The Sad Death of Josephine's Tiara!

Thinking about Father Bransfield and about his relationship with Aunty Irene and mum and dad, mentioned in an earlier post, here's one very silly story involving them all I've just recalled. I told Rayna this story years ago and she said she found it AWFUL, but I hope you find it as funny as I do:

Ages back, Princess Margaret was coming to Fiji for an official visit. Aunty Irene, a terrible snob, got majorly excited and asked mum to machinate behind the scenes to get her an invitation to the big official dinner (and the less said about that eventual dinner the better) so that's indeed what mum did.

Well, the moment the glossy invitation arrived, Irene decided she was going to outshine everyone on the night, so sent to her lawyers in New York to get Josephine's tiara out of storage and send it to her in Fiji.

Yes, we are indeed talking about THE JOSEPHINE here! Napoleon's Josephine! And this was Josephine's best tiara, although it wasn't this one she wore during her brief stint as Empress. I told you already Irene had, during her long and insalubrious life, accumulated a wealth of seriously priceless antiques, so you now have an idea of what I'm talking about since Josephine's best tiara was only a small part of her estate!

Let me see if I can find the actual one we're talking about here:

Eureka!

Oh wow, she wore it at his coronation!

There you go. Josephine's tiara! Anyway, Irene loved it dearly and talked about it constantly, but never had an occasion important enough to warrant wearing it, so, despite mum telling her it was bad etiquette to wear a tiara in front of the royal family unless you yourself are of royal blood, she considered this dinner party as, finally, an excuse to get it out of the bank vault and take it on a outing! Yee ha!

But she wasn't counting on Fiji being Fiji, was she!

Her NY lawyers sent it out in a briefcase shackled to some funky's wrist, and Irene signed for it, asked the man to come back in a fortnight to collect it again, stuck it on her head and wore it around the house for days. She even threw a "Dress-up and Wear your Best Tiara!" dinner party wherein ... well, mum took photos of the night, and there's only one tiara in the room, and, while Irene's dressed in a fabulous evening gown of shot Thai silk, everyone else is in Tiki Togs and Bula shirts, and I particularly love the photo of Father Bransfield leaning forward and grinning with amusement, showing what he thought of the whole thing!

But then the inevitable happened! The tiara vanished! Nowhere in the house! Nowhere in the garden! Just - whoosh! - gone! Irene instantly got all hysterical and screamed herself into hyperventilation, so her maid, Gail, in a panic, sent for dad.

Dad was the only doctor in Deuba, so, although by then retired, was always sent for in emergencies ... and when he arrived and saw what was up, treated Irene to his best dose of Irish medicine - he upended a jug of iced water over her, which indeed did the trick - and then, because he couldn't stand Irene at the best of times, rang Father Bransfield to come over to take care of her emotionally and mum to come over to track down Josephine's tiara, and stormed out.

Like me, mum loved playing Nancy Drew ... so, first question, "who was the last person to see the tiara?" That was Gail. Four hours earlier, Irene noticed it wasn't sparkling enough so handed it to Gail to clean. Gail, naturally, had no idea how to clean a tiara so washed it in the kitchen sink with detergent and then put it out in the sun to dry. "Where in the sun?" Gail thought about it: Irene had too many trees in the courtyard and around the house so there wasn't much sun ... so ... she put it ... in a patch of sunlight ... atop the car in the driveway.

They raced out to look. No tiara. "When was the last time this car was used?" mum asked.

"Mmmm! Immediately after lunch."

"What happened?"

Mmmm, Irene decided she wanted icecream for dessert and there wasn't any in the house, so Gail jumped in the car and drove to the shops! "Was the tiara still on the car?" Mmm, Gail hadn't noticed.

By this time, they'd put Irene to bed, so Father Bransfield, mum, Gail and the other housegirls together formed a cordon and walked the length of the road towards the shops ... until, yes, there on the ground, mushed up by the car wheels that had passed over it ... was Josephine's tiara!

They gathered up all they could find and returned to the house where, without waking Irene, they found the documentation and photos of what it should look like, and tried to reassemble it the best they could, only to find 75 diamonds missing, including 16 of the major ones.

So then came the mad hunt for the missing diamonds. A couple of the biggest ones were found in the wheels of Gail's car, and another 16 were discovered by the housegirls further along the road ... and then they sat around trying to figure out who owned the cars that must have come down the road during the past few hours. Since it was a dead-end road in an exclusive neighbourhood, the choices were limited:

Then ... well, you have to visualise it: Father Bransfield, who wasn't young, sneaking into neighbourhood garages with a torch and penknife, to examine car wheels. He managed to find 45 that way ... and then, well, Fiji has no secrets because Fijians always know everything going on, a bunch of village boys turned up at Irene's villa with a further seven, handed over in exchange for "a movie and ice-cream money".

The final five stones - and they were major ones too - were never discovered, and, for many years afterwards, the favourite occupation in Deuba was, every morning and evening, walking your dogs along the stretch of road between Irene's villa and the shops, quietly kicking over stones and, well, secretly looking!

Hey, do you imagine Josephine, at some glittering historically-major occasion, well over a century earlier, on the other side of the planet, ever thought that, one day ... Father Bransfield would be crawling around garage floors in a place like Fiji, looking for the diamonds she was then wearing atop her head?

Ah, Fiji, Fiji, Fiji! Don't you just LOVE the place!