From its mouth came a scroll, suggesting one of the balloons that hold the words in a comic strip, and in the scroll were the words To autem servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc. Not very elegant as Latin, but the words spoken to the bridegroom by the governor of the feast at the Marriage at Cana: “Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Christ’s first miracle; a puzzle, for nothing in the Gospel suggests that anyone but Christ and His Mother and a few servants knew the secret.
Was this picture, then, as well as an object of great beauty, a puzzle? A joke, a deeply serious joke, on future beholders?
April brought the answer, as Darcourt had hoped it would. He made the inconvenient train journey to Blairlogie and, armed with a shovel, a broom, and his camera, he went to the Catholic cemetery and there, high on the bleak hill, he visited once again the McRory family plot. It was dominated by large, tasteless stones commemorating the Senator and his wife, and Mary-Benedetta McRory. But there were a few humbler markers, one of them not a gravestone but a memorial to somebody called Zadok Hoyle, identified as a faithful servant of the family. And—here it was—in an obscure corner behind the biggest stone was a small marble marker, flat to the ground, and when Darcourt had cleared away the last lingering snow and ice, and an accumulation of lichen, it read, plainly, FRANCIS.
So: here it was. Among the sketches from Francis’s boyhood years there were a number of an invalid figure, confined to a bed which was almost a cage; the figure in the bed was a pitiable deformity, of the sort that cruel people used to call a pinhead, blank of eye, sparse of hair, and wearing an expression, to use the word loosely, that would draw pity from the heart of an ogre. These sketches, rapid but vivid, were identified only by the letter F, except for one on which was laboriously written, in the hand of a boy who wished to be a calligrapher but did not yet know how, what seemed to have been copied from some royal signature, François Premier.
Francis the First? Now, thought Darcourt, I know all I need to know, and all I am ever likely to know. Truly the best wine has been kept until the last.
5
“The crones are coming,” said Dean Wintersen’s voice down the telephone. “They are expected today.”
What crones? Was this some uncanny visitation of weird old women? What crones? Darcourt had been roused from his work on the biography of the late Francis Cornish, and his mind did not readily shift to the Dean’s concern. The crones? Oh, yes! Of course! The Cranes. Had he not agreed that some people called Crane should come from an American West Coast university to do something or other of a vaguely defined order about the production of the opera? That had been months ago and, having so agreed, and having it well understood that the Cranes were not to cost the Cornish Foundation anything, he had banished the Cranes from his mind, as a problem to be dealt with when it arose. Now, it appeared, the Cranes were coming.
“You remember them, of course,” said the Dean.
“Remind me,” said Darcourt.
“They’re the assessors from Pomelo U.,” said the Dean. “It was agreed they should sit in on the production of the opera. You remember the opera, don’t you?”
Oh, yes; Darcourt remembered the opera. Had he not been slaving over the libretto for the past four months?
“But what are they going to assess?” said Darcourt.
“The whole affair. Everything connected with the opera from Schnak’s work on the score to the last detail of getting the thing on the stage. And then the critical and public reaction.”
“But why?”
“To get Al Crane his Ph.D., of course. He’s an opera major in the theatre school at Pomelo, and when he has got his assessment together he will make a Regiebuch and present it as his thesis.”
“His what?”
“His Regiebuch. A German expression. All the dope on the production of the opera will be in it.”
“My God! He sounds like Divine Correction out of a medieval play. Does Dr. Dahl-Soot know? Does Geraint Powell know?”
“I suppose they do. You’re the liaison man, or so I understood. Didn’t you tell them?”
“I don’t think I knew. Or fully realized.”
“You’d better tell them, then. Al and Mabel will be seeing you right away. They’re eager.”
“Who’s Mabel?”
“I’m not sure. I think she’s not quite Mrs. Crane, but she’s with him. Not to worry. Al has a big grant from the Pomelo Further Studies Fund to look after him. This is a courtesy schools of music frequently extend to one another. It’ll be all right.”
How lightly the Dean took such things! Doubtless that was the secret of being a dean. When, a couple of hours after his call, Darcourt gazed at Al and Mabel Crane, as they sat in his study, he wondered if it would really be all right.
Not that the Cranes looked menacing. Not at all. They had the look of expectancy Darcourt knew so well as an attribute of a certain kind of student. They wanted something to happen to them, and they wanted him to make it happen. They were probably in their middle twenties, but they had still the unfledged, student look. Apparently they travelled light and informally. It was cool in the Canadian spring, but Al Crane was dressed as if for a hot day. He wore chinos, a much crumpled seersucker coat, and a dirty shirt. The breast pocket of the coat hung heavily with a number of ball-point pens. His bare feet were thrust into sandals that would not last much longer. He had not shaved for two or three days, and his lantern jaws were dark. As for Mabel, the one arresting thing about her was that she was monstrously pregnant. The child she carried, though still unborn, was already sitting in her lap. Like Al, she was dressed for summer, the summer of Southern California, and she too was in a bad way for footwear. They both smiled, in a dog-like manner, as if hoping to be patted.
Al, however, knew what he wanted. He wanted several days with Hulda Schnakenburg, to go over the score of the opera and examine all the scraps of Hoffmann, which he called The Documentation, and then he wanted a few days with Dr. Dahl-Soot, whose presence in the matter was, he declared, awesome. Just to talk with Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be an enrichment. He wanted access to a Xerox machine, so that he could get facsimiles of everything, every inch of Hoffmann, every draft of Schnakenburg, every page of the completed score. He wanted to go over the libretto with whoever had prepared it, and he wanted to compare it with anything by Planché, from which it derived, or did not derive. He wanted to talk with the director, the designer, the designer of lighting, and the scenic artists. He wanted copies of every design, and every rejected design. He wanted to photograph the stage that would be used, and he wanted all its measurements.
“That’ll do to be going on with,” he said. “Then of course I’ll sit in on all the rehearsals and all the musical preparation. I’ll need a full C.V. from everybody involved. But right now, we’re wondering where we are to live.”
“I haven’t any idea,” said Darcourt. “You’d better talk to Dean Wintersen about that. There are lots of hotels.”
“I’m afraid a hotel would be way beyond us,” said Al. “We’ve got to watch the pennies.”
“I understood the Dean to say that you had a generous grant from Pomelo.”
“Generous for one,” said Al. “Tight for two. For three, I should say. You can see how it is with Mabel.”
“Oh, Al, do you think there’s been a slip-up?” said Mabel.
She was the kind of woman, Darcourt saw with alarm, who cries easily.
“Not to worry, Sweetness,” said Al. “I’m sure the professor has everything lined up.”