Death and the Jubilee

35

Lord Francis Powerscourt was surrounded by angels, angels with broken wings, angels with no arms, angels with no heads, angels in stone, angels in marble. He was waiting for Johnny Fitzgerald at three o’clock in the afternoon in Kilburn Cemetery in the north-west of the capital.

Knox’s depleted forces had been remarkably speedy in their negotiations with the keepers of the records. Three coffins had indeed been sent from Dublin to London in the preceding month. Their destinations had been three different firms of undertakers, who had reluctantly told Powerscourt and Fitzgerald their final destination. Henry Joseph McLachlan, aged fifty-four, had been buried here with these angels.

Sections of the cemetery were overgrown. Weeds and brambles covered the bottom of the graves and giant creepers had entwined themselves round the statuary. Rooks and crows circled above the trees, protesting at the arrival of living humans. Through the foliage occasional crosses could be discerned, almost hidden from view. The other area was not very large, only a couple of hundred souls waiting here for the last trump.

Powerscourt began making his way round the graves, looking for McLachlan. He was wearing a pair of old trousers and the fisherman’s jersey Chief Inspector Tait had found for him in Brighton. The grave would be clean and fresh, the passing seasons yet to leave their slow marks of creeping decay. Johnny Fitzgerald materialized, in his Mystic Merlin clothes, a spade in his hand, a large bag of tools on his back. He had been very cheerful since Brighton, drinking only the finest wines to compensate for his brief period of abstinence.

‘What’s this bugger called, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald.

‘McLachlan,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Henry Joseph McLachlan. The earth won’t have settled long enough for him to get a proper tombstone yet. There’ll be a small cross or a stone with his name on it for now.’

‘Wouldn’t it be grand,’ Fitzgerald was looking down at a bunch of dead flowers, ‘if people actually said what they meant on these bloody tombs.’

‘What do you mean, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.

’Delighted he’s gone,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully, ‘Thank you, God, for taking the old bastard away. Gone but not remembered. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, not a moment too soon. May her life be as miserable where she’s gone as she made mine here on earth, that sort of thing.’

‘You’re a bad person, Johnny,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘They’ll get their own back on you, all these people here. I expect they’ll leave a message with St Peter that you’re not to be let in. You’re blackballed from heaven, Johnny. Hard luck.’

Powerscourt stopped. The afternoon sun lit up a row of graves not ten feet from where they were standing. One of them was new, very new with a small cross at the head.

‘Here he is, Johnny. Henry Joseph McLachlan. Gone to his Father in Heaven, May 1897.’

‘Do we open it up now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘or do we wait till it’s dark? That’ll be bloody hours away.’

‘We’ve got to do it now,’ said Powerscourt, glancing uneasily round the cemetery. There were no gardeners on duty. No relatives had come for a late afternoon communion with their dead. They were alone.

Powerscourt borrowed a spade from an open grave nearby, the preparations apparently left half-finished. In a couple of minutes they had removed the earth on top of the coffin. Something moved behind them. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald turned quickly, hands going automatically into trouser pockets. A squirrel eyed them coldly and vanished up a tree.

‘I think, Francis, we can open the coffin without taking it out of the grave. Give me that big screwdriver. You keep your eyes open up top.’

Fitzgerald lay down beside the grave. He began undoing the four great screws that held the lid in position.

‘I don’t suppose,’ he said, panting slightly with the exertion, ‘that you would recognize the coffin we’re looking for? That would be too much to hope for.’

‘It was very dark,’ said Powerscourt, his eyes fixed on the main entrance to Kilburn Cemetery, ‘all I could tell was that they were coffins.’

He was hoping more than anything that this would be the right coffin, if there was a right coffin. He remembered that night in Greystones, following the coffins on their journey from the sea. He wondered if the man with the pipe had been Michael Byrne. Maybe all three were full of dead bodies, not deadly rifles. Maybe he had got it all wrong. Maybe the deadly coffin had been sent to Guildford or Reading, not to London at all.

‘Three screws out, one to go,’ Fitzgerald reported. ‘I think I could do with a drink.’ Powerscourt thought of the other corpses he had met in the course of his investigation, Old Mr Harrison with no head and no arms, floating by London Bridge, Mr Frederick Harrison, burnt to death on the top floor of his mansion. Ordeal by Water. Ordeal by Fire.

‘Give me a hand here, Francis. We can just take a peep inside.’

Fitzgerald made the sign of the cross. Powerscourt lay down beside him. Together they tried to lift the lid. It was stiff. It didn’t want to move.

‘Bugger it,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘is there another bloody screw somewhere?’ Anger seemed to give him extra strength. Slowly, with a faint creak, the lid of the coffin came up.

There were no rifles. Only a white face that looked surprised to be dead, the eyes closed, the hair carefully brushed across the forehead, the hands folded in pious expectation of the second coming.

‘Sorry, Mr McLachlan,’ said Fitzgerald quietly, ‘very sorry. We’ll put you back where you belong in no time.’ He replaced the lid and the screws, lying on the ground beside the grave. Powerscourt was whispering to himself. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was hurling the earth back on top of the coffin as fast as he could.

‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people.’

Fitzgerald had moved on to the turf now, laying it out in neat rows. He stamped on it to make it flat once more.

Powerscourt was still whispering. ‘To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to the glory of thy people Israel.’

Johnny Fitzgerald jumped off the grave of Henry Joseph McLachlan. He brushed the earth off his clothes. ‘Where now, Francis? I don’t suppose you passed the Gravediggers Arms on your way in here? The Last Trump perhaps? That would be a good name for a pub.’

Powerscourt was looking at a piece of paper. ‘We’ve got a choice here, Johnny. There are two coffins left. One is in the North London Cemetery somewhere near Islington. The other is the West London Cemetery near the river in Mortlake. Do you have any aesthetic preferences for either of these locations?’

‘To hell with Islington,’ said Fitzgerald firmly. ‘There are lots of good pubs near the river in Mortlake. Mortlake gets my vote. I presume your carriage is still waiting near the entrance, Francis? We must be the only grave robbers in Britain to have their very own carriage to carry them round their targets. To horse! To horse!’

The streets were very busy. Every cab, carriage and brougham of the capital seemed to be full of visitors, inspecting the sights of London before they watched the Jubilee Parade. Powerscourt looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past four. He had noticed a sign at Kilburn that said the cemetery shut at five o’clock. If they arrived too late at Mortlake they would have to wait for a quiet moment to climb over the wall. It didn’t look as if there would be any quiet moments in London this evening.

They made it with fifteen minutes to spare. They picked up their spades and Johnny’s bag. Powerscourt took out two huge fisherman’s bags and hid them inside the entrance.

‘One blast on this whistle,’ he said to Wilson his coachman, ‘means come to the entrance as fast as you can. Two blasts means Help.’

Chief Inspector Tait had given Powerscourt some police whistles as a memento of the night in the King George the Fourth. Powerscourt had asked for three more for the children and regretted it deeply within twenty-four hours. Robert said it would be very useful for refereeing football matches with his friends in the park. Thomas and Olivia blew theirs once to universal delight. But they didn’t stop blowing them. Powerscourt thought their lungs must collapse under the weight of blowing, from the top of the stairs, in the drawing room, in the garden. They crept into the kitchen and blew them right behind the cook and her assistant, causing panic and near mutiny below stairs. They dashed out into the street and frightened little old ladies taking a quiet afternoon walk in Markham Square. Lady Lucy only separated Thomas and Olivia from the whistles by pointing out that she and Francis wanted to play with them as well. Even then Powerscourt had to invent a whole new vocabulary of police whistles. One blast on the whistle meant Go and get into the bath. Two blasts meant Get into bed. Three blasts meant Go to sleep.

‘Look at this place, Francis, would you just look at it.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was leaning on his spade, for all the world like a workman taking a well-earned rest, and looking at the vast expanse of cemetery. Well-ordered rows stretched almost as far as the eye could see. North towards the river, west towards Kew, the West London Cemetery was enormous. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of dead must be interred here.

‘My God!’ said Powerscourt, horrified at the prospect of searching for one grave among so many. ‘It looks to be about the same size as Hyde Park, Johnny.’

To their left was the Belgravia of this country of the dead. Avenues of great stone catafalques, temples to the departed, stretched out towards the rear wall of the cemetery. Even in death, Powerscourt thought, the rich had to be better housed than the poor. If you had money in this life, then you had to show it when you were gone, neoclassical temples with shelves and closed chambers to contain the dynasties of the wealthy. Iron grilles barred the entrance to these last resting places of London’s better postal districts. Inside spiders wove their webs very thickly. The air was musty. Bats no doubt came out at night to guard the money and the dead.

Powerscourt pointed this necropolis out to Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘In here, Johnny. We can wait till the place closes up. Nobody would find us in here.’

Crouching down beside the catafalque of the Williams family of Chester Square, five of them interred in their five star luxury, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald waited in silence until they knew the cemetery was closed. Powerscourt felt claustrophobic, choked. Fitzgerald was drawing something with his finger on the dust of the side wall. Powerscourt thought it was a wine bottle. At last they heard the bolts being pulled and the keys turning in the great locks of the main entrance. Until the morning they were alone. Alone with thousands of the dead, one of whose coffins might not contain a corpse.

‘We’d better have a plan, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt as they emerged from the dank air of Belgravia. ‘Should we start at the middle and work out, or begin round the edges and make our way into the centre?’

‘Maybe there’s one section where they put all the new arrivals, Francis. Like new boys at school. What’s this bugger called anyway?’ Johnny Fitzgerald pointed his spade into the middle distance as if the newest graves were there.

‘This bugger is called Freely,’ said Powerscourt, checking his piece of paper again, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely.’

The sky was mostly blue. Small clouds drifted overhead. The tombstones were warm from the late afternoon sun. ‘Let’s begin round the edges,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and work our way in towards the centre.’

‘All right,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely,’ he muttered to himself, ‘where the hell are you?’

By seven o’clock, after an hour and a half of searching, they had found nothing. Powerscourt reckoned they had covered less than a tenth of the territory. He began to worry that they might not find Dermot Sebastian Freely before it was dark.

The whole century is enclosed here, in this enormous cemetery, he thought. He passed the grave of a man born in the year of Trafalgar, 1805, when England was saved from invasion. He passed the grave of a woman born in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession to the throne. He passed an ornate headstone commemorating a man who had been born in the year of the Great Reform Bill in 1832 and passed away in the year of the Second Reform Act of 1867. He passed the last resting place of men who had been soldiers, who had fought in the Crimea or in Africa or in India, servants of the Queen who had turned into an Empress and whose dominions now stretched across the globe. He doubted if they had been heroes, these bodies sleeping peacefully in the evening sun, but as it said so frequently on the tombstones, they had fought the good fight, remembered most often by the loving tributes of husbands and wives, sons and daughters. Powerscourt thought of the ending of Middlemarch, Lady Lucy’s favourite novel: ‘for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts: and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

By eight o’clock Johnny Fitzgerald was getting thirsty, muttering to himself the names of the pubs he knew along the river, the Dove, the Blue Anchor, the Old Ship as if it were a final blessing on the dead.

‘Who the hell was Zachariah?’ he asked Powerscourt at one of their occasional conferences. ‘I’ve seen quotations from the old bugger about five times in the last half an hour.’

‘Old Testament,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Prophet. Long white beard.’

Fitzgerald looked at him doubtfully but returned to his stretch of tombs. There was a breeze coming off the river, rustling the leaves of the trees, whispering its way through the tombstones. At nine o’clock they failed to notice a small boy who had climbed into the cemetery by a tree at the southern end and hid himself in its branches, keeping a careful eye on the two interlopers.

Powerscourt was thinking about Lucy and the journey they would take when all of this was over. Maybe the Italian Lakes, he said to himself, remembering Old Miss Harrison in Blackwater House describing her holidays there all those years ago. Charles William Adams, he read, Mary Nightingale, Albert James Smith, beloved husband of Martha.

Maybe the Italian coast, Portofino in its fabulous position right on the sea’s edge. Somebody had told him about Corsica, wild and mountainous but with magnificent scenery and great peaks rising out of the very coastline itself. Anne Louisa Jackson, Catherine Jane O’Malley, Thomas Piper, Gone but not Forgotten.

Maybe we shouldn’t go abroad at all, he thought. Maybe we should just go about our lives very quietly rejoicing in each other and the fact that we’re still alive and not in a place like this. The roll call of the dead went on, the names tolling in his head as he passed them by.

Peter John Cartwright, Rest in Peace, Bertha Jane Hardy, George Michael Simpson, Gone to his Father in Heaven.

‘Francis, Francis!’ Johnny Fitzgerald was beckoning to him from about two hundred yards away. Powerscourt ran the whole way, his spade over his shoulder, hoping that the long search was over at last.

‘Here he is,’ said Fitzgerald softly, ‘Dermot Sebastian Freely, born 18th February 1820, passed away 30th May 1897. I am the Resurrection and the Life.’

Powerscourt looked carefully round the cemetery. He saw no living soul, only the birds rising and swooping over the rich pickings of Belgravia. In his tree the small boy snuggled into his branches, scarcely daring to breathe.

Resurrection was coming early for Dermot Sebastian Freely. In a few minutes Fitzgerald was lying on top of the grave, great piles of earth on one side of him, screwdriver in hand.

‘One,’ said Fitzgerald, placing a large screw between his teeth. Powerscourt was gazing round the four corners of the West London Cemetery.

‘Two,’ said Fitzgerald. Powerscourt turned from his inspection and peered down into the open grave.

‘Three,’ said Fitzgerald rather indistinctly as the third screw was clamped between his teeth. The small boy saw that the two men had their backs to him now. The fisherman’s jersey wasn’t looking round the place any more. He knew what they were doing, opening up the grave. The Christian Brothers at school had told him this was a mortal sin. Very slowly, very quietly, he began to make his way down the tree onto the path outside the walls.

‘Four,’ said Fitzgerald, placing the screws carefully on the ground beside his spade. Powerscourt made his way to the other end of the coffin. They began to pull at the lid as hard as they could.

The small boy had reached the ground. He looked around him quickly. Then he began to run as fast as he could to find his father. His Pa and his new friend from Dublin would be pleased with him.

‘Heave,’ said Fitzgerald, panting hard. ‘Heave for God’s sake.’ Powerscourt put his feet on the bottom section of the coffin and pulled with all his might. Very slowly the lid came off, inch by tantalizing inch. The coffin did not want to reveal its secrets. Then it came off completely, throwing Powerscourt and Fitzgerald back on to the grass. Dermot Sebastian Freely was not inside.