‘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.