Death and the Jubilee

29

Lady Lucy didn’t know very much about what was happening to her. Those horrid men kept putting something over her face. Fragments of hymns and prayers from her childhood floated through her mind. Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. God be with us in our waking and in our sleeping. The day thou gavest Lord has ended, the darkness falls at thy behest. One thought never left her. Francis will find me. Francis will find me. Then she would drift off to sleep.

Johnny Fitzgerald arrived shortly before nine o’clock, clutching a sinister-looking black bag. He took one look at Powerscourt’s face. The joke he had been about to tell dried on his lips.

‘What’s happened, Francis? Christ, you look terrible!’

Powerscourt told him about the abduction of Lady Lucy, about Robert’s heroic pursuit of the villainous pair, of their departure with a drugged Lucy to Brighton. He handed Fitzgerald the note they had left behind.

Johnny Fitzgerald read it quickly. Then he read it again. He looked at his friend, his features drawn now, lines of worry etched across his forehead.

‘Jesus Christ, Francis. The bastards. They’ll pay for this. They bloody well will.’

Fitzgerald helped himself to a monstrous glass of whisky from the sideboard.

‘We must make a plan, Johnny. We’ve never got anywhere without having some sort of idea of what we were trying to do.’

Powerscourt thought bitterly that he and Johnny had never had such a difficult task in all their years together.

‘I don’t think I can go to Brighton tonight, Johnny.’ Powerscourt sounded very sad. ‘I’ve got this meeting here tomorrow morning with the Prime Minister and a man who may save Harrison’s Bank. If that fails, then Harrison’s Bank will fall in a few days time and the reputation of the City of London will be ruined for years to come. But if that happens, Lucy should come back, if those fellows keep their word.’

‘Francis, Francis, do you know what you are saying?’ Fitzgerald was drinking his whisky very fast. ‘You sound as if you want that meeting to succeed. Surely you want it to fail. Otherwise you may never see Lucy again. Can’t you persuade the Prime Minister to call the whole thing off, to let the bank fail and to hell with the consequences?’

‘I’ve thought of that, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt bitterly. ‘I seem to have a choice, don’t I? Professional success means personal failure. Professional failure means personal success, don’t you see? Success in this case could mean death for Lucy. Failure could mean that Lucy lives. So it looks as though I have to choose between the failure of the bank, the collapse of the Jubilee, and my precious Lucy, mother of my children. But I don’t think it works like that. I know which course I would pick, of course. But I also know which course the Prime Minister would take. If he has to choose between one life and national humiliation, he will sacrifice a life. That’s the kind of choice Prime Ministers have to take. Think of the number of lives they throw away when the nation goes to war. One life, just one, isn’t even going to keep him awake at night.’

‘So what do we do, Francis?’ Fitzgerald could see the torture in his friend’s eyes.

‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We’ve got to find Lucy in the next four days, that’s all we’ve got before the final showdown at that bloody bank. I think you should go down to Brighton this minute. There may be somebody left on duty at the station who may remember them, maybe even a cab driver who took them wherever they were going.’

Fitzgerald was looking at a portrait of Lady Lucy, hanging by the fireplace. Whistler had painted her in a pale evening gown against a dark background. Her eyes looked as though she was teasing the painter. Fitzgerald took another medicinal dose of his whisky.

‘I would think they must have gone to a hotel, Francis,’ he said. ‘Think about it. They can’t have known before they started that they were going to have to pull off a stunt like this. They can’t have rented a house in Brighton or anything like that.

‘We do have a problem, Francis.’ Fitzgerald was still staring, as if hypnotized, at Whistler’s version of Lady Lucy’s face. ‘They will have a good idea of what we look like, you and I. I may even have met one or two of our kidnapping friends in Berlin. We can’t use the police. If they see a policeman they may do something to Lady Lucy. Sorry, but it’s true.’

Powerscourt started shaking as he thought about the razors. Another wave of uncontrollable anger was surging through him. He knew he would just have to wait till it passed.

‘And if we send in the policemen in plain clothes,’ Fitzgerald went on quickly, ‘they’ll be recognized. I don’t know what it is about policemen in plain clothes, but they’re even more recognizable than if they had their bloody uniforms on.’

Powerscourt was lost in thought. Uniforms. Something to do with uniforms.

‘Johnny,’ he said, pacing up and down the room again, ‘uniforms can make you almost invisible. If you’re a fireman or somebody like that people don’t really look at you at all. They look at the uniform.’

‘You’re not suggesting, are you,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘that we turn into the Sussex Fire Brigade? Not that I wouldn’t like climbing up those big ladders and waving the hosepipes about.’

‘No, I’m not, Johnny.’ Powerscourt was deadly serious. ‘It was the principle of the thing I was thinking about. Army officers.’ Powerscourt said triumphantly. ‘I’ve still got my uniform. You must still have yours somewhere. We could be a couple of heroes home from the wars.’

Powerscourt looked at Lady Lucy’s favourite clock. He wondered yet again where she was.

‘It’s nearly half-past nine, Johnny,’ he said firmly. ‘This is what we should do. Off you go to Brighton with your uniform. Do you have any medals? Ask at the station about any sightings of Lucy earlier in the evening. In the morning, Captain Fitzgerald begins making discreet inquiries of the hotel managers in Brighton. Begin at the Kemptown end and work your way along the sea front. I shall see you at the railway station at one o’clock tomorrow. I’m going to talk to the Police Commissioner here later on. We may not be able to send the police out into the front line but we shall have a substantial body of reinforcements to call on. God speed, Johnny.’

Fitzgerald fled into the night, whistling the Londonderry Air as he searched for a cab in the soft evening air of Markham Square.

As he tossed in his bed that night, the space beside him empty and cold, Powerscourt sent out another message. He directed it down the Brighton Line.

Hold on, Lucy, I’m coming. Hold on.

‘What in God’s name is keeping him? McDonnell’s been downstairs for nearly half an hour.’

The Prime Minister was growing impatient. An improbable quartet waited nervously in the upstairs drawing room in Number 25 Markham Square. One floor below, in Powerscourt’s study, Mr Franz Augustine Messel, millionaire many times over, was closeted with Schomberg McDonnell, private secretary to the Prime Minister, and the finest tea the Powerscourt household could provide. Messel had travelled down from his Oxfordshire mansion, arriving in Chelsea shortly before ten o’clock.

‘We just have to be patient,’ said William Burke, poring over a book of accounts.

‘We don’t have that much time, you know,’ said the Governor of the Bank of England. ‘We really need to have that money today to make sure we can cope with all the necessary particulars of transfer and so on.’ The Governor was, if anything, even more anxious and uncertain than he had been the night before. He paced up and down the room, wringing his hands. Rosebery was reading the racing papers.

Powerscourt was standing by the window. Two policemen were stationed discreetly among the trees. Some stray American tourists in London for the Jubilee were admiring the houses in loud East Coast accents and wondering if Boston could offer anything finer. He felt weak from lack of sleep and sick with worry. He thought he had drifted off a couple of times in the night but terrible visions of Lucy being ill treated left him exhausted. He had resolved not to say anything to the Prime Minister or anybody else until this meeting was over.

There was a rush of footsteps up the stairs.

‘Right, Prime Minister.’ Schomberg McDonnell was a mild-looking young man with an innocent face and fine brown eyes. ‘Sorry that took so long. I had to explain to Mr Messel that we could not, under any circumstances, tell him the reason why we wanted the money.’

‘What’s the score?’ asked the Prime Minister, rising from his recumbent position on the sofa.

‘Five million pounds at five per cent, payable over ten years,’ McDonnell replied.

The Bank of England looked aghast. Rosebery turned pale. The Prime Minister seemed unconcerned.

‘We couldn’t lose that much in the Treasury accounts over ten years. We need a longer payback time, McDonnell.’

‘I understand, Prime Minister.’

‘Peerage,’ said Lord Salisbury firmly.

‘Set against the interest rate or term of loan?’

‘Both,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘Christ!’ said McDonnell, and fled downstairs to do his master’s bidding.

‘I was never very good at mental arithmetic at school,’ said the Prime Minister, turning to William Burke. ‘Don’t think I could ever have managed the Exchequer. But something tells me that we should have to find two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year in interest charges alone on that deal. Couldn’t have managed it.’

Burke looked up from his account book.

‘You are absolutely right, Prime Minister. Perhaps you would like me to do the calculations for you as further bulletins emerge?’

‘That’s uncommon civil of you, Mr Burke. I’m much obliged.’

With that the Prime Minister sank back on to the sofa and closed his eyes. My God, thought Powerscourt, he’s not going to sleep at a time like this. The Governor of the Bank was looking desperately at his watch. Burke had opened a new page in his book and was writing five million in large figures at the top. He drew a line a third of the way down the page and put another heading of five million pounds.

Powerscourt wondered how much a human life was worth. Just one. Just Lucy’s. He thought of the other human lives, the Farrells and the thousands like them whose prospects would be ruined if Harrison’s Private Bank were forced to sell off all the properties they held for charities. He looked again at the portrait of Lady Lucy. He felt the tears starting in his eyes and thought of other things. He thought of Johnny Fitzgerald checking out the Brighton hotels, he thought of his meeting with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner late the night before, the Commissioner looking pale as he sat drinking brandy in Lady Lucy’s favourite chair.

‘My God, Powerscourt, this is the most terrible thing I have heard in all my days. I shall speak to my counterparts in Sussex. The resources of the Brighton force will be put at your disposal.’

Powerscourt had expressed his gratitude. ‘But don’t you see, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘how difficult the thing is. First we have to find her. But the kidnappers must not know we have found them. You have seen what they say in their note.’

Even the Commissioner shuddered.

‘If we find them,’ said Powerscourt, pacing up and down the drawing room like one of Nelson’s captains on his quarterdeck, ‘we have to work out a way of getting Lucy from their clutches. And, believe me, I cannot see how we do it at present.’

Out in the square a plain-clothes man was talking to the two policemen. A delivery van arrived and began unloading cases of wine at a house with a red door across the way. Life in Markham Square went on, even as the Prime Minister of Great Britain tried to negotiate the salvation of the City of London in Number 25 and Lord Francis Powerscourt was closer to despair than he had ever been in his life.

There was another rush up the stairs. A distant corner of Powerscourt’s mind automatically noticed that Schomberg McDonnell was not out of breath at all. Perhaps it keeps you fit, he thought, working for the Prime Minister.

‘Four and a half per cent,’ he announced, ‘fifteen years.’

‘Christ, he’s going to make even more money out of us that way,’ said the Prime Minister, opening his eyes.

‘Royal Commission, Prime Minister?’ asked McDonnell.

‘Not yet, not yet, dammit. Try him with some of that fashionable stuff. You know the sort of thing.’

‘Weekend at Sandringham with the Prince and Princess of Wales?’ said McDonnell. ‘Dinner in their London home at Marlborough House?’

‘Not weekend, McDonnell, weekends. Plural.’

‘God help him!’ said the private secretary, and shot back down the stairs. They heard a faint click as the study door closed on the floor below.

‘Interest charges would run on that deal at two hundred and twenty five thousand a year,’ said William Burke. ‘That’s not including repayment of the principal.’

The Prime Minister subsided on to the sofa once more. Burke prepared more sections of his book with headings of five million pounds. Powerscourt noticed that there was now a subsidiary row of figures labelled one per cent, half per cent, quarter per cent. Burke was preparing for all eventualities. The Governor wished most devoutly that he was somewhere else.

So did Powerscourt. Suddenly he could hear Lucy’s voice echoing in his mind. She was reading a bedtime story to Thomas, her tone soft and quiet in the hope it would send the little boy to sleep. It was a fairy story about a princess locked up in a tower. Only a handsome prince could rescue her from her prison on the top of the mountain. He went to the window to blink back his tears.

This time the negotiations seemed quicker than before. The Governor had only looked at his watch once before McDonnell was back.

‘Four per cent over fifteen years,’ he reported.

The Prime Minister snorted as though he had expected better tidings. ‘All right, McDonnell. Royal Commission.’

‘Member or Chairman?’

‘Start with member,’ instructed the Prime Minister, ‘see how you go.

‘Very good, Prime Minister.’

‘You’re down to two hundred thousand pounds interest charges a year now, Prime Minister,’ said Burke cheerfully. ‘Total interest charges of three million. Three to catch five.’

‘Could be worse,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘could be worse.’

Where is she? Powerscourt asked himself. What are they doing to her? He wished the meeting would end and he could tell his news to the Prime Minister and rush off to Brighton. He felt completely detached from this meeting, as if it were all a dream. It’s a Greek tragedy, he thought. McDonnell is the Chorus, forever coming back on stage with fresh news of atrocities and the unburied dead. Hold on, Lucy, I’m coming. Hold on.

Rosebery had ringed a number of entries in his racing paper. Burke was now marking out further pages of his notebook ready for new calculations of interest charges. Powerscourt saw that he now had a separate heading called Repayment of Capital, underlined twice.

‘Maybe we should open a book on how long each negotiation will be,’ said Rosebery, inspired by his study of the turf. ‘I say he’ll be back inside three minutes.’ There was not time for anybody to reply. Just inside the Rosebery timetable McDonnell returned.

‘Three and three quarter per cent. Twenty years,’ he announced.

‘Member or Chairman?’ asked the Prime Minister.

‘Chairman,’ said McDonnell. ‘I thought it was worth it for the extra five years.’

‘What have we left now?’ The Prime Minister was still lying back on his sofa.

‘Let me try him with clubland, sir,’ said McDonnell. ‘I talked to a man last night who said Messel had been very disappointed when he was blackballed by the Coldstream.’

‘Carry on, McDonnell.’

‘Very good, Prime Minister.’

‘I hope we can deliver these bloody clubs for him, Rosebery,’ said the Prime Minister, turning to his predecessor. ‘Never cared for them much myself. But you belong to one or two, don’t you?’

‘Rest assured, Prime Minister, the clubs should be fine.’ Rosebery smiled. ‘The last time I counted I belonged to thirty-seven.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said the Prime Minister. ‘How ever do you find the time to go to them all?’

One of the stairs at the bottom of the hall was creaking, Powerscourt noticed. There was a small but noticeable squeak that heralded the return of the private secretary.

‘Three and a half per cent, Prime Minister, over twenty years. It seems Mr Messel is very fond of clubs even though he doesn’t belong to many. That’s the MCC, the Royal Yacht Squadron, the Coldstream, the Warwick, the Beefsteak, the Athenaeum and the Jockey Club.’

‘All gone?’ asked the Prime Minister.

‘All gone,’ McDonnell nodded.

‘Christ, that’s a lot of clubs. Can we cope with that lot, Rosebery?’

‘We can, Prime Minister. But somebody should have warned him about the Warwick. The food is disgusting.’

‘We’re running out of bait,’ said the Prime Minister, rubbing his eyes.

‘A position on government committees, Prime Minister?’ McDonnell seemed to have taken the measure of Franz Augustine Messel. ‘I think he’d go for that, Mr Messel.’

‘Any damned committee?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘Forestry? Technical Education? Maritime Shipping?’

‘Something like that, Prime Minister.’

‘Use your judgement, McDonnell. Off you go.’

The Governor of the Bank of England joined Powerscourt by the window. The Americans had left. The policemen still guarded Number 25. Rosebery returned to the racing pages, marking out some more winners for the afternoon. Burke was now writing his own name over and over again in the last page of the account book. The Prime Minister closed his eyes once more. Powerscourt was thinking again about professional success and personal failure. He thought again about the Farrell family, thrown out on to the unforgiving streets of London. He thought that he might never see Lucy again. I’ve just got to find her, he said to himself, clenching his fists very tightly. I’m bloody well going to find her. Hold on, Lucy. I’m coming. Hold on.

That squeak again. McDonnell’s face never changes every time he comes back, Powerscourt noticed. Nobody looking at him could have guessed what sort of tidings he was bringing with him.

‘Three per cent over twenty years. No interest payable for the first two years,’ he reported.

‘What’s that, Mr Burke?’ asked the Prime Minister from his sofa.

‘One hundred and fifty thousand a year, sir,’ said Burke.

‘Done,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘I’ll settle for that. What did you have to offer the fellow for the extra half per cent, McDonnell?’

‘I’m afraid I said it was likely that there would be a joint committee of both Houses looking into the whole question of foreign loans.’

‘Did you, by God,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘I thought,’ said McDonnell, looking his most innocent, ‘that Mr Messel might have useful things to say on the subject. And I only said it was likely, Prime Minister. Nothing definite. Nothing we couldn’t wriggle out of later on, if we had to.’

‘Powerscourt,’ the Prime Minister rose from his sofa at last, ‘we’re obliged to you for the loan of your house. I’d be even more grateful if you could manage some champagne. Governor, Mr Burke, could you attend to the financial paperwork and so on with Mr Messel? Soon to be Lord Messel, God help us all. Bring the fellow up here, McDonnell. We must drink a toast! To the salvation of the City!’

Welcome, Mr Messel, thought Powerscourt bitterly, welcome to the higher hypocrisies. Welcome to the insider’s world. Welcome to the club. Welcome to the Jubilee. Welcome to Britain as it is in the year of Our Lord 1897.

‘Could I just have a private word, Prime Minister?’ Powerscourt closed the door on the departing financiers. He told the Prime Minister what had happened. He showed him the letter from the kidnappers, already slightly crumpled from being taken out and read so many times. He wondered what the Prime Minister would do. He knew that men said he was one of the most ruthless political operators of the century, that the corridors and the committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster were littered with the corpses of his political opponents. His first response was not what Powerscourt expected at all.

‘My God, Powerscourt,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘the last hour and a half must have been torture for you, listening to these negotiations and McDonnell running up and down the stairs. It must have been hell. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘I didn’t think it was fair,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘You can see that if these negotiations had failed, then Harrison’s Bank would have fallen and Lady Lucy could have been back in this house this evening.’

He looked quickly round the room as if his wife might just float in through the window.

‘By God, you must find her, Powerscourt!’ The Prime Minister paused, stroking his beard. The Powerscourt cat had made an unexpected entrance. It curled up happily on the Prime Minister’s lap, purring loudly that it had found a new friend.

‘Let me tell you what I can do,’ he went on, scratching the cat’s chin as he spoke. ‘I can put the resources of the State at your disposal. If you want a regiment or two, you can have them. If you want a couple of destroyers moored off the coast of Brighton you can have them. If you want Brighton sealed off by the authorities, we can do it.’

He paused. A look of distaste passed across his features. This was going to be the bit Powerscourt dreaded. He knew what was coming.

‘Let me also tell you what I cannot do, my friend.’ The cat seemed to sense that its new friend was false. It leapt off the Prime Minister’s lap and settled at Powerscourt’s feet. ‘I have had the honour to serve Her Majesty as her Prime Minister for seven years now. In that time I have done whatever I thought necessary to preserve liberty and the constitution at home and the power and reputation of this country abroad. But one thing I cannot do, however much personal circumstances might work on my heart.’

He looked rather sadly at Powerscourt.

‘I cannot give in to blackmail, wherever it comes from. Government would become impossible. Thanks to your skill, this wicked plot has been uncovered and repulsed. I cannot have that victory thrown away. They say, Lord Powerscourt, that you are the most accomplished investigator in the land. I have no doubt that you will succeed in rescuing Lady Powerscourt from this contemptible gang of sordid blackmailers. Let us know if there is anything you need.’

‘All I need,’ said Powerscourt bitterly, ‘is the one thing I haven’t got. Time. I’ve got less than four days to find her now.’

‘With all my heart I wish you Godspeed,’ said the Prime Minister, rising to extricate himself from a difficult situation. ‘We shall all pray for your success.’