Bertie and the Crime of Passion, page 8
He managed to say, “The latter.”
I told him that in that case we would require his cooperation in persuading the rest of his family to submit to questioning.
The voice tried to be steady. “I shall see to it.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Before we go any further, Sarah and I would like to know where this gun was kept.”
“It’s from the gun room. All the firearms are kept there.”
“May we see?”
The way to the gun room was through the dining room and the smoking room and across a cobbled courtyard. He led us there and pushed open the door.
I said, “You don’t keep it locked, I notice.”
“There is a key,” he pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s not much use if you don’t remove it when the door is shut.”
“Bertie, I’ve never had reason to lock it—or never thought I had,” Jules said, sounding sheepish. He pushed open the door.
Reader, I have seen the gun rooms of every great house in England and Scotland and, believe me, this would have ranked among the finest. Oak paneled and as high as a coach house (which I dare say had been its original purpose), it was furnished with twenty or more rosewood gun cabinets, each holding a dozen shotguns. The walls just below the open beams were hung with the mounted heads of animals bagged by Agincourts over half a century, including wild boar and some big game. At a lower level were a series of exquisite oil paintings of hunting scenes. They were interspersed with photographs of shooting parties. The floor was carpeted and dominated by two magnificent tiger skin rugs. The morning newspapers lay undisturbed on a table. The pleasant smell of cigars lingered. A black retriever was asleep on the hearth, at least until Bernhardt gave a cry of delight and woke the poor beast.
I am not by temperament a sybarite, but I could easily picture myself resorting to this companionable room on a foggy morning when shooting was impossible, fanning my hands in front of the huge log fire before settling into one of the leather lounging chairs with a glass of sherry and a volume of Surtees (or his French equivalent) from the bookshelves behind the door. In fact, the atmosphere was more to my liking than the smoking room. In no way could one think of the room simply as an armory.
“I spend many a cozy hour in here,” Jules said, reading my thoughts. “I’ve never cared to keep it locked.”
“So anyone may come in?”
“Yes.”
“Including the ladies?” Bernhardt inquired, looking up from where the dog was lying in a most undignified position having its chest massaged.
“Certainly, when they wish.”
“And do they?”
“Not as a rule, but occasionally they’ll come for a newspaper or a book.”
“Or a gun, if they had a use for it,” said I, quick to catch the drift of Bernhardt’s questions.
Jules missed the point entirely. “The ladies in this house don’t go in for field sports.”
“Where do you keep the pistols? I don’t see any on display.”
“They’re in the top drawer of the gun cabinet at the end, or should be,” Jules informed us. “We possess four revolvers, all engraved with our coat of arms.” He went to the cabinet he had pointed out and opened the drawer. It was not kept locked, I noticed. Clearly, no one had seen any reason to enforce security.
“How many are left?” I asked with a strong hint of irony. To tell the truth, I was not a little shocked by the easy access to the weaponry. Given that Jules liked using the room to lounge in, you would think that he’d still see the wisdom of keeping the cabinets locked.
“Three.”
I looked inside. The silver guns lay in no particular arrangement on the black velvet lining among a scattering of loose cartridges. “Would you by any chance have checked this drawer in the past few days?”
He shook his head. “I had no reason to.”
“So you had no idea that one of these revolvers was missing?
“No idea at all.” He looked apologetic, but what use was that?
“Tell me, Jules, in the week of the murder—that is, the days before the murder took place—do you recall any visitors, anyone who might conceivably have come in here?”
He fingered his cravat as he made an effort to remember. “No, we’ve had no visitors recently, other than Maurice, rest his soul. Lord, I shouldn’t say this, but I wish there were someone else.”
“Is there any one of the servants you might suspect of taking the gun?”
“The servants.” He sighed and frowned. “Most of my staff have been with me for years. I can’t believe they would steal from me.”
“It’s not so unusual,” said Bernhardt, trying to be helpful. “I once caught my maid wearing my underclothes. I found out only when my pet monkey got under her skirt and made her jump onto a chair. A lady’s maid wearing a Breton-laced petticoat from Beer’s! My God, she was out of my house in thirty seconds.”
“Sans petticoat?” said I.
“Sans everything except the mark of my boot on her derriere.”
Jules listened blankly. Not even an image like that would lift his spirits.
At my suggestion, we prodded the fire into more activity, threw on a couple of logs, and sat in front of it in the huge leather armchairs. Sarah had already draped herself on one of the tiger skins, where she could fondle the by now utterly shameless gundog. I wanted Jules to relax sufficiently to tell us how young Letissier had met Rosine and how each member of the family had reacted to the prospect of this outsider becoming one of them. He began with much sighing and hesitation, as if the exercise was too painful to undertake, but with no end of coaxing from Bernhardt and me, he gradually became more fluent.
“How were they introduced?” He echoed my question. “I think it must have been at a dinner party.”
“A dinner party?”
“It could have been somewhere else,” he hedged. “A salon. No, it was supper in Cubat’s.”
“I know Cubat’s,” I said, for he was speaking of one of the better restaurants in Paris. Cubat was the former chef to the Tsar, and the Romanov family know how to eat well. “So they met over supper?”
“It was during the Grande Semaine the year before last. 1889, the year of the Exposition.”
“The Grande Semaine. No wonder your memory was hazy,” said I.
The Grande Semaine, reader, is the climax of the Paris season, a week of racing in August followed every night by balls, parties, and suppers that last until dawn, a social program so exhausting that it can only be undertaken in the knowledge that immediately the week is over, everyone departs for the summer resorts.
Jules explained, “The whole thing was got up at Longchamp by some Yankee millionaire in a straw hat who was looking in at all the boxes, announcing, ‘Cubat’s at midnight. See you there.’ It became quite a joke along the racecourse. As soon as one of us spotted a friend, we all chanted in chorus, ‘Cubat’s at midnight. See you there.’ And so we had to be there.”
“All the family?”
“Yes, Tristan had finished at the lycee.”
“Cubat’s must have been crowded that night,” Bernhardt prompted him after a longish pause.
“Crowded, oh, yes. But it was a gloriously warm evening and the tables were laid in long rows in the garden. A candlelit supper. No prearranged seating. Americans like informality, don’t they? And that was how we found ourselves at a table with Maurice Letissier. He was seated at the end, as if he was presiding, and in a way he did, because the waiter couldn’t get to everyone along the table, it was such a crush. Maurice called us all to attention at the appropriate moment and announced the soup of the day and so on. He did it all with great charm and wit.”
“You were impressed by him?”
“One couldn’t fail to have been.”
“Was he handsome?” Sarah asked.
“Not by conventional standards, but he was very animated, very articulate, and I’m sure the ladies found him attractive. He sported a particularly fine mustache. He was seated beside Juliette and for once my dear wife didn’t monopolize the conversation. She was intrigued by the young man.”
“And where was Rosine seated?”
“Along the table, on my left, close enough to observe Maurice without exchanging too many words.”
“Was it love at first sight?” Bernhardt asked.
“I think he fell for Rosine straight away, yes. His eyes hardly left her.”
“And Rosine?”
Jules hesitated. “She was only eighteen at the time.”
“An impressionable age.”
“That’s a fact!”
My remark had hit the bull.
“Well, you may as well know that Rosine was already in love with someone else,” he added. “Someone utterly unsuitable.”
At this, Bernhardt sank her hand so powerfully into the retriever’s furry chest that the creature gave a yelp and scampered under the table for refuge. “So there is a lover.”
Jules covered his mouth as if he’d said too much.
“Unsuitable in which way?” I pressed him. When he declined to answer, I said, “I realize how delicate this matter must be, Jules, but clearly it has some bearing upon our investigation. I must insist that you tell us.”
He shifted in the chair. “Sarah, you will understand what I am saying, but bear with me while I explain our French customs to Bertie. We are old-fashioned enough to believe that marriage is a contract between families. A bride must accept that she takes not only her groom for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, but his entire kith and kin. It is more than a personal matter; it is a joint-stock affair. There is a matrimonial settlement. A French mother doesn’t cry on the wedding day because she has lost a daughter; she rejoices at gaining a son.”
The speech seemed like flannel to me. “This is not so different from marriage among English people of rank, as I was trying to explain to Sarah only yesterday,” I commented, leaving him in no doubt that I was irritated at being lectured on French customs.
“Ah, but it must be handled with delicacy in France,” he said with want of tact. “We have to abide by the Code civil. If a daughter of twenty-one or older should choose to defy her parents and promise herself to some young man of her own choice, and if the parents will not give their consent, she may make what is called a sommation respectueuse, a kind of extrajudicial protest. After three such sommations, if her parents continue to resist the match, the Code allows her to marry the man whatever his character and habits.”
“Good Lord!”
“Be he a vagrant, a philanderer, an anarchist, anything,” Jules added. “It is diabolical.”
“But it is the law,” said Bernhardt firmly, and for a moment I feared that she was about to give us a lecture on the rights of women. To my great relief, she spared us that.
“So do you see the difficulty parents labor under?” Jules went on. “We are not insensitive to our children’s wishes. Matchmaking is a delicate process that continues for some time until a desirable partner is found. Parents—and I suppose I should say mothers, for they are usually the more instrumental in the process—will make discreet inquiries about the circumstances of prospective families. If suitable, they will approach the other parents and suggest opportunities of acquaintance, such as garden parties, or croquet, or dinner parties.”
A little wearily, I said, “Jules, old friend, this is all very familiar. Remember, I have three daughters and two sons, and only one is married.”
“Yes, but your daughters aren’t threatening you with a sommation respectueuse,” he blurted out.
We were coming to the crux of it.
“Has Rosine resorted to that?”
“She can’t. She is not twenty-one yet, but she will be next October.”
“And who is the young man she so admires?”
“He is not young at all, Bertie. He is older than I am.”
“Come, come,” I said in disbelief.
“He is a worthless painter called Morgan and he is fifty-one.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!”
Bernhardt for once was lost for words.
Jules informed us, “She met him in church, of all places.”
“That’s some consolation, surely?” I commented. “The fellow can’t be entirely bad.”
Jules quickly put me right on that point. “He is a pagan. He followed her in there to talk to her when she was arranging the flowers. The ladies of the district take turns to decorate the village church. You’d think your daughter was safe to perform a pious duty like that unchaperoned. I gather Morgan happened to be in the churchyard in front of his easel when he saw my little Rosine coming up the path with her basket of flowers. He went in and started a conversation with her, just like that. No one introduced them. In a house of God, Bertie!”
“It does seem sacrilegious,” I agreed. “When did this disgraceful episode take place?”
“Sometime early in the summer of ’89.”
“Before she met Letissier?”
“Yes. She is totally infatuated with Morgan. I can’t understand it.”
Bernhardt said to console him, “The ways of the heart cannot be analyzed, Jules.”
“Yes,” he said, “but this is an old man. He’s over fifty.”
“That’s not so old,” said I, with my own half century looming in November. “The difference in ages is cause for comment, I grant you.”
“Well, he looks a damn sight older than he is,” Jules said. “It’s the long beard streaked with gray that does it, I suppose, and the scruffy clothes.”
“You’ve met him, then?”
Our host spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Last summer, Rosine invited him to paint a landscape of the park. We’ve had him wandering about the estate ever since. The gardeners kept asking if he was a tramp. I had to tell them he was there by invitation. I don’t know what the girl sees in him.”
Bernhardt made the obvious point that some young girls were attracted to older men. “It’s their experience, their urbanity—”
“Not forgetting their money,” said I.
“Not in this case,” Jules put in. “Morgan is practically without a sou. His paintings don’t sell. He says he doesn’t care about material needs. Mind you, he makes short work of lunch when it’s brought to him on a tray.”
“You made him welcome, then?”
“We tolerated the fellow, Bertie. I didn’t want him sitting at my table, so I had the meals sent out to him.”
“But you met him yourself?”
“I went to look at his painting out of curiosity. I didn’t have the slightest suspicion that Rosine was in love with him. I thought we were helping a poor painter as a charitable gesture. She had mentioned that she’d met him at the church, which was true, and I assumed they had been properly introduced. She’d said after painting the church he was looking for other local scenes to render in oils and I gullibly agreed to give him the freedom of our estate. We French have a high regard for the arts, as you know.”
“Is he a talented artist?” Sarah asked, like me looking for crumbs of comfort.
“Did I call him an artist?” said Jules, by now quite pink in the face just talking about the man. “If I did, it was a mistake. He’s one of these Impressionists—all dabs of paint in garish colors straight from the tube. He does the whole thing in two hours. You have to stand ten meters away before you can pick out anything at all in the picture, and then it’s very crude in outline. He’ll never sell anything, as I keep telling Rosine.”
“Was he civil when you met him?” I asked.
“Depends what you mean by civil. He didn’t have much to say. Didn’t even have the decency to put his brush down. And he didn’t once look me in the eye. I didn’t object at the time. I put it down to eccentricity. After all, I didn’t know I was speaking to a prospective son-in-law.”
“Is that what he has become?” said I.
“Heavens, no, Bertie. I’m speaking from the point of view of my deluded child.”
“You said they met two years ago. When did you meet him yourself?”
“Last summer, when he started painting here. The fellow hasn’t gone away yet. Sometimes he sleeps in empty buildings on the estate. And he appears to think that he has carte blanche to roam across my land with his easel at any time. He was painting a snow scene within a hundred meters of the house when I last saw him.”
“Haven’t you warned him off?”
Jules sighed and shook his head. “I’ve always tried to be civilized in my dealings with local people, and they respect me for it. I gave permission for Morgan to paint on my land without specifying that it was only for a limited time. He’s done no damage. He closes gates after him. If I ban him from the estate, I’ve got to justify my action.”
“But if he was pursuing Rosine—”
“He wasn’t, not in any obvious way. He was clever, you see. If there was any pursuing, it was Rosine who did it. She goes riding around the estate every day—has done for years, and I can’t stop her. I’m sure she knows where Morgan sets up his easel. I’m not suggesting that there was any misbehavior. She’s a virtuous girl and I trust her. But if I put a ban on Morgan, it won’t be his reputation that suffers in the village; it will be Rosine’s.”
“So he does have carte blanche.”
“Well, now that you point it out, I suppose he does,” Jules admitted. “But only to paint, not to fraternize with my daughter.”
“Rosine was promised to another.”
“Exactly.”
“You and Juliette thought him suitable, I take it?”
“Maurice? Well, I wouldn’t have promoted the engagement otherwise,” said Jules, still tetchy about the whole unfortunate business. “He was from an excellent family, decently educated, completed his military service with some distinction. And he had a very confident, charming manner. Juliette and I discussed him and decided after making some inquiries, as responsible parents do, that we should meet the Letissiers. It was easy, because they are racing folk, as you know, and I’m a member of the Jockey Club, so I got a mutual friend to introduce me to Letissier senior. It was arranged that our families should meet at a costume ball given by the von Winslows.”
