Death and the Jubilee

7

The park was nearly empty now. A stiff breeze, driving hard through the trees, had sent most of the walkers home to Sunday evening tea or Sunday evening service. But for Richard Martin and Sophie Williams, this was how they liked it. During the week they met rarely, Sophie often busy with her suffragist activities and Richard reluctant to face the censure of his mother.

‘Where do you think you are going now, Richard?’ she would say, sometimes tracking him down as he tried to escape through the small back door. ‘You’re not creeping out to meet that girl again, are you? Haven’t I warned you about her before? What would your poor father say if he knew that his son was leaving his mother all alone in our little house to carry on with that young woman?’

Richard suspected that his father would have wished him luck in the pursuit of such a pretty girl as Sophie Williams, but he never said so. It was easier, as well as more dutiful, to follow her wishes.

But Sundays, he felt, Sundays were his own, the only day completely clear of his work in the City. And on Sundays his mother was often busy on church business. Anyway, he thought, she wouldn’t be able to imagine anybody flirting with a member of the opposite sex on the Sabbath.

So here they were, in the park a few streets from their homes, Richard and his Sophie, as they often were at this time on a Sunday.

‘Richard,’ said Sophie eagerly ‘you must tell me all about what’s been going on at your bank. Fancy a dead man turning up in such a respectable place!’

‘Well,’ Richard said quickly, ‘he didn’t exactly turn up at the bank itself.’ He had a sudden vision of the headless corpse walking up the stairs and taking a seat in the partners’ room on the first floor. ‘He was found in the river some time ago. It was just the news that it was Old Mr Harrison that arrived this week. But, think of this, Sophie. I have met the Governor of the Bank of England!’

‘You haven’t! Is he more important than the Lord Mayor? Does he have a cat like Dick Whittington?’

‘He is the most important man in the City, Sophie. He has influence over everything. Everything. And I had to show him upstairs to Mr Frederick. “How do you do, young man,” he said to me very civilly on the staircase.’

‘One day, when women have the vote and true equality, those banks and counting houses will not be run entirely by men.’

Richard groaned internally as the tale of his triumph was turned into another attack on the wickedness of male society.

‘There are women working there already, Sophie,’ he said, trying to deflect her.

‘Oh, I know. I have met some of them at meetings. But they are only allowed in humble positions, operating the typing machines and junior clerking, that sort of thing. They’re not going to be important.’

Sophie’s eyes danced with passion as she preached her gospel. Richard looked at the vivacity, the animation of her, and he knew more than ever that he was in love with her.

‘But tell me,’ said Sophie, returning once more to Harrison’s Bank, ‘how did they take it? The partners, I mean. Were they very upset?’

‘Well, no, I don’t think they were,’ said Richard, moving off the path briefly as two very large dogs chased each other across the park, pursued by the shouts of their owners. ‘I think Mr Williamson, the partner who used to be the senior clerk, was the most upset of all.’

‘But he wasn’t even a relation!’ Sophie turned to him, shocked at the inhumanity of bankers.

‘Well, I think Mr Frederick – the one who’s senior partner now was worried in case there was going to be a run on the bank. That’s why he asked the Governor to call.’

Few matters in City offices escaped the notice of the junior staff. Gossip ran just as freely and just as widely inside the offices as it did on the streets and in the chop houses.

‘And the young Mr Harrison, Charles, he just seemed to be cross about the whole business. Maybe he was so angry with whoever had done such dreadful things to his great-uncle.’

‘Did you get to see the body, Richard?’ asked Sophie, turning ghoulish, something she would undoubtedly have discouraged in her pupils. ‘Was it very horrid?’

‘No, I did not, Sophie,’ Richard laughed. ‘I’m afraid I can’t satisfy your curiosity there.’

‘And will the bank continue to prosper? Surely things aren’t any different? Mr Frederick has been in charge for some time.’

Although she didn’t like to say so, Sophie was suddenly worried about Richard’s future.

‘In theory, you are right, Sophie,’ the young man replied, unaware of the girl’s concerns. ‘But in practice, I am not so sure. Most of the really important decisions were referred to the old man since Willi Harrison died. Many’s the time we have lost money, or not made as much as we might have done, while we waited for a reply to telegrams and messages to Blackwater. On one occasion, when the telegraph was broken, we lost fifteen thousand pounds.’

In spite of his youth and inexperience, Richard Martin had a sharp banking brain. He had watched and learnt a lot in his five years at Harrison’s and studying for his banking exams. ‘I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I just don’t know.’

Sophie knew little of the City. But she was sad to see Richard so sombre.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she said, looking at him directly.

‘Of course,’ said Richard, his heart beating a little faster.

‘I have to go for an interview with the headmistress on Thursday afternoon. I don’t know what she wants to see me about but I’m a bit worried. Could I see you in the evening, just to let you know what happened?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Richard. He wondered how he could deceive his mother. Maybe he could tell her he would have to work late at the office. Maybe he would be able to leave early on Thursday. ‘You’re not in trouble, are you Sophie? They couldn’t be unhappy with your teaching, your children are all doing so well.’

‘I don’t know what it is about. Maybe it isn’t serious. But she did give me a very strange look last week.’

‘Look,’ said Richard, ‘I’ll see you in that coffee house opposite Liverpool Street station at five o’clock. I’m sure they’ll let me go a bit early if I tell them it’s important.’

As they set off, Sophie was worried about Richard’s bank and her own interview. But Richard was feeling strangely elated. If she asked for this special meeting, didn’t it mean that she must care for him a little bit?

They buried Old Mr Harrison on a bright spring morning, the little church at Blackwater filled to overflowing with servants and tenants and local people as well as a number of visitors come from London to pay their last respects. His coffin was carried down from the house past the lake he loved, the sunlight dancing on the water and lighting up the classical buildings that shared his secrets. He was to lie in the new Harrison Chapel, next to his eldest son.

Some days later Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking up the drive to call on Old Mr Harrison’s sister, the oldest surviving member of the family.

‘She’s well into her eighties,’ Frederick Harrison had told him at his morning meeting in the bank’s offices in the City. ‘She can still see, she can still hear most of the time, but her mind is liable to wander. It’s as though parts of her brain get detached from the main instrument, then they rejoin it a little later.’

Johnny Fitzgerald had been despatched to Cowes to make inquiries about Willi Harrison, the eldest son who had perished in the boating accident. Powerscourt wasn’t sure how much would be remembered about the event, well over a year after the tragedy, or how much would have been exaggerated with time. But he needed to know if his brother-in-law’s information was correct.

He was shown through a handsome entrance hall, a cube of some thirty feet, full of paintings of the family. He thought he recognized Frederick in younger days, seated on a handsome horse, surveying his park.

Old Miss Augusta Harrison was waiting for him in the salon, a fine room with an ornate ceiling and views of the gardens beyond. She’s shrinking, Powerscourt thought, as she welcomed him formally to Blackwater. Every year she must be smaller than the one before.

‘And how can I help you, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said slowly, showing him to a chair by the marble mantelpiece.

‘I am very grateful to you for seeing me at such a difficult time,’ Powerscourt began, thinking that the mourning black reminded him of Queen Victoria. ‘I would just like to ask you some questions about your brother.’

‘That would have been when we lived in Frankfurt,’ she said slowly. Powerscourt wondered if she had never really mastered English and was slipping in and out of German in her mind. She paused and looked at Powerscourt suspiciously. ‘What did you want to know about my brother?’ She returned to normality. ‘I don’t know anything about the bank.’ She shook her head. ‘I never did and I don’t suppose I’m going to start now.’

‘I wanted to know how he spent his time when he was down here, you know, how he passed the time,’ said Powerscourt, looking at a Roman statue of a Vestal Virgin in the corner of the room.

‘Do you speak German, Lord Powerscourt? I find everything easier in German.’ The old lady seemed to be pleading with him, her gnarled hands rubbing together in her nervousness.

‘I’m afraid I don’t, Miss Harrison. My wife does, but she is not with me today. But take your time, please, I have no wish to hurry you.’ He smiled.

‘The trees are beginning to come out in the park,’ the old lady said. ‘I always like it here in the spring. It’s not as good as the Rhine, nowhere is more beautiful than the Rhine in the spring.’

Powerscourt wondered about the ratio between connection and wandering in her mind. It seemed to be about half and half. He felt he couldn’t in all decency stay much more than an hour. He wondered if he would get any information at all.

‘I was wondering,’ he said in his gentlest voice, ‘how he spent his time when he was down here, your brother.’

‘Carl lived very quietly when he was down here. He loved walking in the gardens and by the lake. It must have been in ‘35 or ’36 that Father took us to Garda,’ she went on, her mind slipping out of gear once more. ‘Carl used to take me rowing in a boat.’

‘Was he worried at all in the last year or so?’ Powerscourt cut in quickly, trying to bring her back.

‘Anybody involved in banking has reasons to worry, that’s what Father used to say. Worries all the time. I think he was worried about something, yes. There were such dances in Garda,’ she went on, a faint smile playing across her withered lips, ‘and all the young men looked so handsome. Sometimes they would build a platform out on to the water so you could dance on top of the lake. Not any more, not any more . . .’ she was muttering now, shaking her white head sadly from side to side.

‘What do you think he was worried about?’ Powerscourt tried again.

‘And the mountains!’ She was happier now, her eyes bright with the memories inside her head. ‘The mountains were so beautiful. And you could walk up into them for such a long way. Carl used to take me up to look at the flowers. He was so worried that he went to Germany quite a lot in the last year. He went several times. On Saturdays we used to take a family party to row out down the lake and stop at some of the little villages by the waterside. Sometimes we would take tea in them. They had very good cakes. Do you know the cakes in the Lakes, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I do,’ Powerscourt lied, ‘very fine cakes they are too. Where did your brother go when he went to Germany?’

‘I sometimes wish we had never left, you know, that we’d never come all the way from Frankfurt to London. Carl said business would be better here than it was in Germany. Frankfurt and Berlin are such fine cities, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘Very fine.’ Powerscourt felt faint stirrings of irritation creeping over him. ‘Was that where Carl went? To Frankfurt and Berlin?’

‘So big now, they say, Berlin. And getting bigger all the time,’ the old lady went on. ‘Carl said he could hardly recognize it. Great big buildings for the Parliament and things. It wasn’t like that when we were young.’

‘Why was he going to Frankfurt and Berlin? Was it a holiday?’ Powerscourt was finding politeness increasingly difficult.

‘You never can take a holiday from a bank, Father used to say. There was something wrong at the bank. Even when you are away you take the worries with you, even to somewhere as beautiful as the Lakes. Poor Father.’

‘Did Carl think there was something wrong at the bank? Something wrong at his bank in the City?’ Powerscourt was struggling now to hide his irritation.

‘Father used to say the only time a banker could ever feel at peace was when they put him in his grave.’ Old Miss Harrison stared defiantly at Powerscourt. ‘Well, Carl is there too now. I hope he’s found some peace there. He said there was precious little peace left to him in his last years.’

‘Was it Carl saying that, or your father? About precious little peace?’ Powerscourt realized that he wanted to shake her but he knew it would be hopeless.

‘Father was buried in that big church in the middle of Frankfurt. So many people there, such a fine service. It rained too, I remember, even though it was early summer. Not as bad as the rain here. I can hear it upstairs, you know, rattling on my window and making noises on the roof. There are very strange noises on the roof sometimes. They seem to have stopped now.’

‘What was Carl worried about?’ I’m on my last throw now, Powerscourt thought to himself, I can’t take much more of this.

‘Mother’s buried there too,’ the old woman said to him, ‘in the same church, just eight months later. She never really recovered, you know. They say that sorrow brought it on. Do you think that can be true, Lord Powerscourt? If sorrow could kill us there wouldn’t be so many people left in the world, would there?’

‘Indeed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Was it the bank that Carl was worried about?’

‘Always worries in a bank, Father used to say. Always worries, yes. Worries. All the time.’

‘Did Carl say what it was that worried him about the bank?’

‘Always worries in a Bank, Father used to say . . .’

Powerscourt wondered if the old lady was better in the mornings. Probably she was. Maybe he would ask Lady Lucy to come and speak to her in German. Will I end up like that, he asked himself, my mind meandering round the past like a stream making its way to the sea? He thought he would rather be dead.

There were only two facts he could take away with him, the confirmation of what Fitzgerald had told him about the trips to Germany and the knowledge that Old Mr Harrison had been worried about the bank. At the very back of his mind he had filed away what she had said about the noises on the roof, terrible noises that the rain could not have made. But something else could have made the noises. A body perhaps, being pulled along above a household meant to be asleep, a body due to be decapitated in the woods, a body destined to be dumped in the river, a body destined to be found many miles away bumping alongside a ship moored by London Bridge.

As he walked the two hundred yards to the head groom’s cottage Powerscourt wondered if Samuel Parker would be better in the mornings too. The light was fading fast now. He could see the church clearly on his left and below that, partly hidden by the trees, the faint outline of Blackwater lake.

‘Do come in, Lord Powerscourt, please.’ Samuel Parker met him at the door. He was in his seventies now, but still tall and upright in his bearing. Years of work in the open air had turned his face brown to match his eyes. ‘Mabel isn’t here just now. She’s over at the church helping with the flowers and making sure the place is tidy.’ He showed Powerscourt a chair by the fire. Blackwater logs burned brightly in the Blackwater grate. The walls were covered with pictures and sketches of horses.

‘Are these splendid animals ones that have passed through your hands over the years, Mr Parker?’ Start with what they know best, Powerscourt reminded himself, wondering if he had adopted completely the wrong tone with the old lady in the big house.

‘They are, Lord Powerscourt, all of them. Those three just to your right were all born in the same year. Aeneas, Anchises and Achilles, they were. Old Mr Harrison always gave them names from the past and we had a different letter of the alphabet for each year. One year we had Caesar, Cassius and Cleopatra. Old Mr Harrison used to say to me, “We’ve got to watch these horses this year, Samuel. The original Cassius went in for stabbing Caesar to death in some great building in Rome and before that Caesar had been carrying on with that Cleopatra woman in Egypt.” It always used to make him laugh, that, even when he was telling me for the twentieth time.’

‘Was Achilles very fast, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt saw that the horses were a splendid introduction to Samuel Parker’s world. He had, after all, spent his entire life with them.

‘Achilles fast, Lord Powerscourt? Fast? That he was not. Oh no. He should have been with a name like that, but he was a slow creature, very slow. Very good-natured, mind you.’

‘We used to have some splendid horses in the Army, Mr Parker, really magnificent.’ Powerscourt thought that Samuel Parker might have served in the Army as a young man. A lot of the grooms had learnt their trade in the Royal Horse Artillery or the Transport Divisions.

‘Was you in the Army, my lord? I wanted to join when I was young but my mam wouldn’t let me. You’ve got a good steady job here, she used to say, no point in joining up to get killed in foreign parts. I don’t know but she might have been right. But did you see the world, my lord?’

‘Well, I spent some years in India,’ said Powerscourt, ‘up in the north, near the border with Afghanistan. I was working in Army Intelligence.’

‘Was you now, Lord Powerscourt!’ Samuel Parker leaned forward in his chair. ‘I would have loved to have gone to some of those places and seen some of those wild natives, dervishes and hottentots or whatever they were called. Did you meet some strange foreigners, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I did, Mr Parker. Some of the tribesmen up there tried to kill me. They were very wild. They were very fond of their horses, though.’

‘Were there great mountains, Lord Powerscourt, with snow on them all the year round?’

Powerscourt thought he could detect the heart of a traveller beating strongly in Samuel Parker, who had spent his entire life in the calm and order of the Oxfordshire countryside.

‘The mountains, Mr Parker, are huge. Huge. Nearly thirty thousand feet, some of them, with snow covering the peaks even at the height of summer. I have a book of photographs of the great mountains at home. I shall bring it for you next time I come.’

Samuel Parker’s honest face lit up with pleasure. ‘That would be so kind, Lord Powerscourt. But I fear we are getting away from our business here. Mr Frederick said you wanted to talk to me about Old Mr Harrison.’

‘I do. Perhaps you could just tell me about his time here, how he spent his days, what your own dealings with him were. Take your time, Mr Parker, take your time.’

‘Well,’ replied Samuel Parker, trying to arrange his memories into some sort of order for a man who had seen the great mountains of the Himalayas and had a book to prove it. ‘Old Mr Harrison, he’d been living here most of the time for about the last ten years or so. Some of the time he was in London, sometimes he was abroad. For the bank, you understand.’

He paused. Powerscourt said nothing.

‘My duties had to do with him and the horses. Ten years ago he would ride about the country quite a lot, on Caesar or Anchises – he was always very fond of Anchises. Then, these last few years or so, he was only able to make the journey from the house round the lake. He liked to go round it every day. “It looks different every single day of the year, Samuel,” he used to say to me, “and I want to see it changing.”’

For a moment Samuel Parker vanished into his memories.

‘Then, about a year or two ago, something changed. He wasn’t as well as he had been after his accident. It hurt his leg something terrible, that accident, he had to keep on going back to the doctor. I blame that Cleopatra myself, she always was an obstinate beast with a mind of her own. After that, he would ride very slowly, sometimes on a pony. And this was different too.’

Samuel Parker scratched his head and put some more logs on the fire.

‘He began bringing work with him. Letters he had received, papers from the bank, I shouldn’t wonder. You haven’t seen those temples by the lake yet, Lord Powerscourt, have you?’

Powerscourt shook his head.

‘Sometimes he would work in there at his papers. We had a folding table we used to bring and he would work away, writing letters and things inside one of those temples. Sometimes he would give me letters to post for him. He got very slow towards the end, Lord Powerscourt. He was old and his leg was bad but I’m sure his mind still worked faster than his feet if you follow me.’

Samuel Parker stopped. Powerscourt waited. Perhaps there was more to come. Perhaps Samuel Parker had exhausted his memories.

‘That is very interesting,’ he said at length, ‘and admirably told. Perhaps I could just ask you about one or two things, Mr Parker?’

‘Of course you can, my lord. I was never very good at long speeches, if you follow me.’

‘Can you remember exactly when he began to bring his work down to the lake?’

Samuel Parker looked into his fire. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think I can, my lord. All I can remember is that it was about the time we began to hear about the plans for this new Jubilee up in London. Mabel reminded me of that the other day. She is very fond of things like Jubilees, my lord. I took her all the way up to London for that other one in ’87. She can remember all the details to this day, can Mabel. I don’t suppose either of us will get there for this one though. Mabel’s legs wouldn’t be up to it, so they wouldn’t.’

‘And when Old Mr Harrison took his papers down to the lake,’ Powerscourt sounded his most innocent, ‘do you suppose he left some of them behind sometimes? In one of the temples or somewhere like that?’

‘I’d never thought about that, my lord.’ Parker fell silent for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, he could have done, I suppose. Sometimes he didn’t seem to have as many of these papers going back as he did going down, if you follow me.’

‘And would you know,’ Powerscourt was looking at him intently as the night finally closed in outside, ‘where exactly he left them?’

‘Do you mean, my lord, that they might be still there, these papers?’

‘I do, Mr Parker.’

‘God bless my soul, Lord Powerscourt, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d never have thought of that. I suppose they might be.’ He scratched his head again as if unsure what to believe.

‘And the letters, Mr Parker,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘the ones he gave you to post. Did you think that was unusual, asking you to take charge of them rather than leaving them in the big house for the servants to send off?’

‘I thought it was unusual at first, my lord. Then I sort of got used to it. Mabel used to think Old Mr Harrison was making secret investments somewhere abroad.’

‘Were the letters for abroad?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Why, yes, I suppose they were. Mostly to Germany, Frankfurt, I remember, and Berlin, wherever that is. And some for a place called Hamburg. Mabel looked that one up in a map at the library.’

Powerscourt wondered if he had a rival in the detection business in Mrs Parker, obviously an assiduous researcher.

‘Did he bring letters with him down to the lake?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Letters that might have come from these foreign places?’

‘I think he might have, my lord.’ Samuel Parker scratched his head. ‘I do seem to remember that sometimes they weren’t opened. And they had foreign stamps on them. Mabel does like to look at a foreign stamp.’

Powerscourt wondered again about the precise role played by Mrs Mabel Parker in her husband’s affairs but he let it pass.

‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was already planning another visit to Blackwater House. ‘I have to come back here again very soon, to talk to the people in the big house, you understand. Perhaps we could go on the same walk round the lake you used to take with Old Mr Harrison. Sometimes revisiting the places helps bring back more memories. Not that you haven’t remembered very well already.’

Powerscourt smiled a smile of congratulation.

‘There is just one other thing, my lord,’ said Parker. ‘You’re not the first gentleman to have been round here asking questions about Old Mr Harrison. There was another gentleman round here the other day.’

Samuel Parker paused again.

‘He was a very curious gentleman, my lord. I thought he was almost too curious. Very friendly, of course, but I wouldn’t have said he was as discreet as yourself.’

Powerscourt rejoiced at this description of Johnny Fitzgerald. Not as discreet as himself, he liked that. He would tell Lady Lucy about it this evening. But as he set off for his train back to London one question above all others troubled him.

Why had Old Mr Harrison taken his business down to the lake? Why had he posted his foreign correspondence in this unusual way? Was it normal banker’s caution? Was it merely the whim, the foible of a very old man? Or did he think he was being spied on inside the drawing rooms and the bedrooms of Blackwater House?