when I set it up. And the money from our friend in Bavaria was paid direct by banker’s credit from his bank in Munich.’
‘Which means that the bankers know and our friend in Bavaria knows.’
‘Hell, man, somebody had to know. Our friend in Bavaria is going to keep very quiet, because he has been receiving stolen goods and will not wish to draw attention to himself. And the bankers will keep quiet because that’s bankers’ etiquette.’
‘Not, alas, as strictly observed as formerly. Bankers are beginning to get twinges of social conscience. Even the Swiss.’
‘They won’t get many twinges about a mere thirty-five thousand pounds.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Ivor, ‘but this sort of thing is enough to make anyone nervous.’
‘You can say that again. While I was waiting in that hotel in London to hear the credit had been lodged I could have screamed the place down.’
‘The other volume…The Wandrille Georgics…it’s safely hidden in your lodgings?’
‘Yes. Snug as a snake in winter. Now then, Ive. When can the good life begin?’
‘That is a problem.’ Despite himself, Ivor was rather enjoying the mechanics of the plot. While miserable about what was being planned for Jacquiz, he was nevertheless anxious to ensure Len got full benefit of his enterprise and was finally stowed away with his loot in safety and comfort. ‘You see,’ Ivor went on, ‘if everything goes to plan, the Provost is going to arrange – or so we think – for you to be quietly shoved off into inferior academic employment, probably at a polytechnic. Now, even Lord Constable can’t arrange this with a mere snap of the fingers; it will take time; and during that time you’ll have to hang about in Cambridge.’
‘I can’t just vanish during next vacation – around Christmas, say, when nobody’s looking?’
‘No,’ said Ivor. ‘If you disappear before you’ve taken up the new job which Constable is going to procure for you, everyone will get suspicious.’
‘They’ll already be suspicious.’
‘But content, on Constable’s instructions, to let the thing lie. If you suddenly disappear, however, you will make it quite blatantly obvious to all and sundry that you, and not Jacquiz, are the guilty party.’
‘Right. So I stay around until a new job’s found for me. What then?’
‘You take it up,’ said Ivor with relish, ‘you then begin to show signs of mounting discontent, and after a year or so you drift away, apparently searching for more congenial employment, but in fact just – well – losing yourself. No one, forgive me, is going to care what happens to you once you are gone, and your exit will have been so gradual as to excite no notice. What you must avoid is a sudden and dramatic vanishing trick within a few weeks of the theft’s being discovered.’
‘That I see, Ive. But I don’t like the idea of staying a whole year at whatever dump Constable gets me consigned to. Especially as it may be months and months before I’m even sent there.’
‘I fear, Len, that patience is one of the necessary preconditions of the good life which you envisage.’
Len giggled. ‘I love it when you say things like that,’ he said. ‘Your voice all plummy with worldly wisdom.’
‘You must also see that I’m right?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I see it, Ive. Well, what the shit? Suppose I wait around for even as much as two years before I scarper, it’s a small price to pay for the good days that are coming. I shall let you know where I’ve gone, Ive. You’ll come and see me sometimes?’
‘I rather think I might. I don’t know what it is about you, Len. By all my rules I ought to loathe you, but somehow…I’m becoming rather attached. I have a delicious sense of complicity. Now, I think we had better sit down on that seat under the Judas tree and go through the drill for the day of the check-up just one more time.’
‘Right,’ said Len, as they sat down. ‘I pass you the key of the cash box, and you open it and take out the key of the safe. You open the safe and with my assistance, since you’re new to the job, you produce several items, which are duly checked off on his list by the Third Bursar, and then you produce the two oilskin bags. “The St Gilles Breviary,” you say, looking at the labels, “and The Wandrille Georgics.” “Right,” says the Third Bursar, and ticks them off on his list – hardly looking at the bags, he’s done it so often. “But I think,” you then say, “I think, as it’s the first inspection to take place during my tenure, that we’ll open up those oilskin bags and check the contents…” ’
‘It turns out,’ said Jacquiz, depositing the Abbé Valcabriers’ scrapbook on the back seat of the car, ‘that the priest’s account of Louis’ marriage to Constance and of their journey as far as Pau is pretty vague. I should have expected this. After all, he wasn’t there, and none of it, in itself, was of very much interest to him. What he does tell us squares absolutely with what we know already. Obviously he was merely repeating what Constance told him – they became quite thick later on, as we shall see. But they never became thick enough for Constance to tell him about Van Hoek the painter, or the Rubies, or the precise circumstances under which she married Louis.’
Jacquiz started the engine and eased the Rolls out of the stable yard, through the arch, and on to the road.
‘As far as the priest was concerned, Louis and Constance met and married while Louis was in Montreuil, Constance had cast off her family and embraced Louis’ nominal Catholicism, and then they had come South. Constance admitted to bringing some unspecified “dowry” with her, and this, along with profits which Louis had supposedly made as a Commissary, was enough to explain Louis’ decision to abandon the King’s service and return home. The priest learnt of Louis’ illness at Aigues Mortes and of his death at Pau, after which, he tells us, Constance had come more or less straight on to Saint Bertrand to seek out the Comminges, doubtless requiring their protection.’
Jacquiz drove the Rolls over a bridge, turned sharp right and crossed another bridge, and then accelerated gently down a long avenue, heading out of St Girons for St Gaudens.
‘I don’t think we shall ever know,’ Jacquiz said, ‘quite when Louis told Constance of their ultimate destination and of his family there; probably when he told her of his Albigensian ancestry, possibly as he lay dying – but at some stage he must have told her, and to Saint Bertrand-de-Comminges she duly came after he was dead. And what she found was this: Louis’ father and Louis’ aunt were still alive. (These were the two children of the woman who had rehabilitated the Comminges in Saint Bertrand after the trouble with the Inquisitors.) Louis’ mother was dead, but his father, now getting on for sixty years old, had recently married again, taking a young peasant girl from the plain below the town…who, when Constance arrived, was already six months pregnant of her first child. Brothers or sisters Louis had had none (his mother had been sickly and given to dropping her children stillborn) so the household, situated in one of the Comminges’ properties in Saint Bertrand, consisted of Louis’ father, the new and pregnant wife, Louis’ widowed and childless aunt – and now Constance, who, I need hardly tell you, was regarded with manifest suspicion by all of them, particularly by the new wife, Constance’s step-mother-in-law though in fact even younger than Constance.’
‘Their house – was it the same one as Valcabriers lives in, the one we saw yesterday?’
‘No. It was much nearer the Cathedral, just across the square from it, in fact, and facing its West façade. Indeed, this propinquity contributed very materially to the…subsequent undoing…of poor Constance.’ Jacquiz shivered slightly and slowed the car so much that it almost seemed he would stop. But at the last moment he accelerated again and drove on, though with evident reluctance. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘there was Constance living with, if barely accepted by, her new family, and at this juncture the priest, our narrator, first comes on the scene in person and makes her acquaintance. It seems that one day he was accosted, in the Cathedral, by a “wild-eyed and trembling woman” who said that she was being haunted and could only escape the ghost that haunted her by coming into the Cathedral. This was Constance speaking. She went on to say that for some time she had had a feeling, an increasingly strong one, that before very long the spirit would overcome whatever power kept it out of the Cathedral and would be able to torment her there too. Having listened while all this was being gabbled at him, the priest very sensibly led Constance away to a vestry, sat her down, gave her a glass of wine, and asked her to tell him her story slowly and from the beginning. Which she now did. Of her marriage and journey Southwards she gave the sketchy version of which I’ve already told you, but became a great deal more detailed and precise when she reached the events which had followed her arrival in Saint Bertrand.
‘When she had first presented herself to the Comminges, she found that they already knew of her existence. At some point during the journey from Montreuil, it now appeared, Louis had written them a letter and paid a courier to carry it to Saint Bertrand. The letter had told them that he had taken a wife in the North and had thereby bettered himself, since his wife was in possession of a private fortune. They should expect to see him and her in a matter of months or even weeks, the letter had continued, but before he finally returned he had an important affair to settle in the matter of his wife’s property.’
‘But he did not tell them what this property was?’
‘No. After all, the loot was still very “hot” indeed. The letter might well go astray, Louis would have thought, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone to know that it was he who had the Rubies. For almost certainly he meant to dispose of them in Pau, as we surmised earlier, and total discretion was needed.’
‘Then why did he write to his people at all?’
‘Pretty natural, I’d say. He intended to come home, the bad hat made good, with a fortune in money, and like many before him he could not resist the temptation to do a little boasting first.’
‘And so Constance was greeted with two simple questions,’ said Marigold: ‘where was Louis? and where was her fortune?’
‘Right. To the first there was a very simple answer. To the second she returned some evasion about being heiress presumptive to an estate of her father’s near Montreuil.’
‘And of course nobody believed her.’
‘No. It seems that the priest, to whom she was now telling her tale in the vestry, pressed her to tell him what her fortune actually consisted in, and she so far broke down as to hint that it was something easily portable. But neither to him nor to the Comminges did she breathe a word about the Rubies – which are therefore never mentioned, as such, in the whole of the priest’s narrative. He refers to Constance’s fortune as her “dowry” or her “treasure”, and evidently had no inkling of its nature or its fabulous value. His tone is that of a man who thinks she probably has a box tucked away somewhere with fifty or a hundred gold pieces in it, a very tidy sum in those days, but not up to a ruby necklace.
‘But back to the Comminges. When they heard that Louis had died in Pau, they reasoned very much as you and I did, that he must have been in Pau to sell something (which would have been consistent with the statement of intent in his letter) and something that was most unlikely to have been land, whether near Montreuil or elsewhere. So they badgered Constance. Although the fortunes of the Comminges, which had nosedived after the trial in 1597, had been somewhat restored under the tutelage of Louis’ grandmother (the lady who slept with the bishop et al.) there was certainly room for more. A stiff injection of money always comes in handy – and so where, they wanted to know, and what was the fortune about which Louis had written to them in his last letter? When she repeated that she was heiress to an estate in Picardy, her father-in-law beat her up – helped by his sister and his wife.
‘At this point, as Constance told the priest, she decided to leave. Travelling alone might be very awkward for a woman, and she didn’t really know where to go, but anything was better than sitting in Saint Bertrand being bullied by the Comminges, and she supposed that “her dowry” would provide her with means of support.’
‘Where do you suppose she had the necklace hidden?’
‘A very good question.’ Jacquiz slowed the car as they came into the suburbs of St Gaudens. ‘Clearly, nothing was safe in the Comminges household, not even hidden on her own person, as they stripped her naked whenever they beat her up. I’m afraid we shall never know, as she didn’t even tell the priest. She simply told him that after some days in Saint Bertrand she was still in possession of her “treasure” despite the strippings and whippings, at the onset of which he had determined to take both her “treasure” and herself off somewhere else, anywhere else, forthwith.’
‘But she didn’t, because here she was in the vestry.’
‘She couldn’t.’
Jacquiz drove past some handsome gardens (cascades and Aleppo pine) and turned left for Luchon.
‘They locked her up?’
‘No. She couldn’t move more than a furlong from the Comminges’ house.’
‘They followed her and brought her back?’
‘No. She literally could not move her limbs when she got to a dist
ance of two hundred yards or so – “two hundred and fifty paces”, the priest quotes her as saying – from the Comminges’ front door. She was, she thought, bewitched. The priest, who knew the history of the Comminges family, thought so too. But this was by no means the worst of it. She was, she said, haunted by the spirit of her husband. He did not appear to her but he was constantly whispering in her ear –’
‘– Telling her to hand over the goodies to his relations, I suppose –’
‘– And threatening to come bodily from Pau if she did not. This was the real horror of it. The voice said that it was only the spirit of Louis but it insisted that, if Constance did not do as she was told, the actual corpse would rise and come to her from Pau. Only when she was in the Cathedral. Constance informed the priest, was she safe from the voice, and she was no longer sure, as she had already told him in her first outburst, how long even that immunity would last. Alternatively, she said, she was afraid lest she might be the victim of a second spell which would prevent her from walking as far as the Cathedral (only a hundred paces odd from the Comminges’ house) and enjoying the protection and solace which it yet offered her. But this, as you’ll soon see, lovely Marigold, was certainly not going to happen. It was no part of the Comminges’ plan to keep Constance out of the Cathedral – quite the reverse, for reasons which will later become very plain.’
Marigold looked through the windscreen at the ranks of the Pyrénées, huge white knights on dappled chargers, now advancing towards her at a steady walk across the plain, the foothills going before them like so many esquires holding their masters’ bridles. Would the trumpet ever blow for the charge, she wondered idly, would the esquires release the harness and back off, one fine autumn morning, and the white knights come thundering and trampling over the vasty fields of France?