The Roses of Picardie Read online

  The body of the Vicomte was identified as such by a friend and distant cousin, an Englishman called Mr Balbo Blakeney, who read of the matter while on holiday in France and came forward to offer his assistance to the police. Although he had met the Vicomte only at irregular intervals during his life and not at all for many years previously, Mr Blakeney was able to make a decisive identification by his description of a certain birthmark (a mauve stain in the shape of an elongated rhomboid some six inches above the Vicomte’s left knee), a description which he rendered with great precision before being allowed to inspect the body.

  With the deaths of the Vicomte and his father, there is now extinguished one of the most ancient, noble and, in its heyday, illustrious and powerful families of Northern France, renowned for its territorial aggressions, its illicit venery and its love of high play (a taste, as we shall see; highly relevant to our present discourse). Its history, stretching back to the eleventh century, is superb, outrageous and multicoloured, the dominant colour, however, being that of blood. Of this history we shall have something more to say later. Meanwhile, we should note that the fortunes of the family began to decline even so long as 200 years ago, and that for the last 100 before the death of the Vicomte and his father it had been ever more degraded by poverty.

  Although the Vicomte du Touquet was murdered nearly twelve months ago, in the late August of last year, there have since appeared no clues either as to the murderer himself or his motive. Theft is ruled out; for on M. le Vicomte’s dead body was found by the police, untouched, the full sum of 142,000 francs which he is known to have won that evening in the Casino. (All of this money was claimed, on news of the Vicomte’s death, by his numerous creditors, among whom it is still being apportioned by the courts.)

  There are several points of abundant interest about the Vicomte’s visit to the Casino on this, the last evening of his existence. First, there is the astonishing affair of his immense and spectacular win – a win of over 140,000 francs achieved, apparently, from an initial capital of a single five-franc piece. Secondly, we must take note of some very curious speeches which he is reported as having addressed to some among both the croupiers and the other players: speeches which seemed to imply that he believed himself to be under some species of supernatural guidance, which might at any moment be withdrawn. And thirdly, we have to recall the most peculiar matter of the procedure – or rather, the unwarranted omission of the procedure – necessary (at Aix-en-Provence as everywhere else in France) before his admission to gamingrooms of the Casino:

  Attend me closely here. On the Vicomte’s body was found no official card of identity, only a ticket of admission to the gaming-rooms dated ‘25 Aug. 1973’ in the name of ‘Monsieur du Touquet’. However, to obtain such a ticket the dead man should first have been required to surrender a piece of identity to the clerk of admissions at the desk in the foyer. The number and provenance of this piece of identity and other basic information should then have been recorded by the clerk on a card for later inclusion in the files of the establishment. Only after this procedure had been observed and the prescribed fee paid and recorded, should the clerk have given to M. du Touquet his newly stamped ticket of ingress.

  But behold, what do we find? We find, charming readers, that application to the files and records of the Casino at Aix-en-Provence (made by the police soon after discovering the murder) reveals no information of M. du Touquet, no entry of a fee paid by him, no details of his identity card, in short nothing whatever to do with him.

  In sum, then, and to avoid the proliferation of wearisome technicalities, it would strongly appear that the ticket of admission found on the Vicomte du Touquet’s corpse, while incontestably genuine in its kind, signifies the total violation of the Casino’s most rigid and supposedly inescapable formalities.

  We now find ourselves confronted, sage reader, with the following question:

  WHAT RATIONAL (OR OTHER) EXPLICATION CAN THERE BE OF SO FANTASTIC A CONCATENATION OF MYSTERIES?

  For see before us:

  1) A gambling win against almost infinite odds, whereby one minute jeton was converted into a fortune;

  2) The sincere profession, by the gamester, that he was receiving supernatural aid;

  3) The bestial and seemingly motiveless murder of the gamester a little while later;

  4) The extinction, into nothing and nobody whatever, of a family once most noble and almost sovereign – an extinction so utter that the Vicomte’s corpse had needs be Identified by an English ‘cousin’ in the fifth or sixth degree.

  And 5) a final titillation – the possession, by M. le Vicomte du Touquet, of a perfectly genuine ticket to the gamingrooms in the Casino of Aix-en-Provence – but a ticket that was never applied for, never paid for, never even issued.

  It is this last item, at first sight so trivial, yet (as all frequenters of Casinos will confirm) in truth so unthinkable, that may give us the clue to the entire aggregation of bizarrerie.

  To be continued

  So they’re raking up all that old tale again, thought Jacquiz Helmut.

  He put down the Paris Fiche and went to the window. Marigold should be back at any moment, and she would be coming, since she was walking back from Cambridge, along the path which ran beside the river. Jacquiz was eager to see Marigold, for a number of reasons, and now looked hotly for her over the meadow, but saw, to his purpose, nothing; only three cows, the willows beyond the path, the reeds beyond the willows, and the brown streak of water under the far bank of the Cam. I hate this meadow, thought Jacquiz, and I hate those bloody cows and I hate being out here at Grantchester. After all those contented years in the best rooms which Lancaster had to offer, the Lauderdale Set in Sitwell’s Building, no less, why did I have to move out here to bloody Grantchester? Because I got married, that’s why, married to bloody Marigold. I wish she’d come quickly, I’ve thought of something new, this time, perhaps, it will work.

  But still no Marigold – though she was already forty minutes late. Back in time for tea, she’d said: they always had tea at 4.15 and now it was almost five. Why was she so late – so late, so inconsiderate, so unreliable, such a bloody selfish horrible bitch? Jacquiz fidgeted across the room and found himself looking down at Paris Fiche. He had originally picked it up, some twenty-five minutes ago when he had first started to fuss, simply in order to hold it and thus to associate himself, in some remotely vicarious fashion, with the delinquent Marigold, who had bought it in the Transit Lounge of Orly Airport on the way back from their holiday in Siam. But having once picked it up he had out of long scholarly habit investigated its contents and had come on the article about that wretched fellow, du Touquet. Why, Jacquiz wondered as he began to read the article a second time, had Marigold not mentioned this piece to him? She must have spotted it: it was heavily advertised on the cover, which was probably why Marigold had bought the rag in the first place. Yes, she had bought the Paris Fiche to read about du Touquet, had presumably long since read about him, and had not told Jacquiz. Why not? Bloody, deceitful bitch.

  Marigold bounced into the room, ginger hair disordered (oh, adorable), freckles prominent (which meant mischief) in round, snubby face.

  ‘I never saw you cross the meadow.’

  ‘I got a lift by road.’

  ‘You said you were going to walk.’

  ‘But instead I got a lift.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘That spotty research student who helps you curate the College manuscripts. Or whatever you do with them.’

  ‘Collate them. As you very well know, I am Collator of the Manuscripts of Lancaster College. That young man is my Temporary Under-Collator. He does not live in Grantchester, he is unmarried and lives in Lancaster. So how can he have given you a lift here? Why would he be coming here at all?’

  ‘In order to give me a lift. Then he was going to drive back.’

  ‘Why on earth should he trouble himself to do that?’

  Both of them knew how and where the conversat
ion was going to end, thought Jacquiz, but one must play by the established rules and carry on the rally stroke by stroke.

  ‘Because I asked him to,’ said Marigold.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was tired.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’d just been sucking me off and I’d had three colossal orgasms. Bang on the table where you curate your manuscripts.’

  ‘Collate them. Did you suck him off?’

  ‘No. I gave him a hand job and let him finish off between my tits. Which reminds me. I left my bra behind in your manuscript room –’

  ‘– Chamber of the Manuscripts –’

  ‘– So bring it back with you next time you go in.’

  ‘Do you tell me all this to torture me?’

  ‘I thought it excited you.’

  ‘It does. It also tortures me. To think of you…with just anybody. All the time. On the slightest whim.’

  ‘But oh my God, you’re excited, aren’t you? You’re revolting.’

  ‘And you are sly!’

  ‘No, I’m not that. I’ve told you it all straight out.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me about that article in the Paris Fiche.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Marigold at last. ‘I should never have left the fucking thing about.’

  ‘You call that a response? Answer my question. Why didn’t you show me that article?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want you poking your snooty Jewish snout in.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be interested?’

  ‘Because you’re interested in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I was there when my father told you the story of the Roses. It was that time, just before our wedding, when we went down to see him at Sandwich. Even though we weren’t yet married, I was beginning to run out of illusions about you –’

  ‘– Then why did you marry me?’

  ‘You made a change. Like your Under-Collator’s spots. I’ve a weakness for feeble men. And then at my age a girl begins to need some security, and the one thing about you that isn’t feeble is your bank account. And in a funny sort of way I loved you, then as now.’

  ‘Ah, Marigold.’

  ‘But then as now my eyes were open. I watched you, while my father told you the story down at Sandwich, and I saw your eyes cross and your schnozzle twitch, and I knew what you were thinking. This is what I need to make me big, you were thinking: if I could sniff out the Roses of Picardie, they’d all have to take me seriously at last. The Provost and the dons and the students and the porters, instead of saying, “There goes that long yellow streak of Jewish piss who’s so pompous about his joke job with the mouldy manuscripts”, they’d all have to bow down in adoration in front of great big Jacquiz Helmut who’d brought off the antiquarian coup of the century.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with ambition of that kind. At least I shouldn’t just be treasure-hunting.’

  ‘Because you have treasure already. You’re rich, Jacquiz, but you’re also second-rate as a scholar and unloved…except perhaps by me for yourself. So you think that what you’ll do to make up is to buy yourself a great big load of esteem. You’ll buy your way to the Roses, and then you’ll use them to buy reputation and regard.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. I simply wish to solve a mystery.’

  ‘By spending money which other people wouldn’t have to spend.’

  ‘By risking money which other people are too cowardly to risk.’

  ‘But lessening your risk by using the special knowledge with comes from my family.’

  ‘Why waste it?’

  ‘Because my family, Jacquiz, wants the whole thing forgotten.’

  ‘And yet it was your father who told me about it in the first place.’

  ‘He thought he was telling you a curious after-dinner tale – a tale now so old and so remote that no one would even consider following it up.’

  ‘But if I choose to follow it up, why not?’

  ‘Because, Jacquiz, if there is anything to find at the end of the trail, it will be something exceedingly nasty.’

  ‘If all scholars were deterred by the prospect of nastiness Marigold, very few trails would be followed at all.’

  ‘Nasty for you, Jacquiz, not just in the past or in the abstract, but nasty, injurious, dangerous, perhaps lethal, to you in person.’

  ‘Why this sudden solicitude for my welfare? For all this “love” you talk of, you have never shown me any care. Take this afternoon –’

  ‘– Jacquiz. Whatever it is…this nastiness that goes with the Roses…it’s very old-fashioned. It goes back to a period when husband and wife were deemed to be one flesh. Some of it would probably rub off on me.’

  ‘So now we have it at last. You’re scared.’

  ‘Yes. I’m fascinated, as you are, as my father is, but like him I’m also scared, and since I share only your fascination and not your pitiful ambition, I want the thing left entirely alone as it has been left by my family for three centuries.’

  ‘Then why did you buy the magazine with that article?’

  ‘I’ve just told you: like anyone else who hears it, I’m hooked on the story. I wanted to read…about it; but to read is all I wanted.’

  ‘Well, now that we’ve both read this piece, we can put our heads together and see what it tells us…about IT.’

  ‘Nothing. It’s about the death of du Touquet. IT has been out of his family for three hundred years.’

  ‘Ever since it came into yours.’

  ‘A distant branch of mine, lost and forgotten.’

  ‘So you say. But they’re still around somewhere, for all we know, and therefore still possible to find again. And IT with them.’

  ‘Perhaps. If that branch of the family survives, and if they still have IT. Two big “ifs”, Jacquiz. And in any case that article can’t help you. As I’ve already said –’

  ‘– That article is about the death of du Touquet, and du Touquet had nothing to do with your family or with IT. But don’t you see where that article is leading?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh yes you do. I shall be very careful, Marigold to buy the issue which carries the next instalment.’

  Paris Fiche August 10, 1974

  THE CASE OF THE DEAD GAMESTER Part II

  Today we continue our special correspondent’s enthralling study of the circumstances in which M. le Vicomte du Touquet (son of the last of the line of Comtes de la Tour d’Abbéville) met his terrible death almost exactly one year ago.

  At this stage in our investigation, I must unroll a little of history – the history of the ancestors of our unhappy Vicomte.

  The tale begins with a certain Baudouin du Bourg, who was a cadet of a cadet branch of the family of the Counts of Boulogne… In 1096 Baudouin accompanied his cousin, Eustace III, Count of Boulogne, on the first crusade to the Holy Land. In due course of time Baudouin du Bourg became the trusted factor and deputy of Bohemond, Prince of Antioch, while Eustace perished and was succeeded by his younger brother, another Baudouin, who now became Count of Boulogne and Count of Edessa (the latter feoff having been achieved during the march on Jerusalem).

  Not long afterwards, Count Baudouin was chosen to become King of Jerusalem. Compelled to leave his county of Edessa in order to implant himself on his new throne in the capital, he summoned his cousin Baudouin du Bourg, on grounds of res et fides familiaris, to leave the service of Prince Bohemond and take over the governance and guardianship of Edessa on his senior kinsman’s behalf.

  Baudouin du Bourg, obeying the summons, celebrated his departure from Antioch by appropriating a casket of jewels from the treasury of Bohemond. The jewels in question had been looted by Bohemond shortly after the capture of the city; or rather, they had been looted by a party of his serjeants, from whom they were subsequently confiscated by him. The serjeants yielded their booty quite willingly to Bohemond, as th
e aged Hebrew of Antioch who rightfully owned the jewels and was butchered while defending them had cast a curse, while he lay bleeding to death, on the serjeants who stole them and on all into whose hands the jewels might subsequently come. Or so the legend has always stated. Certain is this at least: that one of the serjeants died of a hideous crimson flux within hours of the theft, thus encouraging his comrades’ belief in the Jew’s curse and persuading them to pass on the jewels, without objection, to Bohemond. Bohemond, knowing of the curse, boasted that he was too big a man to heed it; but one may remark that when the jewels were pilfered, as related above, by the departing Baudouin du Bourg, Bohemond made no effort to repossess himself of them, being glad, we may hazard, to be quit of them.

  So du Bourg went rejoicing on his way to take over his High Stewardship of Edessa – where, very soon, he was afflicted with what the chronicler (an English monk called Godart who wrote in Latin under the name of Salopius) describes as ‘totius corporis ruina et exesio, quae gesta est maculis per membra rodentibus ac squalentibus – the collapse and decay of his whole body, which was brought about by scaly patches that crept over his limbs’. Whereupon du Bourg, being so pointedly reminded of the curse which the jewels purported to carry, swiftly disembarrassed himself by giving them, as a bounty, to his young cousin and esquire, Clovis du Bourg. This latter was about to return to the North of France, where the rich and eminent Marquis de Maubeuge, impressed by rumours of the du Bourgs’ flourishing fortunes in Outremer, had promised him one of his daughters in wedlock.

  The moment Baudouin du Bourg handed over the jewels to his cousin Clovis, the disease left him (‘velut gelu de gramine dissolutum – like a frost thawing from a lawn’, as Salopius remarked). Although this Baudouin was in time to succeed Baudouin of Boulogne as King of Jerusalem, it is not to our purpose to say more of him; for it is the fortunes of Clovis, founder (though not, as will be seen, progenitor) of the dynasty in which we interest ourselves, that must now concern us.

  The said Clovis, then, having set sail for France and his promised bride, at first enjoyed fair winds and refined entertainment at the ports, which lay on his route; but before long he too was subjected to cruel misfortunes, ‘considered by his crew’, wrote Salopius, ‘to be caused by the Jew’s curse which attended the jewels, from which, however, Clovis would in no wise be parted, saying that he had mighty use for them whensoever he should come into France’. Whatever this purpose might be, it began to seem improbable that he should ever reach France to pursue it: for storms, contamination of stores, plague, shipwreck and imprisonment by the Moors of Tunis all impeded Clovis du Bourg so disastrously that he eventually reached Mentone only through the good offices of his contracted father-in-law to be, who paid a stiff ransom to the Moors to redeem him.