Riviera Gold

by Laurie R. King

  For a man whose intellectual achievements consisted of memorised poetry, the Hon Terry could be remarkably perceptive when it came to people. Something in my response betrayed my weakening, and he was on it in a flash. “Aha—Monte Carlo, so Mrs Russell has a secret vice! Do we have to keep you from the tables?”

  “I doubt it. I’ve never seen the appeal in setting fire to a lot of banknotes. No, it’s that I have a…friend, who may be living there.”

  “Oh jolly good! Any friend of yours is bound to be a ripping gal. She is a gal?”

  “She was once.”

  “So it’s settled. Yes? You’ll come a-sailin’ with us?”

  He might have been a spaniel begging for a thrown stick. Still, I had to admit it was tempting. As he’d said, how often does one meet the opportunity to circumnavigate Italy on a spectacularly lovely sailing yacht? The dullness of our stage-colonel host would be counteracted by the surprisingly amiable company of the Hon Terry and his friends. And if the weather turned, if the company palled, if seasickness, rich food, or the steady diet of lotos gave me indigestion, there would be any number of ports along the way that would provide an escape home.

  “Oh, all—”

  He did not let me finish, merely shouted in glee and threw his arms around me, so impetuous a gesture that it brought with it a flash of my long-dead brother.

  And so I had said good-bye to my husband and set off on the Stella Maris with the Hon Terry and friends; twenty-two days of education in the subtle interactions of canvas and rope, tide chart and compass. I spent my days learning the language of wind in the sails and water in the seas, while scrambling to carry out orders. I spent my nights shovelling down huge servings of delicious food, then falling into my bunk to sleep like the dead. My hands blistered and went hard, my skin burned and went brown, while I learned about pulling in partnership, the proper way to throw my weight around, and just how deadly a gust of wind could be. When we were under sail, I was never entirely free of seasickness, but I did find that when I was busy enough, or exhausted enough, I could ignore it.

  One night when we were halfway up the Tyrrhenian, with Sicily behind us and the outline of Sardinia yet to appear, it came to me that I had been quietly learning other lessons as well, from this man with no more intellect than a retriever. The Hon Terry was teaching me about friendship.

  I had no family, other than the one I had made through Holmes. My few friends were from University, since I’d somehow never found the time to create more. But on board the Stella Maris, distracted by aching muscles and thirst and hunger, the bursts of shared laughter and effortless camaraderie opened my heart.

  In turn, I found I was ever more impatient for the end of the voyage—or rather, for the person I hoped to find there.

  It was ten years since the cool, War-time morning in 1915 when I stumbled across Mr Sherlock Holmes on the Sussex Downs. Ten years since the afternoon I’d met the woman who would become my surrogate grandmother. Mrs Hudson called herself a housekeeper, but from that first day, she was so much more.

  In all the decade that had followed, all those long years when I came to know her worn hands, ageing face, and greying hair better than I knew my own, I never suspected that the heart beating under those old-lady dresses and old-fashioned aprons might belong elsewhere. Never suspected that she had been anything but a landlady-turned-housekeeper—until the past May, when a case brought to light a colourful, even shocking history. The history of a woman named, not Clara Hudson, but Clarissa. A history that came to claim her, and drove my Mrs Hudson from her home.

  The thought of losing her had been more than I could bear. I pleaded to know where she was going, how she would get along, what she would possibly do without us. Her reply was less an answer than a vague observation—but as a straw, I would continue to grasp it until it crumbled.

  It had been night. The motorcar that would take her away had been idling at the front door, and Mrs Hudson had paused in the act of pulling a pair of travelling gloves over those work-rough hands to consider my question. When she’d looked up, she had not looked at me, who loved her, nor at Sherlock Holmes, who had lived with her for more years than I had been alive. She had not even run her eyes over the doorway that she had polished, swept, and walked through for the past twenty years. Instead, straight of spine and with no sign of hesitation, she had lifted her head to gaze resolutely out into the darkness.

  “Do you know,” she’d said thoughtfully, “I’ve always been fond of Monte Carlo.”

  Twenty-two days after making our way out of the Venice lagoon, the Stella Maris was sailing, not alongside a coastline, but towards one. I was every bit as trim and brown as Terry had promised. Also, perpetually hungry, always thirsty, and profoundly tired of an endlessly moving deck beneath my feet.

  Tired, too, of some of my fellow passengers—not Terry’s friends, but those of our host, DB. As a group, their humour was heavy-handed, their conversation patronising, and they proudly demonstrated their wit by using quotes that were either stale, or inapt, or simply wrong.

  Such as DB’s proclamation now, as we drew near the Riviera coast: “And in the afternoon they came to a land where it was always afternoon.”

  Terry and I winced, as if we’d heard an ill-tuned piano. I waited for Terry to continue the quote—with words Tennyson had actually written.

  “ ‘All round the coast the languid air did swoon, breathing like one that hath a weary dream,’ ” he dutifully supplied.

  “Wrong time of the month for a full-faced moon, though,” I noted. This, too, was part of the ritual, the two of us joining forces in the subtle mocking of ignorance.

  It was probably a good thing we planned to disembark soon, before our mockery grew shameless. I gave DB a smile that I hoped looked friendly rather than apologetic, and went below to shove the last things into my valise. Terry followed, standing with his shoulder propped against the doorway.

  “So, have you thought about stopping with us for a bit?” he asked.

  I pushed my unruly hair out of my eyes, wondering where I had put my scissors. “Terry, you must be truly sick of me.”

  “Mary Russell, I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave! Who else understands my jokes?”

  I put on a puzzled expression. “Terry, have you been making jokes?”

  “Har har.”

  “Your friends laugh. More than I do, really.”

  “Patrice laughs when he knows it’s supposed to be a joke, and Luca laughs because he doesn’t want to admit he missed it in English. Oh, do come along, just for a couple of days. It’ll be a new experience to talk to people without watching their heads bobble with the waves.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. The people you’re staying with will be plenty crowded with the four of you.”

  “No, we’re at an hotel.”

  “Really? What kind of Riviera establishment is open in midsummer?”

  “Most of ’em do close—this one did, until a couple years ago. But the more guests they can pull in, the better the chance they’ll keep it open next year.”

  “Why on earth would they want to?”

  I got to my knees to check under the bunk for stray pens and wayward stockings, half-listening as Terry prattled about a note that caught up with him in our last port, from a friend extolling the virtues of summer holidays on the Cap d’Antibes. It seemed that the hotel there, which for its thirty-some-year history had indeed sensibly closed its shutters for the summer season, was recently talked into staying open by a handful of mad Americans with deep pockets and a perverse affection for broiling under the sun. They paid well, but considering the hotel’s plenitude of rooms, it would help, as Terry said, to round up a few more paying guests.

  So: extend my leisure holiday, or return to empty Sussex?

  First, the obvious question. “Who else is coming?”

  “Luca,
Patrice, and Solange,” he said promptly. His sailing friends—but none of DB’s abrasive guests. Luca was a pleasant young man Terry had taken up with in Venice. Patrice was a friend from Terry’s university days, and Solange, his wife. The five of us had contrived to give the slip to the Stella’s other passengers in nearly every port we’d visited.

  I laughed. “Then yes, I’d love to join you in a half-deserted, baking-hot, off-season hotel. Though just for a day or two. I do have a life to return to.”

  “Books,” he said dismissively. “Rot your brain.”

  Terry knew nothing about my other life—the real one, with Sherlock Holmes. In Venice, people had known my husband as “Mr Russell,” amateur violinist, in a bohemian sort of marriage to a much younger and somewhat idiosyncratic bluestocking. Which were not difficult rôles to play, since we were both precisely (if not exclusively) that.

  One night on the Stella Maris, under the spell of moon and friendship and more than a little alcohol, I had come near to blurting out the truth. Solange had been reading a detective story, and the others began proposing alternative solutions to the mystery. The name Holmes was on the very tip of my tongue—until Terry said something jolly that made me actually picture him in an investigation: stepping in the foot-prints, pocketing a vital clue, and refusing to believe that one of his friends could do anything so dashed unsporting as commit murder.

  At that, I remembered the threat of endless prying discussions about the mythic, near-fictional character Sherlock Holmes, and firmly shut my mouth.

  But despite the mild effort of keeping up the act, spending a day or two on the French coast was not a bad idea. If nothing else, it being a land of Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Ligurians meant that it would provide any number of aqueducts, amphitheatres, rural museums, and quaint villages for me to visit. It would give my muscles time to recuperate, and give me a chance to let Holmes know where I was. And yes, to see what I could do about locating Mrs Hudson in the nearby principality of Monaco.

  Of course, it was always possible that the straw I was so eagerly grasping at was a complete delusion. That the word “fond” had been not a hint, but a vague reflection, or even a deliberate ruse. That our housekeeper with the racy history had in the end gone to another place altogether.

  * * *

  —

  The Stella Maris was headed to Cannes, a few miles along the coast, but the captain put in first to the more workaday harbour at Antibes, to take on fresh provisions for lunch. This was convenient for us—doubly so, because enough fishing boats were out at sea that we were given a berth at the docks rather than having to be tendered ashore. As usual, the boards underfoot seemed to sway more than the boat had, so I paused to make a nonchalant survey of the view while my equilibrium ceased its spinning and grabbing at nonexistent walls.

  The view was worth admiring. To the south, a piece of rocky land extended out into the appropriately azure water. Along the eastern horizon lay the long line of the Alpes Maritimes, while north of the harbour stood the high, stark walls of a castle. The town itself was a typical Mediterranean jumble of red-tiled roofs, smelling of dust and fish.

  Terry paused beside me to study the rocky promontory south of town. “That might be the Cap d’Antibes.”

  “Didn’t you say there was a beach?”

  “P’raps it’s on the other side.” He turned his sun-glasses at the waterfront road. “You see anything that looks like a hotel car?”

  The hotel car proved to be two ancient taxis with five good tyres and a pair of unbroken head-lamps between them. Those who were staying on the Stella Maris thought this was hilarious, but the affection between DB and Terry, a bit strained during recent days, returned as we took our leave. They waved us off, we waved them good sailing, and we piled into the taxis as the drivers, cigarettes hanging from their lips, tossed the last bags and valises in on top of our sweating bodies, strapped Terry’s new and peculiar-looking skis onto the roof, and ground their motors into gear.

  We stopped three times along the way: the first time to let Luca out to be sick (the previous night had been a raucous one on board); the second time while a small boy herded some goats across the road; and the third time for what remained in Luca’s stomach.

  The promontory we had seen from the harbour was indeed the Cap, although the larger part of it was hidden from view. The Hôtel du Cap proved to be on its far side, set in a cultivated pine forest overlooking the Mediterranean. A palm-lined entrance drive led to an establishment both large and grand—more luxurious than I had expected.

  During the winter, I had no doubt that its halls would ring with the accents of those escaping the cold of the European north and the American east. Now, in the sweltering heat of midsummer, the voices inside the doors were a mere echo of its high-season glory. Luca, for one, welcomed the relatively cool silence, and was quickly ushered away to our rooms, as were our bags. The skis did cause the porter momentary puzzlement—not only were they strangely wide, but July was not the usual time for hotel guests to take a jaunt up into the Alps. However, any luxury hotel is accustomed to the peculiarities of guests, so the man merely checked that Terry did not wish to keep the skis in his room, and took them away.

  When the lobby was empty again, Terry suggested we take a look at the sea. The four of us wandered through the grounds to the centre of the summer merrymaking, and looked down.

  “Good heavens,” I said.

  The hotel was on top of a cliff, but it had embraced its rocky setting—and got around its lack of a beach—by gouging a large swimming bath into the cliff itself. Above the pool stretched a brilliant white pavilion with arches and shades, stairs leading down to the open sea below. Halfway along the stairs lay the pool and its terrace, the geometric edges making for an odd contrast with the organic stone, although the people below—be they splashing, drinking, or lounging on pool-side chaises, fully exposed to the beating sun or sheltering under the striped umbrellas—seemed untroubled by the unnatural symmetry. For those who wanted actually to swim, diving-boards thrust out into the open sea, where floating platforms were decorated with lounging figures.

  The hotel was where Edwardian formality lay. Outside, it was all Twenties.

  Solange declared her intention to don her bathing costume and join them. Patrice amiably agreed to accompany his wife (they were newly wed, so he tended to be amiable about most of her demands). To my surprise, Terry was less enthusiastic, merely telling his friends that he’d see them in the bar later.

  When they had trotted off to chivvy the maids into digging their costumes from the trunks, he turned to me. “Fancy a walk?”

  “Absolutely. Though I may need a hat.”

  I had lost five hats on the way from Venice, since the wind on board a ship will pluck off all but the most robustly anchored head-gear. Here it was not only dead calm, but uncomfortably hot, without a breath stirring the leaves.

  “You might want a towel, too,” he said. “In case we find that beach.”

  So I fetched my surviving hat, and a towel. Also a large silk Venetian scarf under which I could shelter, a flask of water to stave off dehydration, and—need I say it?—a book.

  The Cap d’Antibes may once have been a place of thistles and desolation, but at some point in the past century this wilderness had been claimed by the rich. As a result, villas had sprouted, tropical gardens were coaxed into existence, and narrow lanes were lined with the gates of winter homes. The afternoon was quiet, the sun baking our shoulders until we dropped down onto the northern slope, and even then, the path Terry and I described wove back and forth to take advantage of any overhanging trees.

  Fortunately, there was little traffic.

  In the end, we came to a beach, a pale-gold crescent of sand between a low stone wall and the blue waters of a little bay. Where the right-hand point of the crescent faded into trees, some skiffs were tied. Closer to hand was
a café—but it was shut for the season.

  “Perhaps,” I suggested as we sidled into a patch of shade, “three in the afternoon is no time to linger under the Riviera sun.”

  There was one person in sight: a man dressed in baggy linen trousers, a striped French jersey, and cloth espadrilles. His head was bound with what looked like a large bandage, although I thought it was probably a way to keep the sun off his scalp.

  He was wielding a rake, shifting washed-up sea-weed towards the far end of the beach.

  Not that the solitary labourer was the only evidence of life. Further along the sand—the nice, well-raked sand—were indications that people had not only been here, but planned to return: a festive blue-striped changing-tent, half a dozen leaning beach umbrellas, some sand-covered bamboo mats, a picnic basket. A pile of inner-tubes, water-wings, the bloated shape of a blow-up rubber horse, half a dozen buckets and some small shovels testified to a family. Either that, or the raking gentleman planned to top his pristine surface with a sand-castle.

  Terry studied the signs of civilisation, then ran his eyes along the rest of the beach. All the way down to the groundskeeper, the sand was clear. After his bent figure, a strip of sea-weed had been left by the receding tide. I made a small wager with myself as to what Terry would do…

  And won.

  “Let’s get you settled,” he said, “and I’ll have a word with that chap. He might know when people will show up again. And anyway, seems a bit rude to take advantage of his work without giving him a tip.”

  “Terry,” I said, “you are a very nice man.” It was hard to see beneath the dark lenses and hat-brim, but I could tell he was blushing.

  I spread my towel on a bit of the sand, arranged the scarf as a personal tent, took a swallow of already-warm water, and opened my book. Tiny waves lapped. Seagulls bickered. I watched the pantomime drama unfold down the way.

  Terry had set off under the assumption that the man in the head-cloth was a groundskeeper, hired to clear the sand each day. I noted that this work would be less Sisyphean here on the placid Mediterranean than on an English beach, where a day’s tides may rise and fall twenty feet.