Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Good,’ Nicole said. ‘I like revelations.’

Enzo pointed first at the scallop shell, and then to the bee. ‘Do either of these things mean anything to you?’

Nicole thought for a moment. ‘Didn’t Napoléon use the bee as his emblem? I can see golden bees embroidered on blue velvet. Something like that.’

‘Good girl. And what about the shell?’

‘A Coquille St. Jacques ….’ Nicole said thoughtfully.

‘Okay, I’ll stop you right there. Why’s it called a Coquille St. Jacques ?’

Nicole frowned. ‘Something to do with pilgrims, wasn’t it?’

‘Exactly. Since the early middle ages, pilgrims from all over Europe have been following trails through southwest France to Galicia on the northern Spanish coast, to a place called Compostela. It’s where the saint we call James in English, and you call Jacques in French, was supposed to have landed not long after the death of Christ. Saint-Jacques de Compostelle.’

Nicole was tapping away furiously at the keyboard. ‘Yeah, here we are.’ She had come up with a page on a website about routes to Compostela. ‘Compostela’s from campo stella , field of stars. Apparently the decapitated body of Saint-Jacques the Elder was landed there in 44 AD.’ She looked up, eyes shining. “Decapitated! Is that another clue?’

Enzo tipped his head thoughtfully. They were certainly looking for a body without a head. ‘Perhaps.’

She turned back to the screen. ‘Wow, this guy’s shown close to Christ in most of the paintings of the Last Supper. It says the body got floated ashore from a stone boat to a beach covered with scallop shells, and that’s how the shell became symbolic of the pilgrimage.’

Enzo said, ‘There are arguments about that. Some people say that the pilgrims brought shells back with them to show that they had reached the sea. You must have seen scallop shells carved in the stone lintels of houses in villages all over this area.’

Nicole nodded. ‘Yeah, we’ve got one above our door. I never knew why.’

‘They say that the pilgrims begged for water as they passed, and that it was given to them in the shells they brought back with them. If you had a shell carved above your door, it meant that you were willing to provide pilgrims with food and drink, even a bed for the night.’

She had been tapping away again as he spoke and abruptly changed the subject. ‘Okay…Here’s some stuff about Napoléon and the bees.’ She grinned. ‘I was right.’ And she read, ‘At his coronation as Emperor in 1804, Napoléon adorned his imperial robe with the gold bee figurines which had been discovered in the tomb of Childeric the First. And his throne room at Fontainebleau is filled with silks and brocades enriched with precious gold bee decorations.’ She looked up from the screen and screwed up her nose. ‘Why did he have a thing about bees?’

‘There is a legend that Bonaparte was advised to marry Josephine and adopt her two children, because they were supposed to be of Merovingean lineage — descendants of Christ. He was told it would make him part of that lineage. Childeric was the son of King Merovee of the Franks, the first of the lineage, and supposedly a direct descendent of Mary Magdalene. When Childeric’s tomb was opened in the middle ages, more than eleven hundred years after his death, it contained three hundred solid gold replicas of honeybees.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one story, but who knows. The bee also has certain royal connotations. The Queen served by drones. Royal jelly. Maybe that’s what appealed to him.’ He turned back to the board. ‘Anyway, hold on to those thoughts.’ He lifted his marker and wrote Napoléon below the bee, and Saint-Jacques and Pilgrims below the scallop shell. Then he turned to Nicole again. ‘So the shell and the bee are both what?’

‘Symbols,’ she said simply.

‘Exactly. So, if those two are symbols, it would be reasonable to assume that the other items are also symbols, or at least symbolic of something, rather than being important in their own right.’

‘I see what you mean.’ She stared at the board where he had written Old Medicine next to the antique stethoscope. ‘So the stethoscope doesn’t have any meaning in itself. It’s symbolic of something like early medicine.’ She frowned. ‘When was the stethoscope invented?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, let’s see if we can find out.’

Enzo picked his way back across the room to stand behind her as she put Google to work. She entered Antique Stethoscopes into the search window and hit the return key. The search brought up one hundred and four results, the first one of which was a site called ANTIQUE MEDICAL INSTRUMENTS. Nicole selected it and brought up a website headed, ALEX PECK — MEDICAL ANTIQUES. She scrolled quickly down the page to find the first mention of antique stethoscopes , but it was just a list of early types and manufacturers. She scrolled further down to the second mention, and here found a link to two specific types of stethoscope. She clicked on the first, and up came a page on the Laennec stethoscope. She read out the entry. ‘Ac. 1820s Laennec monaural stethoscope turned in three parts from cedar. Blah, blah….’ She skimmed through the rest, then, ‘René Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec—1781 to 1826—invented the stethoscope around 1816.’ She paused. ‘Just what I’ve always wanted to know. It doesn’t really tell us much, though.’

‘It’s a date,’ Enzo said. ‘1816.’ And he went to mark it up on the board beside the stethoscope. He heard Nicole tapping away at the keyboard behind him. And then an exclamation.

‘Oh, my God!’

Enzo turned, alarmed. ‘What is it?’

Her face was flushed with excitement. ‘I put Laennec’s full name into the search engine, and the first of about a thousand links that came up was for the Catholic Encyclopaedia. You’re not going to believe this. The entry for Laennec says that while studying in Paris he became a pupil of a Doctor Corvisart, who is described here as Napoléon’s great physician.’ She looked up, eyes shining. ‘Napoléon!’

Enzo grinned. ‘Clever girl.’ He immediately turned and, in the centre of the whiteboard, wrote in bold letters, Napoléon’s Doctor . Underneath it, the name Corvisart . He drew a circle around the names and pointed arrows to the circle from both the stethoscope and the bee.

‘What about the thigh bone?’ Nicole said. ‘If it’s really a piece from an anatomical skeleton, then that’s a medical allusion, too, isn’t it?’

‘You’re right,’ Enzo said, and he drew another arrow from the femur to the circle in the centre of the board. So there were now three arrows pointing to it. ‘It’s working,’ he said. ‘This is what’s supposed to happen.’

And then they hit a dead end.

Nicole spent the next hour chasing down dozens of websites about the physician. In the space of that hour they learned nearly everything about the man there was to know, but nothing that brought enlightenment. Napoléon was quoted as saying of him: “I do not believe in medicine, but I believe in Corvisart.”

‘I think I remember reading somewhere that Napoléon had an ulcer, and suffered terribly from piles,’ Enzo said.

Nicole made a face. ‘Monsieur Macleod! Too much information!’

Enzo retired to his recliner and stared at the whiteboard, listening to the clackety-clack of Nicole’s keyboard tapping away the seconds of his life. What possible relevance could Napoléon’s doctor have? He let his eyes wander to the Ordre de la Libération. Perhaps it had a website. He made a mental note to ask Nicole to check when she had finished with Corvisart. And then he thought about the date engraved on the back of the medal. 12 May, 1943. Perhaps it was a famous date in French history. He’d ask Nicole to check that as well. Sometimes streets or squares in France were named after important dates. He went in search of his Paris street planner among the clutter of books, eventually finding it and scanning through it for a street named 12 May, 1943. But without success.