Death of a wine merchant

16

Powerscourt had never known a Channel crossing like it. The captain, it transpired later, had serious reservations about setting forth but had been overruled by the managers of the shipping line. Now the boat, apparently so large and so solid on the quayside at Dover, had turned into a matchstick box, rising and falling in the great swells of the angry sea, its metal shrieking and battered in the fury of the waves. The passengers were confined to the great cabin where they clung on to the seats that were fixed to the floor or held on to the railings by the bar. Anybody on deck would have been swept away to certain death in the swirling embrace of the angry waters. Up on his bridge the captain peered ahead, seeking any respite in the storm. There were several small children on board and they huddled sadly into their mothers’ coats, their faces drawn and pale, asking from time to time when it was going to end or were they all going to die and go to heaven.

Lady Lucy had never been seasick on board ship until today. A nauseous mixture of sea water and vomit swirled round the little table where she and her Francis tried to make a shelter from the tempest. She remembered suddenly that Powerscourt’s first wife Caroline and their little son Thomas had been drowned in a terrible storm in the Irish Sea years before. She hoped Francis wasn’t going to meet his first wife again after another maritime disaster. Perhaps, she thought, they have a special section in heaven for people drowned at sea. At least she presumed her husband would be going to heaven. Looking at him now, she saw that his eyes were closed and his lips moving. She wondered if he was praying or reciting some of his favourite poetry. Tennyson’s Ulysses, she remembered, had a pretty rough time on the seas of Greece, taking ten years after the Trojan Wars to reach the craggy island of Ithaca that he called home.

It took over three hours to cross the first ten miles of the English Channel. There was nobody on board now who had not been sick. Many were throwing up for the fifth or sixth time and had little left in their stomachs. The captain sent word that he thought the last stages of the journey might be easier than the first. There was a sort of embryonic hospital in the corner of the great cabin now, populated by people who had broken an arm or a leg sliding across the floor, unable to stop before they crashed into some immovable object.

Just when you could dimly see the French coast, a thin pencil line of land that wasn’t moving or sliding or falling over, it began to rain. It rained, as Lady Lucy said afterwards, as if it were the last downfall ever on earth, as if all the rivers and all the oceans of the world had to give up their water for it to be hurled down on to the English Channel. It lashed down in torrents so dense you could only see a couple of yards in front of your face. Any other shipping close by would have been a grave hazard. Powerscourt looked at his watch from time to time, realizing that all their train connections had, quite literally, been blown apart. He might not have been aware of the latest Pugh deadline, now in Markham Square, but he was sure the start of the trial could not be very far away. And here he was, miles away from London on a mission that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have described as a wild goose chase.

Nearly eight hours after they set out from Dover their ship docked at Calais. The passengers, some still shaking from their ordeal, others wrapped round husbands or wives, small children held very tight in their parents’ arms, descended the gang plank gingerly and wobbled about helplessly on the unmoving dry land. The captain was waiting to greet them at the bottom, rather like a vicar come to shake hands with his congregation after service on Sunday. He proffered his apologies, assuring everybody that he would never have set forth if he had known the conditions were going to be so harsh. The passengers thanked him for bringing them safely from England to France. Powerscourt found a train bound for Paris that was leaving in twenty minutes. The man in the ticket office said they would have to wait until the next day, a Sunday, to reach Beaune.

Tristram Bennett was back in the tiny cottage behind Brympton Hall. He was lying in bed, completely naked except for an enormous cigar. Emily was lying beside him, her hands folded behind her head, eyes closed, a dreamy look on her face, her shock of red hair bright against the pillows. Tristram had been thinking seriously about his own position in Colvilles and the dues he was owed by society in general. He had been hurt by various episodes in his youth when he felt people, particularly schoolmasters, had not paid him the respect due to a man of his abilities. There had been that refusal to take his going into the Church seriously. On another occasion they had laughed when his mother suggested putting him in for the Diplomatic Service. Only a month ago he had heard of a contemporary of his at school who had just been made a director of a leading bank in the City of London. And here he was, languishing away as junior manager for Colvilles in East Anglia, a post that had provided insufficient scope for his genius.

Emily was not quite asleep. She was dreaming of a great ball where she had gone with Tristram. Now he had left her to play cards and she was besieged by a host of beautiful young men, asking her to dance. The champagne was flowing freely. Through the great windows you could see the garden glowing in the lights strung between the trees and the young couples strolling arm in arm along the paths. This was where she belonged, Emily thought, as she was led away to the dance floor by a young hussar with a slight scar on his cheek that made him seem even more romantic.

‘I tell you what I’m going to do,’ said Tristram, taking a long pull at his cigar. ‘The firm is now as full of holes as one of those Swiss cheeses. Randolph gone, the fool Cosmo locked up and not speaking for something he didn’t do, the old boy Nathaniel out of his depth and past it. Don’t you agree, Emily? You’ve watched what’s been going on.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Emily although it was hard to tell whether she was speaking to an imaginary lover in her reverie or the real one on her right-hand side.

‘They’ve never given me a chance,’ Tristram went on. ‘Just because I was unlucky enough to back a few wrong horses and put my money on the losing cards once or twice doesn’t mean I haven’t got a financial brain. Oh no. It just needs a chance. And I won’t get a chance to do that mouldering up here with the donkey rides on the beach and the boats messing about on those ridiculous Broads.

‘I’m going to sell my shares, all of them, and set myself up as an independent investor with the proceeds. How about that, Emily?’

Emily was still dancing with the hussar with the scar. ‘That sounds very nice, Tristram,’ she said.

Now it was Tristram’s turn to dream, staring out of the little window at the upper branches of the trees waving in the wind. He saw himself at a large desk in a large office in the City, signing cheques and bankers’ drafts, looking for new investment opportunities. His firm would expand, possibly, into casinos and luxury hotels and horse racing. Surely, he thought, you couldn’t lose if you owned the bookies or the roulette wheel. ‘Yes, Mr Bennett,’ ‘What good taste you have, Mr Bennett,’ ‘Thank you, Mr Bennett.’ He was completely incapable of seeing himself as others saw him. He had, after all, been the only boy in his school who had been totally on the side of Malvolio through all his troubles at the court of Olivia in Shakespeare’s Illyria. They were both sick with self-love, the lovers, dreaming their way to running Colvilles or enjoying the most perfect romance.

A thin sunshine illuminated the last stage of the Powerscourts’ journey from Dijon to Beaune the following morning. They were following the route of the Cote de Nuits in the heart of Burgundy, one of the most famous wine routes in the world. Powerscourt remembered travelling the same path years before with his father when his three sisters had been left in London with their mother while the men went off to taste the wines of France. Louis the Fourteenth, his father told him, had been devoted to the Cote de Nuits, Madame de Pompadour had more expensive tastes with Romanee Conti, and Napoleon never set forth on campaign without a decent supply of Chambertin. Lady Lucy had fallen asleep, still weary from the ordeals of yesterday. Stretching away on the south-and east-facing slopes the vines reached out in ordered rows like soldiers on parade. The villages with the numinous names, Powerscourt remembered, Marsannay la Cote and Gevrey Chambertin, Chambolle Musigny and Nuits St Georges, Vougeot and Reulle Vergy, Vosne Romanee and Aloxe Corton all had a number of features in common. They all seemed to be virtually uninhabited, windows shuttered, gates to the store rooms locked and barred. Sometimes an occasional peasant could be seen tending the vines as they stretched across the hillside but nobody could describe the art of the vigneron as being arduous. And every now and then there was a sudden glimpse of hidden wealth, an imposing new house, a brand new car, a Citroen come to grace the hills and the sleepy villages of Burgundy.

The Alchemist’s brother Marcel had not heard of the terrible storm in the Channel. He had expected Powerscourt to arrive in Beaune the day before. One of his men, Jean Jacques, a slim young man with only a couple of teeth left from street fighting, had been posted at the railway station for most of the day to vet the arrivals. The Alchemist had sent descriptions of Powerscourt and Lady Lucy over from London.

‘They’re not coming, boss,’ Jean Jacques had told Marcel at the end of the day. ‘They’re probably still in London. We could head back to Lyon.’ Jean Jacques thought he had a girl in Lyon.

‘Don’t hurt yourself trying to think, Jean Jacques,’ had been Marcel’s reply, ‘just get yourself back down the station first thing in the morning.’

Powerscourt overheard his neighbours on the train talking in a very excited fashion. Most French conversations, he would have admitted readily, took place in an excited fashion but this was something more. After a moment or two he looked at the date on his newspaper. He stared out at the vines of Comblanchien going past his window. He looked again at the prosperous pair conducting the conversation. They were both in their Sunday best, boots polished, dark waistcoats and great jackets to conceal their girth, hair washed and moustaches waxed. Powerscourt didn’t think they were going to church. Gradually it came back to him. He remembered the hotel-keeper telling his father and himself about it late one night at their hotel in Meursault when the other guests had gone to bed. He remembered even more clearly the very special bottle the hotel-keeper had fetched from his cellar to keep them company. Powerscourt told Lucy the story as soon as she woke up.

‘This is a special day in Beaune, Lucy, one of the most special days in the year. Hundreds of years ago, in the middle of the fourteen hundreds or somewhere around there, a Chancellor of Burgundy and his wife decided to endow a hospital for the sick here in Beaune. It was going to look after everybody, rich or poor. They’d just had a lot of plagues in these parts, I seem to remember. Nicolas Rolin, that was the man’s name. Anyway, he endowed his hospital not with money but with vineyards. And not just any old vineyard but ones that sat between Aloxe Corton and Meursault, two of the finest wines in Burgundy, or anywhere in the world come to that. I think the hospital may have been left other parcels of land and vineyards over the years.’

‘What’s all that got to do with today, Francis? There’s nothing special going on in the wine world today, is there?’

‘There is here,’ said her husband triumphantly. ‘On the third Sunday in November the Hospices de Beaune – that’s the all-purpose name for the hospital and its various sections – have an auction where they sell off all their wines from that year. It’s considered a great honour to have acquired one of these great vintages and sometimes the wine goes for far more than anybody expected. But this is the important thing, Lucy. All the money raised at the Hospices de Beaune auction goes to pay for the hospital, the nurses, the doctors, everything is paid for out of the funds realized at the wine auction. And today is the third Sunday in November.’

‘What happens if they have a bad year, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘No idea,’ said her husband cheerfully, ‘I expect they keep some over from the good years.’

Beaune station was packed with visitors when they arrived. Small local trains seemed to have been bringing in more people from the surrounding villages. Lady Lucy noticed Jean Jacques staring with particular interest at her husband and resolved to make appointments with the dentist for all her family as soon as she reached home.

‘Would I be right in thinking, Francis, that you would like to go to this auction?’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I would, definitely. It can’t take very long and we don’t have to stay till the end. It would be a bit like being in London on the day of a Coronation and not going to see the parades and the procession. This notice here says the auction is to start at eleven o’clock in the courtyard of the Hotel Dieu. I presume God’s hotel must be part of the hospice. We just have to follow the crowd.’

They made their way through streets devoted to the complexities of wine making, shops selling staves to hold the vines, bottle makers, barrel makers, label makers, exporters, blenders, even some shops selling the wine itself. Twice more Lady Lucy noticed the man with no teeth drawing very close to them. His eyes seemed to be locked for the moment on Powerscourt’s back.

The Hotel Dieu had an innocuous-looking frontage. As they handed over what seemed to be an enormous sum of money to gain entrance to the courtyard they saw that they were in an extraordinary building complex. It was long and rectangular in shape. A balcony ran all the way round the first floor. The wings to the left and rear had spectacular roofs of coloured glazed tiles of yellow and blue and red broken up by double rows of dormer windows. Powerscourt thought they had been transported back hundreds of years. A King Henry or a King Edward might ride past on some magnificent horse. Beautiful ladies of the court in long dresses might peep out of the windows. At a high table on the balcony at the opposite end from the entrance there sat four middle-aged men. One was wearing the robes of the Mayor. Another, dressed in white, might have been the superintendent of the hospital. In the very centre, another official-looking figure sat as if he were the centre of attention, the gavel in his hand, his eyes scanning the potential customers on the balcony and in the courtyard below. The table was decorated with bottles of wine, red to the left and white to the right. Right at the front of the table a couple of Nebuchadnezzars holding twenty bottles each kept watch on the proceedings. Powerscourt rather wished that Chancellor Rolin and his wife could return in their fifteenth-century garments to preside over it all. Lady Lucy broke into his reverie and whispered close to his ear.

‘Francis, there’s a man behind us. I think he’s following you. He’s been behind us all the way from the railway station. You can recognize him from the teeth, or rather the lack of them. He can’t be more than twenty-five but he’s hardly got any left. Teeth, I mean.’

‘Would you say,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that his intentions were friendly or unfriendly?’

‘Unfriendly, Francis, definitely unfriendly.’

‘I’d better see if I can give him the slip,’ said Powerscourt, peering about him for ways of escape. Years of experience told him that there was little point in waiting for meetings with unfriendly powers. ‘You stay put here, my love, no point in the two of us falling into enemy hands. If it takes some time I’ll see you back at the hotel. It’s just round the corner.’

Some ten feet to his left there was a large double door. One half of it was slightly ajar, as if people inside were trying to keep an eye on the auction. Firing a fusillade of excusez-mois and pardons, Powerscourt slipped through the people in front of him and shot through the door. He disturbed a flock of nuns who had obviously taken temporary leave of their charges to watch the auction. He started to run. After a moment or two he heard another pair of boots behind him. He shot round a corner and almost collided with another nun, dressed in sober grey like the others, helping a man on crutches. Then round another corner and he was in one of the most extraordinary rooms he had ever seen. His impressions of the Grand Salle passed in a kaleidoscope of size and colour. An enormous room well over two hundred feet long. Fifty feet high and fifty feet wide. A great timber roof in the shape of an upturned keel. Gargoyles and monsters in green at the end of the beams. Ranged along the sides, fourteen to a row, long wooden compartments with beds covered in red blankets and white sheets, set back a couple of feet from the walls. In the beds, some sitting up, some asleep or dozing, some with their curtains drawn closed, the patients of the biggest ward of the Hospices de Beaune, the Salle des Pauvres, the Room of the Poor. Moving quietly around the huge space, the nuns, one or two carrying medicines, others helping the sick to the bathrooms, the lucky ones waiting in attendance on the doctors who sat by their patients and reviewed their treatment. Powerscourt thought it was the most unlikely place for a chase he had ever been in. But the footsteps were behind him again. The nuns at the double doors couldn’t have held the man with no teeth up for very long. He shot behind the left-hand row of beds and tiptoed slowly up the ward. An elderly lady peered at him indignantly from what he thought must be bed number seven or eight and was about to speak when he held his fingers to his lips and made the sign of the cross. That seemed to keep her quiet for the time being. He heard the footsteps, slower now. A man with both arms in plaster turned slowly in his bed and stared at Powerscourt. Powerscourt resisted the urge to write another message on the man’s plaster and tiptoed on. Halfway up the line of beds there was a break and sufficient room to let Powerscourt or a nurse through into the main thoroughfare. He tiptoed quickly into the gap and wished he hadn’t.

The man following him was walking quite slowly up the Salle des Pauvres, peering behind the beds on either side. Powerscourt could stay where he was or he could run. He ran. He shot up to the ends of the row, behind the beds with the red blankets, inspected in astonishment by the patients, one reading her missal, another inspecting herself in a mirror, then out past a painting of the Last Judgement on his left and into the next ward. This was much smaller, with half a dozen beds and some very ill patients indeed. Two of them were chalky white in the face and looked as though they might not last the day. Two more were asleep or dead already. Powerscourt sprinted on. Advancing towards him now was an elderly nun in the regulation grey carrying a tray of medicines. The tray seemed to be rather large and she was holding it well in front of her. When she saw Powerscourt she opened her mouth as if she was going to speak or perhaps to scream. Then, almost in slow motion, the tray slipped from her grasp and a whole flotilla of medicines fell to the floor, pills white and pills red, lotions, potions, mixtures, medicines of every shape and size. They slithered across the floor, forming a slippery sheet that might cause anybody coming her way to fall into this viscous soup of medicines. Powerscourt didn’t stop to find out if his pursuer retained his grip on the floor. He was almost through the next room which seemed to be filled with elderly women when he saw a phalanx of nursing power advancing towards him. In the lead, resplendent in white, was a formidable woman of about forty years of age. Powerscourt thought she must be a sister at least, maybe the Matron herself. She stared in disbelief at the running man come to invade her hospital and disturb the repose of her patients and then she began to speak in one of those imperious voices that have grown used to being obeyed.

‘What on earth do you think you are doing, charging round our hospital in this way?’ she began.

Powerscourt felt the time for serious discussion with nursing sisters or even Matrons was not now. Maybe another time.

‘Terribly sorry, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Chap following me, you see. Very bad teeth. Maybe you could do something for him now he’s here. Can’t stop at the moment. Terribly sorry. Au revoir.’

And with that he was gone. He fled through a room where the walls were lined with tapestries and a sombre couple on the wall in Renaissance costume who were, he presumed, Chancellor Rolin and his wife, still keeping watch over their hospice after four hundred and fifty years. Behind him he could hear voices raised in anger. Maybe the man with no teeth had been arrested by the nursing sorority and was even now having his mouth examined. But he didn’t wait to find out. On he sprinted through the kitchens and here lay disaster. Lunch was being carried to the wards by a group of six nurses lining up two abreast to take delivery of the meals and carry the trays to the wards. Powerscourt noticed that chicken with roast potatoes and vegetables was on the menu today for those with the will and the teeth to eat it. But there was scarcely any room to move past the nurses. A grey stove was in the way with a steaming double oven between him and the wall. This was no time for dignity, Powerscourt said to himself. There was only one way out. He dropped to the floor and crawled through between the legs of the nuns, reciting the Lord’s Prayer as he went. He thought it might provide a diversion and stop them screaming. It wasn’t completely successful. A volley of Hail Marys followed him out of the kitchen and into a corridor. He thought he might have come round in a circle and emerged on the other side of the courtyard. He could hear the noise of the auction growing louder, punctuated by the enormous bangs of the auctioneer’s gavel and the cheers of the crowd who might, he thought, have been sampling the wares on offer. One small room at the end that might have been an office was dominated by sacred paintings on the walls and a trio of nuns writing things in enormous dark ledgers at high desks. They too looked as if they were about to speak but they were too late. Powerscourt was already opening the door. I’m through, he said to himself. Whatever was going on with that toothless youth is over. I can find Lucy at the hotel and we can do what we came for.

But Powerscourt was not through. He came out at the very back of the courtyard, closest to the door into the street. He couldn’t see Lady Lucy. The crowd were concentrating on the auction, many of them rather tipsy by now. He hadn’t known it but he was up against two or maybe more enemies on this day. As he emerged, blinking slightly in the sunshine, an enormous man seized him by the arm. Looking at him for the first time Powerscourt thought he was shaped exactly like a barrel with an enormous chest. He could have done sterling work in the front row of a rugby scrum. Powerscourt wondered if he had in fact been manufactured by some master cooper in his quarters in Santenay or Pommard and brought to life by the patron saints of Burgundy.

‘You’re to come with me,’ said the barrel, ‘and don’t make any trouble.’ Powerscourt felt what he presumed was the point of a knife jabbing into his ribs. He knew he could never win in a fight with this man. He would be crushed. As he was guided out of the courtyard he wondered where they were taking him.

Lady Lucy felt rather lonely when her husband disappeared through the double doors. She watched as the man with no teeth set off in pursuit. At this stage she was not particularly worried. She had seen Francis go off so often on strange missions but he always returned. She wished Johnny Fitzgerald was with him. He always served as guardian angel on these occasions. She had two indices of anxiety that she carried with her. One was the level of danger for Francis, rated on a scale of one to ten. Today in Beaune didn’t count for much more than a two or a three. There was another index, totally out of her control. This was the knot of anxiety that formed in her stomach when she felt he was really in peril. It grew tighter and tighter when she was really scared for him. So far the knot had not put in an appearance. There was another reason for feeling lonely here in the beautiful courtyard. Most of these people were countrymen. Their hands were calloused from working in the fields or hauling bottles and barrels around the cellars and the storerooms of Burgundy. There were one or two more sophisticated clients here, men in elegant suits with buttonholes who might have come from Paris or Lyon to bid for the great hotels and restaurants. But they were all male. The voices of the suffragettes and the marching protesters demanding equal rights for women did not seem to have reached Beaune yet. Everybody here this morning was male, every last one of them. As the shouts of the bidders grew louder and traded insults with their rivals, Lady Lucy slipped away to their hotel, the Ducs de Bourgogne tucked away in a little square a couple of hundred yards away. Francis would find her there.

Powerscourt was pleased to see, but did not show his pleasure, that the man with no teeth, who he now gathered was called Jean Jacques, must have fallen foul of the nurse with the medicines back at the hotel. His trousers were stained in a strange medley of colours, red and green and a chalky white. A strange smell, a compound of dispensary and chemical factory, rose from them. And he must have twisted his leg as he fell, for he was limping painfully. Powerscourt thought of suggesting that he should have stayed in the hospital but thought better of it.

They were joined by a third man, in his early thirties, with a mean face and a vivid scar on his right cheek. The others referred to him as boss at all times. Powerscourt felt sure that his rule was maintained through fear rather than brotherly love. ‘We’re taking him to the barn first of all,’ he said. The two others, No Teeth and Barrel as Powerscourt mentally referred to them, maintained a discreet guard through the streets of Beaune. Powerscourt noticed that one enterprising wine merchant had already filled his windows with bottles whose labels had Hospices de Beaune on the top with the titles of the particular wines, Corton Charlemagne or Beaune, underneath. The citizens, barred from the auction by the high entry fee or the lack of space, were making up for their loss in the shop, carrying off bottles by the dozen in enormous panniers on the front of their bicycles.

They were on the very outskirts of the town when Scarface took them off the main road and on to a little track that led through the fields. Half a mile away there was a farmhouse with an enormous barn fifty yards or so behind it. Just inside the doorway they halted while instructions were given. In the shadows at the back of the barn Powerscourt could see a very strange device. It was very old and looked as though it had survived from some earlier times. It was in the shape of an H or the goal posts at rugby except that the section above the cross bar was quite short and there was another beam of the same size just above the ground. And the beams were far thicker. At the top was a long beam, six or seven feet long and three or four feet wide. This beam was attached to the lower one, of similar size, running along the bottom of the H. Linked to the two vertical columns that joined the top and bottom were a series of short wooden arms that could be used to raise and lower the upper beam until it could touch the lower one if required.

‘Pressoir!’ said Barrel with a note of reverence. ‘Ancien pressoir! Formidable!’

Then Powerscourt understood and he was terrified. The device must have been used to press the juice out of the grapes in the olden times. The grapes would have been held in some sort of container, probably made of cloth rather than wood, and arranged on the lowest horizontal beam. The top section would be lowered further and further down to crush the fruit until all the juice was extracted. There must have been a series of buckets or other containers by the sides to hold the grape juice. Or, in a less peaceful world, a man could be squeezed or pressed between the two beams until all the blood had run out of his body.

‘Tie him up,’ said Scarface. ‘On the lower beam, naturally.’

In less than a minute Powerscourt found himself lying on the bottom beam, secured to the contraption with thick rope. He wondered what they proposed to do with the upper beam. He did not have long to wait. There was a series of grunts and curses as the two men tried to work the levers that would lower the upper section.

‘They’re stuck,’ said Jean Jacques. ‘Nobody’s oiled the damned things for a couple of hundred years.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Barrel, ‘they were working earlier this summer. Damn it, I saw them myself.’

With that he gave a tremendous heave. Powerscourt could see the muscles straining in his face. With a thick squeak the left-hand lever began to work. Looking at the beam descending towards him Powerscourt began to pray. Then, as if working in sympathy, the other one limped slowly into action. The two men looked on as the upper section of the press grew closer and closer to Powerscourt’s chest.

‘Hey, boss,’ said Barrel cheerfully, ‘do you want any juice this morning?’