Death and the Jubilee

14

The message had arrived by a strange and roundabout route. It had been sent, addressed to Powerscourt, care of William Burke in person at his bank. It came from the British Embassy in Berlin, despatched the day before.

’Germanii ad lapides nigros in Hibernia arma et pecuniam mittent. Maius XVII-XX. Iohannis.’ The Germans are going to send weapons and money to the black stones in Ireland, Powerscourt translated it from the Latin for the tenth time as he sat in his solitary railway carriage on the way to Blackwater, between 17th and 20th May. Johnny. Nothing more. A week away, Powerscourt reminded himself. I’ve got a week to get to Ireland.

Inspector Wilson was waiting for him five minutes before the appointed hour of eleven o’clock on the portico of Blackwater House.

‘Good morning, my lord. Nasty-looking day we’ve got here.’

Powerscourt wondered briefly if the entire population of the islands spent their time thinking and talking about the weather. The sky was overcast, dark clouds threatening to pour yet more water into the upper storeys of the house behind them.

‘Perhaps you could just get the details of his movements from Mr Charles Harrison in the library, Inspector. I want to have a quick word with the butler about the events of the last two days.’

Or the last twenty years, he said to himself, smiling benevolently at the Inspector.

‘Very good, sir. The fire people are crawling about the place again,’ Inspector Wilson reported. ‘That Mr Hardy, sir, I’ve never seen such a cheerful soul. Singing away to himself he was, first thing this morning, crawling in and out of the floorboards. Some song about keys, my lord.’

‘Perhaps he’s in love, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt.

‘He’s certainly in love with fires, I can tell you that,’ replied the Inspector. ‘If he weren’t official, in a manner of speaking, I should say he was a pyromaniac.’

Inspector Wilson disappeared into the rubble and proceeded towards the undamaged library. Powerscourt walked slowly to the servants’ entrance, contemplating his interview with Jones the butler.

He found him in a large room in the servants’ quarters, polishing the silver. There was an enormous range in one corner, with copper pans hanging in orderly ranks below. There was a huge sink with a long draining board, cups and plates drying in regular rows. A portrait of Queen Victoria, listing slightly on its hook, hung above the fireplace, the monarch gazing strictly down on her subjects in the servants’ hall. There were a couple of armchairs behind the table with the candlesticks.

‘You must be Mr Jones, the butler here,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully.

‘That I am, sir. You must be Lord Powerscourt.’ A greyish hand stained with silver polish was extended.

‘And are you also Mr Goldschmidt, perhaps I should say, Herr Goldschmidt, formerly of Frankfurt and a member of the bank of Goldschmidt and Hartmann in that city?’

Ever since he left London Powerscourt had been wondering when to play his Ace of Trumps. Play it too soon and he would lose the hand. Play it too late and all advantage might be lost. As he shook the butler’s hand he had had no idea of when to drop his bombshell. But he dropped it.

There was a long pause. Jones went on polishing his candlesticks. Powerscourt could see fantastic reflections of the room, of Queen Victoria, of himself strung out to an impossible length like an El Greco portrait.

Jones looked up at him. He was quite a short man, his hair turning grey, clean-shaven. He was almost skeletally thin. He picked up the last candlestick from the kitchen table. ‘Perhaps I could just finish this one, my lord. I always believe in doing the job properly.’

What job? Powerscourt wondered desperately. The job of revenge, after a whole generation had passed by? The cloth squeaked from time to time as he worked it over the surface. Jones’s feet, Powerscourt noticed, were shuffling nervously from side to side, scraping on the floor.

‘Perhaps you’d better come this way, my lord.’ The last of the candlesticks was gleaming now, standing in a neat line with its fellows, waiting for candles, waiting for the light.

Jones led the way down a narrow passageway. Shelves lined with brushes and pans, dusters and cloths and blacking polish lined the walls. At the end of the passage they turned left. A few feet in front of them was a door, once painted black, now fading into the anonymous grey of its surroundings.

‘Please come in, Lord Powerscourt.’

For a single frightening second Powerscourt wondered if Jones the butler had a gun in here, if his last moment on earth had come in the basement of Blackwater House. Then he saw the room. It was the most astonishing room he had ever seen. Directly in front of him were two windows whose tops were level with the lawn. To his left was a wall covered entirely with reproductions of the life of Christ, from the Annunciation through the feeding of the five thousand to the last supper and the agony in the garden. Most of them were cheap things but Powerscourt thought he recognized a couple of Raphael prints. Below them was a simple bed. It looked like a monk’s bed, hard and unyielding. Fra Angelico comes to Blackwater, he said to himself, his mind taken over by the religious images.

But the wall opposite was the most extraordinary of all. In the centre was a huge cross, made up of gold coins set into an iron framework. As he looked at it, Powerscourt could see that the coins must have been melted ever so slightly and pressed together with a heavy object in a blacksmith’s forge. The cross had a rough, unpolished air that made it more dramatic. On either side of the cross the wall was covered with shells. Identical shells. Shells that had marked out a route march across a continent, shells that had guided pilgrims to Spain for centuries to the sacred shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela. They were the Atlantic starshell, the signposts on the great trail that led from the church of St Jacques in Paris or Ste Marie Madeleine in Burgundy or the cathedral of Notre Dame at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne, across the high pass of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, and on across the last two hundred and fifty miles on the Camino de Santiago till the pilgrims stood in wonder and relief before the Portal de la Gloria. They were signposts on the long journey to the body of St James the Apostle, brought with its severed head in a stone boat from Palestine to the north coast of Spain in the fourth century, then entombed in glory in the cathedral at Santiago. There must have been hundreds of starshells on the walls. Powerscourt knew the story. As a child he had been fascinated by the invocation to St James that gave the Spaniards a desperate victory in the last battle against the Moors a thousand years before, the battle that decided that the cross and not the crescent should rule over Western Europe.

There were no chairs in the room. Jones the butler sat quietly on the edge of his bed.

‘He had no head either, had he, St James the Apostle,’ said Powerscourt. ‘When they sent him to Spain the severed head was carried in the boat.’

‘That’s what the legend says, my lord.’

‘Old Mr Harrison had a severed head too, didn’t he,’ said Powerscourt brutally. ‘Only he didn’t leave in a stone boat, he was found floating by a steel one, right by London Bridge.’

Jones the butler rose from his bed and knelt before the wall with the shells and the gleaming golden crucifix. He made the sign of the cross. He prayed for a long time. Powerscourt waited, saying nothing. Outside another carriage drew up at the portico of Blackwater House. Powerscourt wondered if St James the Apostle had left Santiago on another journey, called to the salvation of another of his faithful. At last Jones began to speak. He rose slowly to his feet and went back to sit on the bed.

‘I must tell you my story, Lord Powerscourt. I am Jones the butler here. I was once Immanuel Goldschmidt of the city of Frankfurt. I am also the pilgrim and the servant of these shells and of what they mean. I have never told my story before.’