Death of a Wine Merchant (20 page)

Back in his office Dr Belfort dismissed Marcel and thanked him for performing his public duty. ‘The really irritating thing,’ he said to his assistant, ‘about these poor patients of ours is how fervently they believe in their own fantasies. The man’s real name, according to the doctor, is Albert Bouchet. Lived around Beaune all his life apparently. But if that peasant
who thought he was an Irish peer had been dressed up in fancy clothes we might, we just might have believed him.’

‘I think you underestimate yourself, sir,’ said the young man. ‘I’m sure you’d have rumbled him whatever he’d been wearing.’

There was a staircase to their left at the end of the corridor. Powerscourt stopped cursing the Alchemist and suddenly remembered a very sad poem, written by a man called John Clare who was locked up in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for over twenty years.

Powerscourt wondered about the inhabitants of this prison disguised as a mental hospital. He tried to work out how the Alchemist had managed to have him locked up in this madhouse. He thought of the three Sherlock Holmeses, deprived of opium and the solid sense of Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson’s cooking. Were there Napoleons strutting round these dismal corridors, triumphant after Austerlitz, worried after Borodino or the retreat from Moscow, despairing on the bleak rock of St Helena before they were fifty years old? Mad poets perhaps, Baudelaires of the insane world, spouting decadent but meaningless verse in their Spartan cells?
Philosophe
lunatics preaching the rational virtues of The Enlightenment to a few colleagues in the asylum canteen?

They were on the second floor now, twenty pairs of eyes, alerted by the sound of boot on wood, staring through their peepholes at the latest arrival. Welcome to the Maison de Fous. Welcome to Hell. Powerscourt remembered one doctor telling him how easy it can be to have people declared insane. Convince the relevant people that somebody is mad and then everybody else will believe it. We all know he’s mad. It’s common knowledge. This doctor had terrifying stories of the wrong people being locked up, in Ireland, or in France, or even in England. It was very difficult to liberate victims such as these because nobody knew they had been locked away in the first place.

They were on the third floor now. The warder was sifting his way through an enormous pile of keys. At last he found the right one and pushed Powerscourt into his cell.

‘There you go,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘you’re home at last.’

By late afternoon Lady Lucy Powerscourt was seriously worried. Maybe it was her nerves, maybe it was the local cooking, but the chicken she had at lunchtime had not agreed with her. Stomach pains were added to the knot of anxiety that possessed her. She had walked for an hour round the hotel square, reasoning that if Francis were to return they must surely see each other beneath the plane trees. Beaune had gone quiet by late afternoon. Lady Lucy wondered what the French did for the rest of Sunday. They went to church,
of course. Then they had an enormous lunch with as many relatives as they could lay their hands on. And then? Perhaps they all went to sleep from the smallest baby to the oldest
grandmére
. The worst thing, she kept telling herself as she contemplated French family life, was that, unlike them, she had nobody to talk to. In London she could have picked up the telephone and talked to her relatives for the rest of the day. She could have located Johnny Fitzgerald and poured out her worries to him. She had discovered the telegraphic address of William Burke but she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She knew men sent telegraphic messages to each other all the time, often concerning the movements of share prices or the winners of important horse races. But the telegraph was an alien male world that she did not understand. Late in the afternoon she enlisted the help of a young man on the hotel reception who had been sending telegraphs all afternoon, triumphant messages of purchases of the contents of the wine auction to the hotels and grand restaurants of Paris. Olivier, for such was the young man’s name, undertook to send her message. It would, he assured her, be with Mr William Burke in his bank first thing in the morning.

‘Francis missing,’ she wrote. She had some distant memory that you weren’t meant to use too many words. ‘Please tell Johnny Fitzgerald and Mr Pugh. Replies to this number. Most urgent.’

She felt slightly better after the despatch. She might not be winning the war, but at least she had sent for reinforcements. Not for the first time that day she wondered what Francis would have wanted her to do. And where he was. And if he was still alive.

As the street lights were illuminated in the fashionable district of Holland Park in west London Sir Jasper Bentinck KC sat at his desk on the top floor of his house overlooking the great
wide open spaces across the road. It was his custom at this time to read through the most pressing of his forthcoming cases. Monday and Tuesday, he was appearing for the Crown in Rex versus Griffiths, a straightforward case of fraud. Later in the week he was leading for the prosecution in Rex versus Colville. Sir Jasper had read the papers some weeks before the committal hearing and been astonished at the lack of any proper defence. Charles Augustus Pugh, he saw, was to be the counsel for the defence at the Old Bailey and Pugh was not a man to let his clients down. He also had a reputation for springing surprise witnesses on the court at the very last minute. Sir Jasper lit a large cigar and stared upwards at his ceiling. He remained in this position for some fifteen minutes, searching through the evidence in his mind for what might be the weak link in the prosecution’s case, some unexplored avenue where the defence might yet rally their forces for a surprise victory. Try as he might, Sir Jasper could find no holes in his case. He was not a man given to self-doubt or self-criticism, Sir Jasper. Leading barristers from the Middle Temple or any other Temple seldom are. If he could find no weakness in the case, then there was no weakness in it.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was wondering about the catering arrangements in his new establishment. There were no lists pasted on the back of the door informing clients about the times of meals, particularly breakfast, and the time by which they must vacate their room on their day of departure. Somehow he doubted there was much information available anywhere here about days of departure. Probably there was none at all. Nor were there any menus to be seen. He wondered if the solitaries like himself were given room service for their meals while the rest of the customers, accommodated, he suspected, in vast undecorated dormitories, ate equally cheerless food in some huge canteen. He wondered if the food in a French asylum would be better than in an English
one. Did they serve a glass or two of wine with lunch and dinner, surely part of the ancient ancestral inheritance of every Frenchman in this part of the world?

Powerscourt began to pace around his cell. It was not large, about twelve feet by eight. There was one small window looking out over the dark. He pulled as hard as he could on the bars but they yielded nothing at all. There was a slit in the door on to the corridor, designed to let people look in rather than the other way round. The door itself was sturdy and the hinges that bound it to the wall were strong. The floorboards, he discovered, lying flat on them for ease of inspection, were joined together with some adhesive that would not give way to human hand or, he suspected, to human hand with hammer. No plank to batter a warder could be constructed out of this floor. There was nothing for him in the walls either. He tried knocking as hard as he could on the two sides of his cell but there was no reply. There was a crude bucket in the corner that would be useless as a weapon. There remained the bed. Powerscourt pulled off the mattress. It was thicker than he would have expected. Maybe the inmates were encouraged to sleep as long as possible and cause less work for the warders. He remembered suddenly the doctor prescribing for him the same medicine as the rest of the third floor. Were they all solitaries on this floor? And what should he do with the medicine when it came? He felt sure it would be some powerful form of slow-you-down-and-make-you-sleepy medicine, probably designed to turn him into a semi-automaton in a week or so, capable of a few bodily functions, incapable of thought. He suspected this was the target condition as far as the doctors were concerned, a collection of patients who had been turned into zombies. All he could think of doing with the medicine was to try to hold it in the back of his mouth until the warder had gone and then spit it into the bucket.

Five minutes later he was trying to prise one iron leg away from the body of his bed and finding it impossible. He heard footsteps approaching up the corridor outside. He threw the
mattress back on the bed and sat on it. An elderly man, clad in that blue uniform of the warders, stood in the doorway. Behind him, Powerscourt could just see, he had a primitive sort of trolley. The man was about Powerscourt’s height with no moustache and a bald head.

‘Good evening,’ said the warder in a guarded sort of voice.

‘Good evening to you,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. Remember the nursery rules, always be polite to the servants and visiting tradesmen like chimney sweeps.

‘Now then,’ said the warder, reaching for something on his trolley, ‘these are for you.’ He tossed Powerscourt a pair of pale green trousers, a worn vest, a green shirt and a green jumper. ‘You must have this on when somebody calls in the morning. They’ll take what you’re wearing now into safekeeping. And you must wear this at all times.’ He tossed Powerscourt a small disc on a string with a number on it. ‘That’s your hospital number, you see,’ the warder said, ‘so we know who you are.’

Powerscourt had been making a careful examination of the man’s keys. He carried an enormous bunch of them attached to a ring on his belt. Each one, he saw, had a small tag beside it.

‘Settling in all right, are you?’ The warder believed in being as polite to the patients as he could. That was what his local priest Father Jugie had told him when he discovered the warder’s occupation. ‘They are all God’s children, they are all worthy of his grace. The good Lord does not mind if they speak to him in a different language.’

‘I can’t complain,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m not sure about the food, mind you. I haven’t actually had any yet.’

‘I’ll be back with that in about a quarter of an hour. I have to give the medicine out first. I’ve got yours just here. This’ll calm you down, it calms everybody down.’

He handed over a large beaker filled with a cloudy liquid. Powerscourt smiled at the warder and took it into his mouth. He did not swallow but went back to lie on his bed.
He thought it would be easier to avoid conversation if he was lying down. The stuff was beginning to burn the back of his mouth. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold it ‘See you in a moment,’ said the warder and shuffled off on his rounds. Powerscourt strode to his bucket and spat into it. He wondered if the stuff could weaken you even by being in your mouth for a few minutes. A quarter of an hour later the warder, who he discovered was called Jean, brought his supper, a stringy piece of meat that might once have been pork and some overcooked vegetables. There was no wine. As he lay down to sleep Patient Number 35601 reflected that it had indeed been an interesting day. He wondered about Lady Lucy. He decided to stop fretting about the Alchemist as there was nothing he could do about him now. Escape, that was the thing. Escape, before the medicine turned him into one of the waking dead. Escape in time to pursue his inquiries in Beaune. And as he drifted off to sleep he remembered that from the morning there were only a few days left before the trial of Cosmo Colville. Powerscourt fell asleep with the warder’s belt drifting across his brain, huge bunches of keys floating through his mind, enormous keys two or three feet long, long thin keys, pencil slim and several inches long, ordinary-looking keys that might open your own front door, tiny delicate keys for opening drawers or secret caskets. On that belt, he felt sure, were the keys of his kingdom, twelve feet by eight, one rough bed, one bucket in the corner, one small window to the outside world, one slit in a door for your enemies to make sure you were still incarcerated. Welcome to the Maison d’Aliénés.

Lady Lucy Powerscourt dozed fitfully through the night in her Beaune hotel. No Dukes of Burgundy after whom the establishment was named came to visit her in her dreams. Sometimes her right arm reached for the space where her husband would have been, but Francis was not there. Some of the time she thought Francis was still alive. The rest of the time she thought he was dead. These fears had crossed her mind often in the past when she felt his life was in danger. How would she tell the children? How would the twins survive, growing up without a father? Would they be damaged in some way? She wondered about the funeral arrangements. Would there be some sort of Memorial Service for him, graced by various forgers and burglars and a whole host of characters Francis had saved from prison or the gallows? And where would he want to be buried, laid to rest? She suspected if she were honest that he might like to join his parents in a Powerscourt grave in a Protestant cemetery in his native Ireland. Then I could not be with him at the end, she said to herself, we’d end up in different cemeteries hundreds of miles apart and I couldn’t bear it. For the first time that day she began to cry.

It was a short paragraph in the newspapers that did it. Nathaniel Colville was just finishing his breakfast when it
caught his eye. He was to tell friends later that it was almost a miracle he saw it at all for he scarcely bothered to read the newspapers any more. ‘Trouble at wine merchant’ the headline said. It was part of a daily column that conveyed slightly gossipy information to its readers. ‘We are given to understand,’ Nathaniel read on, ‘that times are not easy for the firm of Colvilles where one of the partners has been murdered and the other is awaiting trial for the deed in Pentonville prison. No figure of substance has, as yet, appeared to take their place in the direction of the firm.’

Nathaniel put down his piece of toast. Trouble at wine merchant indeed. No figure of substance. It was monstrous. There was nothing a man could sue for but the innuendoes were as broad as daylight. The man could almost have put his message up in lights at Piccadilly Circus. Nathaniel shouted for his dog and set forth to walk off his wrath in the back garden. This garden had once been the envy of the other Colvilles. It was enormous. There was a tennis court on one side and a croquet lawn on the other. Banks of roses used to circle the vast expanse of grass. Ranks of fruit trees and bushes were organized at the bottom. Flowers whose names Nathaniel never knew came up every year to grace his garden. Now the senior gardener was on his last legs and the younger one was not much better. He was over seventy and while the spirit might have been willing the flesh was undoubtedly weak. If you knew where to look you could usually spot him asleep in the early afternoons, snoring quietly behind the raspberries. The grass on the tennis court was overgrown, baselines and tram lines scarcely visible now. It was almost halfway up the croquet hoops on the other side, so deep that the balls themselves would have been hard to see. Nathaniel’s dog Bacchus much preferred the wilderness to the order that had prevailed before. He would disappear into the wilder sections of the garden and leap up and down in pursuit of insects. Nathaniel decided this morning that his garden had become the mirror image of his life. Lack of organization.
Bad planning. No strategic direction. The problems here were the same as those at the firm. Trouble at wine merchant indeed! Damn the journalists! Damn the newspapers! I may be seventy-two years old, Nathaniel said to himself, but I’m not too ancient to get on top of things. I’m going to pay off these two old fellows and employ some new gardeners. I’m going to put on my best suit and hat and go down to Colvilles this very morning. I’m going to take charge. And I’m going to find somebody to help me in the meantime. And then I’ll find some bright young fellow from some other firm to come and run the place. Colvilles were not born to provide idle tittle-tattle in the financial pages.

He strode back to his house and scribbled a short note. A footman was despatched to deliver it to the Chelsea residence of Sir Pericles Freme. Nathaniel had known him years ago and though he might not be able to secure his services full-time Freme could still join the board of Colvilles in an advisory capacity. He would not be alone. Nathaniel Colville had never felt happy doing business alone. All his life he had worked closely with his brother Walter. Now he would have a new companion in arms.

An hour later Nathaniel and Sir Pericles were installed in the Colville Head Office They brought with them an air of confidence, of experience. These were men who knew what they were doing. Inside forty-eight hours morale had improved dramatically. Colvilles, people in the trade said, are back in business.

Powerscourt slept surprisingly well in his hospital cell. He awoke to find that the outlines of a plan were forming in his mind. He rejected his first option, bribery. He had in his pocket as many francs as a warder here might earn in six months. The warder might help him escape, or he might tell the authorities and then Powerscourt would be a marked man, locked up somewhere even more forbidding, the knock-out drops in his
daily medicine increased to a giant’s dose. He wondered at first about violence, about why nobody attacked the warders, about the violence that might be needed to overpower the guard and steal his keys. Surely some of the prisoners must be big and burly, bodies strengthened by years of manual labour, well able to overcome a warder before breakfast. Then he remembered the knock-out medicines. What had the warder said to him yesterday evening? ‘This’ll calm you down, it calms everybody down.’ The hospital authorities must have worked out how much medicine was needed to incapacitate every size and shape of patient they were likely to encounter. Maybe they had a book full of details with patients calibrated by age, weight, height, occupation. Extra large doses for blacksmiths and prize fighters. They didn’t have to worry, the authorities, about violence from the inmates. The madmen were incapable of it. Powerscourt tried to work out if that huge key ring the man carried contained the keys for all the doors in the hospital. He remembered from the way in that he had gone straight from the reception area to the third floor without any gates or barriers in the way. Did the man have the key to the front door? If not, did he have the key of some other exit, back door, side door, tradesmen’s entrance, madmen’s gate?

Lady Lucy’s breakfast consisted of warm croissants and jam and delicious hot chocolate. Her husband’s consisted of a hard roll and a glass of cold water. Powerscourt managed not to swallow the medicine again, but he knew he would not be able to keep this up for very long. The morning warder was different from the one he had talked to the evening before. He too was old, leading Powerscourt to speculate that they might be able to pay the elder ones less than the younger men. But sooner or later a more watchful warder would keep looking at him to make sure he had swallowed his dose or ask him to open his mouth. He would have to escape today or it might
be too late. Evening would be better than daytime. It was dark between five and six in Burgundy in November. The last round of medicine came at about half past five. Powerscourt settled down to wait. He lay on his bed and tried to remember as much as he could about the journey to his cell the day before, about the locks on the front door. If he had known then what he knew now he would have taken a much greater interest in his surroundings. He wondered if they were given any exercise in this French prison. He saw in his mind’s eye one of those enclosed courtyards so dear to the hearts of English prison architects where the inmates trudged round and round under the watchful eyes of the guards in a ghastly arabesque, not allowed to speak to each other, unable to see anything of the real world except the stone blocks of their prison house and the little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky. Lunch time came and a further round of medicine, once more deposited in the bucket when the guard had left.

Powerscourt was now thinking about a weapon. He had his fists, of course, and they might well suffice to incapacitate the warder. He tried swinging the bed without the mattress but it was cumbersome and slow. He lay down once more and thought about his problem. His first plan had involved taking the warder’s uniform as a disguise on his way out of the hospital but he wasn’t sure one man without a weapon could force another to remove the outer layer of his clothes. The keys? Were they heavy enough to threaten a man’s face? Would they be credible? How about the belt? He wondered what they would do to him if he beat up a warder and didn’t manage to escape. He didn’t like to think about that. Shortly after lunch he lay down on his bed once more and made plans for his future.

Lady Lucy certainly had a more varied morning than her husband. A cable from William Burke arrived shortly after breakfast, informing her that Johnny Fitzgerald and Charles
Augustus Pugh had been informed of her husband’s disappearance. Johnny Fitzgerald, he reported, had set off immediately for Beaune and hoped to be there late the following day. Burke had taken it upon himself to telephone Lord Rosebery, a close friend of the Powerscourt family and a former Prime Minister. Rosebery had hurried round to his old stomping ground, the Foreign Office. Shortly before eleven o’clock a telephone call from the British Embassy in Paris informed Lady Lucy that a Second Secretary was setting off for Beaune within the hour. Half an hour after that a handsome young French police inspector arrived and took from Lady Lucy all the details she could remember about her husband’s last hours in Beaune. He would begin his inquiries, he told her, with the Hospices de Beaune. A cousin of his was a sister in the hospital and should be able to help. Lady Lucy marvelled at all this movement and activity marshalled on her behalf. She suspected that Francis would manage his escape all on his own.

The light was beginning to fade and Powerscourt began to laugh. A visitor from the external world might have deduced that this one was indeed mad, pacing the floor of his twelve foot by eight cell, peering occasionally out of the window. And laughing. Perhaps he needed some medicine. In fact Powerscourt had just realized something about the keys on the warder’s ring. There had just been time that morning for Powerscourt to see a row of medicine phials on the trolley he brought with him. That surely meant that the warder had the keys to all the doors that held the patients on this floor due to take their daily dose. That also meant that once Powerscourt had the keys he could open all the other doors. He could let the patients out and lead a great escape, a mass break-out from the Maison d’Aliénés. It would be tremendous. Then he wondered how wise it would be to release a band of lunatics into the French countryside. Maybe some of them were
capable of violence or worse. Then he told himself that the rapists and the vicious criminals would be held in a prison rather than locked up in the Maison de Fous. And if the patients he might liberate were really mentally ill, wandering in their wits, paranoid, not sure who they were, would it be fair to those patients to return them to the hostile world that had caused them to break down in the first place? Would he have a better chance of success on his own or with a platoon of the insane for company?

The Second Secretary from the British Embassy in Paris arrived at Lady Lucy’s hotel in time for tea. He was a most fashionable young man, discreetly fashionable, Lady Lucy thought, surveying the expensive shirt and the slim gold cuff links and the highly polished shoes. She wondered if he did the polishing himself. Perhaps there was a sort of shoe-shine wallah inside the Embassy retained to ensure that the British diplomatic corps had the brightest footwear in Paris. He took a small cup of lemon tea with Lady Lucy, Piers Montagu, before departing for the Town Hall and the Mayor. He firmly believed, he told Lady Lucy, that the Mayor held the key to all French towns and cities. He was a strategic point, said Piers, in the manner of the Château of Hougoumont at the Battle of Waterloo. Hold the Château, or the Mayor, and success was assured.

The young Inspector learnt little from the sister at the Hôtel Dieu. Nobody had seen any of the people involved in the chase the previous day before. They were all strangers. They could not be citizens of Beaune, surely, or we would have seen them about the town. You would not forget the man with no teeth for instance or the round man who was his companion. During the afternoon the policeman rang round some places in Beaune where the stranger might have been seen, the hotels, the restaurants, such
chambres d’hôte
as were on the telephone. There were no reports of an English milord
anywhere. He rang the Maison d’Aliénés only because it was on the approved list of places to call in the hunt for missing persons. The administrative office told him that there had only been one new admission in the previous twenty-four hours, a Burgundy peasant called Albert Bouchet.

Emily Colville had turned into a different person. Or rather, Emily thought she had turned into a different person, a better person. It had all started with a present, a present from Montague, brought home from town one cold evening some weeks before. It was unusual for Montague to give presents, and even more unusual for him to give a present of this sort. It was oblong, and quite heavy, and seemed to Emily as her fingers crossed over the slight gaps in the surface to be in three different parts.

‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’ Montague asked with a smile.

‘Of course,’ she replied, and worked her way to three volumes of a book called
Middlemarch
written by somebody called George Eliot. It was the first time she had ever seen her husband with a book.

‘Have you read this?’ she asked her husband.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Montague, ‘my great aunt Philippa thought you might like it.’

‘Great Aunt Philippa, I see,’ said Emily. She had only met this great aunt once, an old lady more interested in the arts than in the world of commerce. This Philippa thought that life with Montague might be a little dull for a quick intelligent girl like Emily. George Eliot might fill the gap for a while. But George Eliot had done more than fill the gap. George Eliot made a convert. The new Emily longed to be good. She held imaginary conversations with Dorothea Brooke. The prize of goodness was always in her sights. And when she had finished
Middlemarch
, she told herself, she would be twice as good after reading
The Mill on the Floss
, twice as good again
after
Felix Holt,
The Radical
. A great parade of virtue stretched out before her now.