A Rather Charming Invitation (19 page)

“Do I have to threaten to tell your mum on you?” I demanded, feeling a little cranky myself now.

And that, apparently was the key, because at the mere mention of Great-Aunt Dorothy, Rollo launched into a whole spiel about how his mother was ailing, back in London, but impossible to live with nowadays because she kept “threatening to die” as he put it.

“Bloody depressing,” he whined. “She can’t stand having me hang about her, she says she’s got her maid and her doctor. She says I must start thinking of what I’ll do with myself when she’s gone.”

All of a sudden, his antics made sense. The more he talked, the more convinced I became. Rollo was in some sort of panic mode because, as it turned out, he was afraid of being left alone. But as soon as I appeared sympathetic, he cleared his throat with a great
Harumph!
and said, “Mind if I have a look at your telly? Just want to check the football scores.” We had installed a very small white TV in the kitchen, and I allowed this face-saving change of subject.

Jeremy finished his phone call, and rejoined me. “Good news?” I asked hopefully.

“Parker Drake’s man,” Jeremy said with satisfaction. “He says Drake’s wife has heard of
you
, and wants to meet you. So the P.R. guy plans to wangle us an invitation to a party that Tina Drake gives every year. At their place in Switzerland. It’s a masked ball, apparently. A charity event.”

Jeremy looked puzzled. “He said he’d see if he could get me into Drake’s card game there. Apparently cards is the way Parker Drake takes the real measure of a man. I suppose he means poker. I can hold my own in that.”

Although Jeremy said this in a low voice, old eagle-eared Rollo looked up from the TV scores, and turned to Jeremy interestedly, saying, “Drake? Did you say Parker Drake invited you to play cards?”

“Yes, why?” Jeremy said warily.

“Why, dear boy, you don’t mean to say you may be invited into
that
card game, do you?” Rollo cried. “That’s a very exclusive invitation indeed. That fellow Drake conducts his business deals in the summertime over a regular game on his yacht in Monte Carlo. Yes, you may start out playing poker. But if you win and it’s down to just the two of you, it’s not poker you’ll be expected to play. If you want to get on this guy’s good side, the name of the game is piquet.”

“Piquet?” Jeremy said skeptically. “Isn’t that a game old ladies play?”

“Not the way this guy plays it,” Rollo said stoutly. “For him it’s mano-a-mano.”

“I think I’ve heard of that game,” I volunteered. “It’s what all the aristocrats played when they were in prison during the French Revolution, waiting to get their heads chopped off.”

“Ah,” said Jeremy. “I’m thinking in terms of a more current century. Like, this one.”

“Got any cards?” Rollo asked in a businesslike tone. I went to the cupboard where we’d stashed all our rainy-day distractions. I managed to scrounge up a box of three unopened decks of cards. Rollo gestured to Jeremy.

“Sit down, m’boy, and I’ll deal you in,” Rollo commanded, laying out the cards. “For starters, you chuck out all the low-number cards, the ones below seven. The dealer is called ‘the Younger’ and you, Jeremy, will be ‘the Elder’.”

We watched closely as Rollo dealt out the cards and explained the game. It had something in common with bezique, whist, bridge, and even gin rummy and poker. You collected cards in suits and three-or-four-of-a-kind, and kept score on a pad. At first I followed the rules pretty well, but when Rollo and Jeremy started trying variations, I got a little lost. I kept watching, but after a half-hour of seeing the two of them slapping the cards down, it occurred to me that now was a perfect time to go back to Leonora’s château in Mougins to get another look at the tapestry, now that I knew a bit of its history.

I telephoned Leonora and asked if I could take a few more pictures, and she told me to come over any time I wanted. I ran upstairs to grab my handbag, but when I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I decided to change out of my jeans and into a nice dress. Once I’d done that, though, I had to change shoes. And then, transfer my camera, wallet and keys into a prettier handbag. You can’t just march into a château looking like a stowaway.

On my way out, I told Jeremy my plans, and he looked up distractedly, and said, “Okay, great.”

He and Rollo were so absorbed with what they were doing that I’m not even sure Jeremy heard me say where I was going. Which was fine with me. I could tell they’d be at it for quite a while. That would give me plenty of time to see what Armand the tapestry-maker had spent the last precious years of his life working on with such heartbreaking devotion.

I
was never much of a driving enthusiast until Great-Aunt Penelope bequeathed me her old 1936 Dragonetta. Cobalt blue and zippy, it was a natural for these curving Riviera roads, and, once I’d gotten it fixed up, it made me a true believer in the joys of jaunting. I felt as if this elegant little auto had its own cheery personality, and was sharing its fearless enthusiasm with me. It took the curves with ease and aplomb, determinedly racing through the roaring traffic in town, skirting around trucks, buses and limousines, and darting through intersections in time to evade gridlock. Then it chugged up those mountain-goat hills to Mougins with spirited determination. Provence was waking up to summer with a riot of hot pink blossoms, and bright blue flowers on long green stalks, and purple fields of lavender that undulated like waves of a violet sea whenever the wind ruffled it with a breath of seaside air.

The château was coming into bloom, too, with its potted miniature trees in full flower now. A gardener and his son were trimming the fancier topiary, making a sleepy
Zzz-zzz
sound with their machines. They nodded cordially to me as I pulled up the front drive. The Dragonetta snuggled into a shady patch of gravel beneath a tree near the garage, looking contented and perfectly at home.

Leonora was happy to see me. She told me with charming candor that she’d almost given up on my doing any research into the tapestry. And although I’d warned her on the telephone that Venetia had sent me the auction house documentation, which convinced me that the offer Leonora had gotten was reasonable, I suppose my appearance here today convinced Leonora that I was “on the case” and would somehow magically find a way to “up” its value.

I couldn’t exactly tell her that I was really doing this research for my most important client yet—my marriage. I felt that if an ancestor of Honorine’s had gone to all this trouble to make a wedding tapestry for his daughter, then surely this work of art had some wise words of advice for a bride of any century. Something positive. Something for me.

As we moved toward the picture gallery, Leonora commented, “So you’ve been to see Venetia. She is very
drôle
, is she not?”

“I thought she was wonderful,” I said.

Leonora seemed amused and slightly wary of her husband’s unconventional aunt. After I declined the need to have anything to eat or drink, she encouraged me to feel free to get right to it, and furthermore, I could come and go as I pleased.

As I unpacked my camera, and began focusing on capturing the details, I commented, “What an amazing story behind this tapestry. Do you know about Oncle Philippe’s ancestor Armand, who made the tapestry for his daughter’s wedding in the 1600s?”

Leonora shook her head, but before I could launch into more detail, she said hopefully, “That’s what all the appraisers say about the time period, but I don’t believe it. Auction houses can be mistaken. I think it’s from a later period, say, the 1700s, when Louis XIV’s grandson got married; the king was very fond of his grand-daughter-in-law. See that image of the sun? Surely that alludes to the Sun King.”

“Oh,” I said, comprehending that she was not the least bit interested in Armand’s personal story, and only wanted to hear a royal connection, which might increase its value. “Well, these pictures might help me find out more.”

“
Ah bon
,” said Leonora approvingly, “I will leave you to it.”

It was much better without her hovering over me. As I snapped away, my eye caught more of the details, and I knew that my first task was to figure out how to “read” the tapestry. Some tapestries read from left to right, like a book. Others tell their stories from the bottom—where the images in the foreground are bigger, and represent more recent events—to the top, which represents past events. But this tapestry had all those fascinating horizontal rows of drama, and I wasn’t sure where to begin.

The borders acted like a picture frame around the main body of the tapestry. Within this main body was the married couple’s bedroom, and here, the top image was the fan-shaped window above the sleeping couple’s heads, through which one glimpsed the moon-face on the left, and the sun-face on the right, and, in the center, the far-off horizon of hills and sea.

But the most dramatic images were contained within the “bedspread of flower fields”, which the married couple was dreaming under. The top two rows on the bedspread were composed of a series of circular and oval insets. The first row had the “J.L.” insignia circlet on the left; and the knight-and-lady-on-horseback in a circlet on the right; and, in between, oval insets of couples of varying ages, doing their rural chores of planting, harvesting, and gathering in fields and vineyards. Beneath this, the second row of oval insets began: on the left, with a young man and woman, carrying a bucket to a water-well, like an elegant Jack and Jill; and on the right were a series of insets of people in seaside scenarios, fishing and hauling baskets of the day’s catch.

Beneath those two rows, there were no more oval insets. Instead, the remaining rows on the bedspread all seemed to be part of a great wedding procession that was weaving its way on paths through the flower fields. So, the next row was of the bridegroom and his male entourage. He was at the center-left of his row, walking toward the left. His groomsmen were following him, carrying the bride’s very elaborately decorated “hope” chest, which contained her dowry. This was where, oddly enough, the black dogs were snapping at the heels of the groomsmen.

Beneath all that, the next row was the bride and her attendants. She was in the center-right of her row, walking toward the right, and was about to pass under an archway of flowers. So, it looked as if she and her ladies were following the groom’s entourage that was “ahead” or above them.

Finally, beneath the bride’s line, the bottom row had a stately house situated in the lower right corner of the fields; and, to the left, curiously, was the row of soldiers who were leading a man away in chains. They were walking toward the left, facing away from the house.

As I studied it, I began to realize that the house seemed to be the starting point of the wedding procession. So, the way to “read” this tapestry was as a zigzag, like a maze, beginning at the bottom right corner with the house, travelling to the left with the soldiers; above which was the bride, travelling right; above which was the groom, travelling left again. All of these rows of parading figures added up to the drama of a wedding.

Apart from just a literal interpretation of a marriage ceremony, I knew that bridal processions in art were sometimes about the concept of a “triumph”, like the triumph of Love over Death, or Piety over Corruption. Military images in wedding processions could be symbols of the groom’s “triumph” of having won his bride and carried off her dowry. That might explain the soldiers. However, I still couldn’t find a good spin to put on those black dogs nipping at the heels of the groomsmen. But mythology was full of stories of jealous guests at weddings, disrupting the festivities.

Overall, the tapestry looked to me like a father’s tender, loving and bittersweet panorama of the world, with all its joys and sorrows. And now that I knew something about the personal history of the man who made it, these images were infused with new meaning for me. Take the prisoner being led away in chains by the king’s soldiers. Could that be Lunaire, his patron? Or Armand himself, bound and unable to keep up with the wedding procession?

Maybe everything here was deliberately cryptic. The tapestry had been made with such painstaking care, right down to the fine detailing of the flowers in the decorative borders. It occurred to me now that these images might actually be homespun marital advice, woven in coded messages from the imprisoned tapestry-maker, so that the prying eyes of the king’s guards could not invade the privacy of a father speaking in threads to his daughter.

I was deeply absorbed in all this, when David and Oncle Philippe appeared in the entrance hall below me. They seemed completely unaware of my presence, so engrossed were they in a heated argument in French. I heard something about selling the flower fields; then suddenly the volume of the conversation cranked up a notch.

“You may as well sell them my headstone and my grave, too!” Oncle Philippe said, gesturing dramatically.

David sighed. “Pa-
pa
,” he pleaded. “What kind of man would I be if I ignored reality, and put our family and our future generations in peril?”

Oncle Philippe snorted derisively. “Money today, and nothing for tomorrow!”

Something made them look up then, and when they saw me, standing above their heads in the gallery with the tapestry, they both forced a smile and nodded to me. “Ah, Penn-ee,” said David, with his correct, graceful manner. “Delighted to see you making your wedding preparations. We knew that you were coming today, but nobody told us you’d arrived.
Ça va?
”

“Fine, it’s going well,” I said. I imagined that they must have been closeted off in a business conversation too important for even Leonora to interrupt. David looked a bit embarrassed at my having witnessed his exasperation with his father.

But Oncle Philippe was too upset to really care if I’d overheard them. He returned to David, gesturing toward the tapestry. “If we do as you wish, your children—my grandchildren—will inherit only those dead woven flowers, which have no scent!” he exclaimed, and he went outside in a huff.