Death and the Jubilee

15

Powerscourt sat on the floor at the end of the bed, facing Jones the butler. Overhead he could hear footsteps walking towards the library. Jones kept his eyes fixed on the cross and the shells as he began to speak.

‘Twenty years ago, perhaps it was twenty-five, I was Immanuel Goldschmidt. I worked for my father’s firm in the city of Frankfurt. We were bankers, my lord, like the Harrisons.’

Powerscourt was looking at the flagstones on the floor, polished over and over to a smooth finish. He wondered if it was a penance.

‘There was a feud between the two banks, my lord. Terrible things were done, my lord, so terrible that I can hardly bear to remember them.’

Jones stared on at the wall, looking for a message in the shells.

‘The feud was about winning a certain account. Whoever won that account would become rich, rich with all the vain trappings of this world. Certain people bore false witness against one of the Harrisons. I, my lord, was one of those that bore false witness, telling the holders of this account that the Harrisons were embezzlers, that they would cheat the account holders out of all their money. Mr Charles Harrison seemed to have lost the account. He killed himself. He jumped off the highest building in the city.’

Dead before he even reached the hospital, Powerscourt remembered, his back growing stiff against the stone wall.

‘Then the truth came out,’ Jones went on, ‘the Goldschmidts were disgraced, ruined. He shall cast down the mighty from their seats and the rich he hath sent empty away. They that were powerful shall be cast down, and the humble exalted.’

‘So what did you do? Did you come to England? To work for your old enemies?’

Powerscourt sounded incredulous. Jones the butler carried on as if there had been no interruption.

‘I knew I had done wrong. I had borne false witness against Mr Harrison. Then he committed suicide. It was as if I had killed him myself.’

Perhaps you waited, thought Powerscourt. Perhaps you waited twenty-five years and then killed some more members of his family, the family that had ruined yours. He looked at Jones’s hands. There was no blood on them, only the greyish discoloration of the silver polish, the blue veins standing out on the back.

‘I fled from the city where I had done wrong. I had a little money. I carried it in a leather belt.’ Jones looked up at Powerscourt and pointed at the cross on the wall. ‘The belt is nailed to the framework of the cross. Underneath the gold coins.’

Powerscourt held his gaze. The face told him nothing.

‘I went west. I don’t know why. By the time I reached Lyons I was destitute. I had no money. I had nowhere to sleep. I had nothing to eat. I would lay my head underneath the bushes in some city park or huddle at the back of the great railway sheds in the darkness. They were so big that nobody could have patrolled them all. I was having hallucinations I was so weak.’

‘What did you see?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I cannot remember much of those times, my lord,’ said Jones the butler. ‘I remember seeing high buildings, higher than you ever saw in this world, and myself falling from the top. It was a very long way down.’

Jones paused again. He shifted uneasily on his bed, the springs creaking beneath him.

‘That was when I met Father Paul, my lord. He was a Dominican.’

Jones stopped again, as if that explained everything.

‘He found me lying on one of the station platforms. It was the platform for through trains to Cologne, Hamburg and Bremen, my lord. That’s what Father Paul told me afterwards. He gave me food. He gave me shelter. He heard my story.’

Jones made the sign of the cross again.

‘When I was well he told me I had to go on a pilgrimage to atone for my sins. I had to walk from Lyons to Santiago de Compostela, my lord. Father Paul said he would meet me at the other end. He said he would meet me by the west door of the cathedral in Santiago the day before the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That’s 15th August, my lord.’

‘So how long did it take you? To walk there, I mean?’ Powerscourt wondered, as he had wondered ever since the start of the man’s story, if Jones was telling the truth.

‘It took three months, my lord. Father Paul gave me a good pair of boots. He gave me a map with the names of the Dominican abbeys on the way. Every time I stayed there I had to attend the services, even though I was not a member of his Church. He said I had to remember my sins and pray to whatever God I believed in.

‘Conques, my lord. The Dominicans had a beautiful abbey there. Moissac, the abbey was full there, some of us had to sleep in the stables. San Juan de Ortega in Spain, my lord, the abbot was completely blind but he could walk unaided from the refectory to the chapel and then back to his cell. He said the Lord was guiding him. Villafranca del Bierzo, my feet had been bleeding for some time by then. The Dominicans said I must not have any treatment until I reached Santiago.’

‘Did you get there in time? In time to meet Father Paul?’ Powerscourt was fascinated now.

‘I met him on the day we arranged, my lord. He had come in a boat from Bordeaux. Some of the pilgrims did that, my lord. They take you to a special place in the cathedral if you are a pilgrim. There must be a thousand candles lit before the high altar and there is a huge sphere, full of incense, that swings above your head. Then we attended the service for the Assumption.

‘Prospere procede, et regna. Assumpta est Maria in caelum; gaudet exercitus angelorum.’ Jones the butler’s hands were folded in prayer.

‘In splendour and in state, ride on in triumph,’ Powerscourt translated. ‘Mary has been taken up into heaven. The whole host of angels are rejoicing.’

‘Exactly so, my lord. The next day Father Paul baptised me into the Roman Catholic Church.’ Jones the butler crossed himself again. ‘I can still remember how cold the water was. They say it came from a spring at Padron. That’s where the boat was found. The boat with the body of St James the Apostle that had come all the way from Palestine.’

With a severed head in its cargo, thought Powerscourt. The severed head of a saint, not a Harrison.

The sun was breaking through the clouds now. Shafts of light fell on the gold coins of the cross, glowing in Jones’s basement cell.

‘He gave me my life’s work, Father Paul. He said I had to do penance for my sins. I was to find out the Harrisons and serve them all my days. You must love your enemies, he said. Only thus can you find God.’

Powerscourt wondered if he had found God here at Blackwater, surrounded by the pagan temples by the lake. Perhaps he had.

‘Why did you come to England? Why did you not go back to Germany?’

‘Father Paul said I could not go back to Germany. Not ever. My homeland was to be denied me. I had to be an exile from own country. He said it was my fate to wander, like Ruth, my lord, amid the alien corn.’

Far off the bells of Blackwater church were ringing the hour of twelve. It’s the Angelus, Powerscourt remembered.

Jones the butler rose from his bed once more and knelt in front of his altar and his shells.

He prayed.

Forty miles away a young woman was drawing by the side of the Thames. Marie O’Dowd came from Dublin. She was a teacher. She had a good reason for being here in London, attending an interview for a position as a teacher in a Catholic school in Hammersmith.

Marie was twenty-three years old with masses of curly brown hair. Her eyes were green, green for the countryside in the rain, her lover said, green for the Wicklow Mountains in the morning, green for Ireland.

The top page of her sketchbook showed the view from Hammersmith Bridge, the river sloping away towards Chiswick, the great bulk of Harrods’ new depository on the other side. She worked fast, pausing to smile shyly at the passers-by who stopped to admire her work. When she was alone, she flicked to the page below. This showed a very detailed drawing, as accurate as her accurate eye could make it, of the ground directly below the bridge, of the distances between the ironwork, spaces where a man or a woman might hide a parcel, or a package. Or a bomb.

Marie O’Dowd had sketched three of London’s bridges this morning. Each page had its shadow, the one with the details, the one with the spaces for the parcel.

This afternoon she was going to Piccadilly and Ludgate Hill to sketch what she thought was the route of the procession on Jubilee Day. Tonight she would go back to Dublin and give her sketchbook to her lover. To Michael Byrne, the man who waited by the dark waters of Glendalough, the man determined that Queen Victoria’s Jubilee would be a very special day.