Death in a Scarlet Coat

16

Powerscourt felt like some underground explorer deep below the earth’s crust who rolls away a vast boulder to find himself in an enormous chamber, the walls adorned with cave paintings of strange creatures who no longer roam the earth. The air was filled with dust and a horrid smell, a compound of heaven knew how many dead insects and rotting objects and the passing of time itself. The dust was so thick that when his foot touched what was left of the dingy carpet small clouds billowed out over his shoe.

Powerscourt coughed harshly and tried to find some fresh air. The room was on the top corner of the house with a pair of windows looking out over the garden towards the lake and another pair on the adjacent wall looking out over a dark courtyard. Powerscourt pulled out his penknife and inserted it between the edge of the surround and the wood holding the glass of the window. His blade got stuck every now and then but it did eventually manage to run up and down the sash. He spent a few minutes heaving and shoving at the catch in the middle of the window and pulled as hard as he could. For a moment his coughing grew worse. Then the window shot upwards and fresh air flowed into the room. Powerscourt turned his attention to the other windows. After a quarter of an hour he managed to open two of them. You could, he decided, almost feel the bad air rushing past. A couple of rooks, who could never have seen the windows open in their lifetime, flew past twice as if to make sure their eyes were not deceiving them.

The room was very large. To the right of the door were a couple of tall cupboards. Another two were on the left of the door, with a bed in the corner, the pillows limp and flaccid to the touch, the bedcover, which might once have been a bright yellow, now a dingy brown. In front of the long windows looking over the garden stood a couple of easels, one considerably higher than the other, both festooned in dust and cobwebs. A large mirror was wedged between them. In the corner, still standing to attention, stood a grandfather clock whose face announced the time as twenty minutes past three. Time had not moved in here for over a century. There was an alcove to one side of the bed with the remains of a curtain drawn across the space.

But where, Powerscourt said to himself, were the Caravaggios? They certainly weren’t on the walls. This earlier Candlesby had collected the paintings all over Italy and brought them back to his old house and stored them up here on the top floor. The people who lived here now were so frightened of the paintings or what had been done with the paintings that they were too scared to come in. He looked at the cupboards suspiciously. When he opened one of them he found on the top shelf a strange collection of clothes, what looked like a loincloth, a dark cloak, a sort of chemise with no collar that could have been worn by male or female, a strange circular headdress, various lengths and dimensions of scarlet and blue cloth that could have been used for anything. On the second shelf he found a skull, the vast open jawbone still yawning horribly at those who came to see it, a selection of twigs, a limp bamboo cane with split ends and a couple of berets, one in dark blue and one in pale green. There was a filthy candlestick and a mirror that had seen better days. Quite what these objects were doing there, Powerscourt had, for the moment, no idea.

He tried to remember the little he knew about Caravaggio. Born in the north of Italy and brought up in Milan. Moved south to Rome where he was employed by a courtier at the Vatican, then to Naples and various other cities round the Mediterranean. There had, Powerscourt’s contact at the National Gallery once told him on the telephone, been rumours of fighting and drunkenness. He was believed to have fled Rome after killing a man. He had died young after a turbulent life. The National Gallery, Powerscourt’s man told him, had three or four of his paintings stored in the basement, that final resting place for unfashionable artists. He had fallen from popularity, Caravaggio, very soon after he died. Few galleries, if any, had his paintings on display, except for a rather obscure one in Naples. Maybe the artistic world was anxious to forget such a controversial figure. One day, Powerscourt’s curator contact had prophesied, Caravaggio would return to fame and glory once again. It happened all the time, he said. Just as some obscure share or bond which seems to do nothing for decades will suddenly spring into life when fresh seams of gold or silver are discovered, his works would come back into fashion. The swagger and the display and the mastery of light and drama that had entranced his contemporaries in his lifetime would be on display again in the great galleries of Europe. How odd, Powerscourt thought, if the fortunes of the Candlesbys and their estates could be restored by the paintings that had been left to rot up here since the time of the loss of the American colonies.

He had a violent coughing fit. The dust seemed to be making its way down to his lungs. He tiptoed over to the alcove with the curtain. Very gently he pulled it to one side. On the right-hand side was a great pile of paintings, about a dozen, he thought, maybe more. Another heap was against the opposite wall. The dust was lying in layers on the frames. Spiders had created gossamer Old Master drawings against the back wall. Powerscourt picked the right-hand paintings up one by one and carried them back to the bed. He leant them against the sides with a few on top of the covers. The dust twirled and swirled and whirled around his face until he had to go and put his head out of the window. He wondered suddenly if the Edward Candlesby who had purchased these pictures had leant out of this window and stared at his English estates stretching out to the lake and beyond into the Lincolnshire countryside, remembering the days he bought his Caravaggios amid the heat and the different dust of Naples and Rome. He wondered about the purchases on the Grand Tour. Had Candlesby fallen victim to the usual honey trap? You went to an art dealer, usually in Rome, some of whom sold only to British visitors. The dealer would inquire politely in reasonable English which of the Old Masters appealed to you the most. Raphael, you might hazard, or Titian perhaps. What a pity you have come today, the dealer would say. I have some very fine Raphaels and some wonderful Titians, but they are at my house in the country. I like them so much, signor, that I keep them at home for my own enjoyment. But for you, I will bring them back here to the Via Veneto. If you come back in three days’ time, they will be here, waiting for you. What could be better! Maybe the dealer already has some fake Titians and Raphaels in store somewhere. If not, his forger goes to work and the fakes are ready for inspection on the third day. Some excuse about the need for final glazing would be made to give the works time to dry out properly. Perhaps milord would care to look at some other paintings in the meantime? Powerscourt suspected that Caravaggio might not fit into that particular mould. He was relatively unknown. High-class forgers might not take the time and trouble to learn how to reproduce him. The dealer might not keep any in stock in case he could never shift them. Maybe these were originals after all.

Two things struck Powerscourt as he looked through the paintings. The first was the artist’s total mastery of light, spectacular even after a century and a half of dust and damp. It was as if he had a whole battery of searchlights of different power. Some of the faces and some of the bodies would have the most powerful light shone on them. The skin would gleam and glisten as if the subject were sweating slightly. Other, less important, characters received much less power. The contrast between the brilliance of the light shining on the body of St Jerome, for example, and the skull, half in shadow on his work table, gave the picture a power and intensity that held the viewer in its spell. Mastery of light heightened the drama. Even through the dust and the grime the light shone through. The other thing to strike Powerscourt was the faces. These were not the faces of aristocrats or warriors or great kings or ancient philosophers from the distant past. They were not the idealized beauties that graced the canvases of Botticelli or Bellini. Caravaggio was an unlikely foot soldier in the Counter Reformation launched at the Council of Trent towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church’s fight back against the Protestants. The heretics of Geneva or Wittenberg might ban paintings from the walls of their churches. The true believers in the Pope and the Mass were given large paintings on the walls and in the little chapels of the churches of Rome that were morality stories, but morality stories of a power and force that could not but impress. The faces in Caravaggio’s pictures were taken from the streets, lifted from tavern or alleyway or choir to grace an artist’s vision. This, Powerscourt remembered his man at the National Gallery telling him, was what gave them their contemporary feel. This was what enabled the poor and the destitute to identify with Caravaggio’s characters. Titian’s kings and doges inhabited a world far from the ordinary citizens. Caravaggio’s people were real boys and real men and women, spotted by the painter perhaps and paid a pittance to pose for his brushes.

There were one or two charming paintings, probably executed for some prince of the Church, of Bacchus with leaves in his hair, of cardsharps plying their trade, a boy with a basket of fruit. Caravaggio was drawn to drama as the dust was drawn to this high room that served as a sepulchre for his art. Here was the calling of St Matthew, here was the raising of Lazarus, the death of the Virgin. A number of the works, Powerscourt thought, verged on the sado-masochistic, or seemed to come from the pornography of religious violence. Death, blood and beheading were commonplace, painted with appalling realism. Judith with the head of Holofernes, for example, showed the progress of the knife against the warrior’s throat. The beheading of John the Baptist showed the saint lying on the floor with the executioner poised above him in a well of light, knife at the ready. Christ was tied to a tree, flayed, scourged, and had the crown of thorns put on his head. Saints were crucified upside down or right way up, their agony and their faith earning a place in heaven.

Even through the dust and the grime the power of the artist illuminated this room at the top of Candlesby Hall. For the poor and the peasants of early seventeenth-century Italy, they must have seemed more wondrous than the modern cinema pictures. These were in colour rather than black and white with an intensity the camera did not possess.

But what of the other pictures, the ones on the opposite side of the alcove? Powerscourt moved some of the real Caravaggios to rest against the wall behind the easel. Out they came, the others, two or three at a time. When he inspected them, he was amazed. This, he thought, was the most unusual thing he had seen since the start of his investigation. These paintings were as grimy as the others. Dust and dark lines defaced the surface of the pictures as it did the ones by the window. But the subject matter was the same. These were copies, very imperfect copies, of the Caravaggios behind the easels. Here again was the boy with the basket of fruit, Bacchus with a crown on his head, the flayings, the decapitations, the crucifixions, the whole bloody agony from Gethsemane to Golgotha. But they were copies with a difference. This boy with a fruit basket did not come from the streets of Naples. He looked as though he might have come from the farms of Candlesby. There was something terribly English about his face.

As he rattled through the paintings, Powerscourt saw a host of people who must have been locals, summoned to this room to pose for their master. Rubbing lightly with his handkerchief and blowing at the corner of one painting, Powerscourt found a sort of signature. ‘Candlesby’, the writing said in the bottom right-hand corner, ‘after Caravaggio’.

Inspector Blunden was not a happy man. He was on his way to interview Oliver Bell near Old Bolingbroke Castle west of Candlesby. Bell’s father had been shot in a duel by the late Lord Candlesby many years before, and Bell had served in the British Army as an expert marksman. He was, the Inspector thought, far too obvious a suspect but his Chief Constable had been making suggestions so here he was.

Blunden had always had a feeling about murder inquiries. Some of them, he felt, you just knew were going to turn out well. It was only a question of waiting for the key facts to fall into place or a witness to come forward with the vital piece of evidence. The Candlesby murders were not like that. There was his interfering Chief Constable for a start. Then there were those posh people up at Candlesby Hall. Blunden would never have admitted it but he felt uncomfortable with these aristocrats. Part of him really believed that they were superior to him and his like. Another part of him told him that this was nonsense. Nevertheless, he found interviewing them difficult. With most of the population of Lincolnshire Blunden could have told you who was lying and who was telling the truth and been right almost all the time. This detection compass deserted him completely in Candlesby Hall.

Then there was Powerscourt. Inspector Blunden was very fond of Powerscourt and was glad he was on board. But he did find him difficult on occasion. Blunden’s brain ticked over like on old grandfather clock. Steady. Reliable. Unchanging. The time on its face was always right. Powerscourt’s brain on the other hand, the Inspector felt, was not like that at all. It was mercurial, it darted about, it jumped around. Inspector Blunden doubted if a Powerscourt clock would ever tell the right time. It would look very pretty as some clocks did, but as a timekeeper it would be all over the place. In some ways Powerscourt reminded him of a boy he had known at school. He was no good at the steady subjects, Albert Parker, but he was entranced by history and the romance of old buildings and battles and glory long ago. ‘Show him a castle,’ the history master had once said, ‘and there’ll be a princess locked up in the tower and a sword stuck in a rock that only the once and future King can pull out. Overdeveloped historical imagination, that’s what it is.’ Inspector Blunden knew in his bones that Powerscourt would have one brilliant flash of intuition – the Inspector preferred to call it guesswork – and the case would be over.

There was only one consoling thought in the Inspector’s heart that morning and she was called Emily and she was three years old, Emily Blunden. She would sit in her father’s lap and demand his total attention before serenading him with ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, over and over again. The Inspector had impressed upon his wife the need to widen the repertoire, but, so far, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ was all they were going to get.

The little garden outside Oliver Bell’s cottage was very tidy. Oliver Bell opened the door in a pair of dark blue trousers and an enormous sweater as if he was about to embark on a long sea voyage. He had a neat black beard and curly hair turning silver at the sides. He looked, Blunden thought, like a self-contained sort of person, one who does not need all that much of the company of his fellow men.

‘Good morning, Inspector,’ said Bell. ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time now.’

The Inspector wondered if he had been derelict in the performance of his duty and would be sacked on his return to the police station.

‘I’m sure you can understand my position, Mr Bell.’ The Inspector had squeezed into a chair that was much too small for him. ‘Your father killed in a duel when you were small, your coming back here a year or so ago, revenge always a very clear motive for murder and you a military man too.’

‘I can fully see why you might regard me as a suspect, Inspector. In your job I would have done exactly the same. But I have to tell you that I have changed. I am no longer a soldier. I am a pacifist now, a Christian of sorts, a believer in the late writings of Leo Tolstoy and politicians like Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. I am going to London to work for the Salvation Army when you are finished with me. I did not care to leave until I had spoken with you in case you thought I was guilty and was running away.’

‘Can you tell me where you were on the night of the great storm when Lord Candlesby was murdered, Mr Bell?’

‘I can indeed, Inspector. I was here apart from an hour spent with my nearest neighbour, a retired clergyman who thought his roof was about to collapse. I was with him for fifty or sixty minutes. I’m sure he would confirm that.’

‘Very well, Mr Bell, once I have confirmed that you will be free to leave. Just one other thing. Could I ask you couple of questions if I may?’

‘That’s what you people do,’ Bell replied, with a smile.

‘What made you change your mind? About the military, I mean. You had a very distinguished career in the army after all.’

Oliver Bell stared blankly at the Inspector as if he had travelled to some faraway veldt or a distant hill station in Rajasthan.

‘I killed too many people,’ he said finally. ‘Sorry if that sounds gruesome. I must have killed hundreds and hundreds of people in my time in the army. Most of the time you never see them, your victims I mean. Near the end I did see three people I’d shot that very morning. One had been shot in the chest and his blood was everywhere. One had been shot in the belly and his guts were hanging out over his stomach like something in a butcher’s shop. The third had been hit in the forehead and his brains were all over the others. Flies and other insects were all buzzing around for the feast. Man reduced to a treat for the smallest and least significant of God’s creatures. I only killed two people after that. Most of the time I aimed too high or too wide.’

‘I think you are a very brave man,’ said the Inspector. ‘My final question is this. Did you see or hear of anything round about the time of these murders that might help us find the killer?’

Oliver Bell thought for a moment. ‘Just one thing, Inspector, and it could be nothing. Early in the afternoon on the day of the great storm I’d come back from Lincoln on the train. I’d been to the cathedral to hear a talk about the cloisters. It always refreshes me, Lincoln Cathedral. Every time I go there I think we don’t deserve to be exposed to such beauty. Carlton Lawrence, the middle one of that family who had to sell up recently, he was coming out of the railway station. He looked rather nervous, as if he had just done something wrong or was about to do something he shouldn’t. He kept looking around him as if he didn’t want to be recognized. As I say, it could be nothing, Inspector.’

Oliver Bell watched the policeman go. I didn’t think that would be so easy, he said to himself. Much easier than I thought. He went inside and began to pack his bags.

Edward Nathaniel, Earl of Candlesby, referred to by his detractors as the Wicked Earl, had been restored to the room he created at the end of the eighteenth century. Powerscourt and the butler had brought him up two flights of stairs from his place on the dining-room wall next to the second Earl. Only Powerscourt had actually carried the portrait into the room. He was now ensconced on one of the two easels by the window. Powerscourt checked the various copies he had discovered and found that there were two pictures where Candlesby had painted himself as a copy of the Caravaggio original. One was of a saint often depicted in religious paintings. St Jerome is old and losing his hair. He is engaged in copying out the Vulgate, wearing a deep red robe as far as his waist. A skull and a candlestick and a mirror remind us that death is never far away, the very items that Powerscourt had discovered in the cupboard. Powerscourt suspected that Candlesby put the original painting on one easel and his own canvas on the other. When he had copied all the background, he had removed the original and aligned the large mirror on the easel in such a way that he could paint his own reflection on to the canvas. He was wearing the red robe Powerscourt had found in the cupboard, and the skull was nearby as it had been in the Caravaggio version. Unlike the real Caravaggio, there was little life and no energy in it. It was, Powerscourt thought, a poor thing.

But the others, what of the others? Did Candlesby know that Caravaggio used contemporary models from the street or the tavern or the house next door? Would they have told him that in those art galleries in Rome?

He rearranged the Caravaggio canvases once more and discovered that there was a clear sequence of paintings about Christ’s last days, the flagellation of Christ, Ecce Homo or Here is the Man, the crowning with thorns, all concerned with Jesus being scourged and shown to the multitude by Pontius Pilate.

Powerscourt found three copies by the former owner of the house. He stared at them for a long time. None of these men was Candlesby himself. The models being flogged or crowned with thorns were all different people. Were they locals? Had Candlesby simply selected them from his labourers or his servants to act as models for his grisly hobby? Had he ordered them up here, beaten them or flogged them to the required degree and made them sit or stand or be twisted round a pillar, their wounds still bleeding so the paint would look fresh on the canvas? Christ in heaven.

Powerscourt staggered back from the Candlesby paintings and found himself in a dark corner with an enormous cupboard he had not seen before. He pulled very carefully at the door. It seemed to have been locked. Powerscourt vented his rage on the lower panels and kicked the door down. There were two smaller groups of paintings on opposite sides of the door panel. Leaning across the back of the cupboard was a tall piece of wood, eight or nine feet tall. He pulled it into the light. There was another shorter piece of wood joined to it about two-thirds of the way up. This shape had been used in the ancient states of Persia and Greece and Macedonia. It was employed widely in ancient Rome. Six thousand of Spartacus’s slaves were hung on them along the Appian Way after the end of the revolt. Jesus Christ ended his life on one of them. The object in the cupboard on the top floor of Candlesby Hall was a cross, the holiest, the best known, the most powerful symbol of the Christian faith on earth.

Two old people and one four-year-old child had already died from the influenza in the village of Candlesby when Lady Lucy Powerscourt went to help. She was careful at the beginning not to make any suggestions and not to put herself forward. She told the women of the village that she was happy to be useful in any way she could, whatever would be most helpful to them. The women with the sick families were short of time. When their parents and their children were sick at the same time they were stretched to breaking point. So Lady Lucy found herself dividing her time between the very young and the very old. She read to the children, old stories from her childhood, stories she had told to her own children when they were the same age as the Candlesby ones. More stories were ordered, to be sent express from Hatchard’s in London. When the children were too hot, or delirious, she would stroke their faces and hold their hands and whisper softly to them. Sometimes when she thought they were on the verge of death she found it very hard not to break down.

The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was seen a lot in the village, carrying supplies, fetching medicines, ferrying the doctor to and fro. Lady Lucy had ordered provisions to be despatched from Mr Drake’s hotel, soup and fresh bread and roast chickens and fruit. Children who were only mildly afflicted by the influenza would be carried out to the great car with its gleaming silver bonnet, heavily wrapped up, and allowed to sit beside Rhys and inspect the controls for a couple of minutes. None of them had ever seen a motor car before. Every child in the village was promised a proper ride in the Ghost when they were better.

The social life had broken down most severely for the old, most of them female. In normal times their daughters would come to call, or their grandchildren, or their nephews or nieces. They would eat with the rest of the family in the house of one of their children. Now the mothers who cooked had their hands full with sick children, the grandchildren were laid low by the influenza and the neighbours were either confined to bed themselves or on nursing duty elsewhere. Lady Lucy would call on as many as she could find time for, making endless cups of tea, bringing bowls of soup or fresh chicken sandwiches. They were shy of her at first, the old ladies of Candlesby, but they soon realized that, though the externals of their lives were so very different, the central core was the same: children, husbands, family, home. After a couple of days Lady Lucy would ask them about the men they had loved, the men they had married, the men they wished they had married, the men they wished they had never seen. The stronger of them would smile and ask her the same questions back. Some of the old ladies were rambling at the height of the influenza, their minds wandering, their speech virtually unintelligible. Lady Lucy stroked their hands just the same and made more tea. It was only later that she realized some of the things she was hearing might not just be the ramblings of the very sick. Was the key to the mystery of Candlesby Hall being revealed to her in small and unconnected batches as the diseased and the dying referred unwittingly in their ravings to things they would never have mentioned when they were well?

Powerscourt was now very angry indeed. He had pulled out the cross and found various marks in various places he did not like at all. In both lots of paintings, Caravaggios and Candlesbys, there was one disciple crucified upright and one crucified upside down. There was Christ being laid in the tomb, a dead Saviour who looked very dead indeed. Had Candlesby waited for a corpse to paint that particular scene? Surely he couldn’t have killed the man just to have a model for the painting. Had he stolen the corpse from the undertakers? There were various severed heads he didn’t care for either, quite apart from Judith with the head of Holofernes. There was Salome with the head of John the Baptist, David with the head of Goliath, both particularly bloody and realistic, blood dripping artistically from the severed necks, eyes staring in astonishment that death dared take them out of the frames of their lives.

Powerscourt’s brain was reeling now. He didn’t know what to believe. At best, you could assume that the old Earl had rented various locals to model for his imitations of the Caravaggios he had bought on the Grand Tour. But there were other, darker possibilities. The models might have been abused or beaten up or scourged or had their heads cut off. People of all sorts had told him that the Candlesbys were eccentric, that they beat their children, that they refused to speak to their sons and daughters and communicated only by letter, that children could be thrown out for not standing up when their father came into the room. This older Candlesby was undoubtedly of that tradition. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the butler and indeed Charles Candlesby himself refusing to come into the Caravaggio chamber. What did these Candlesbys think their fellow men were for? They were to be exploited, robbed, used, whatever the masters wanted. For the masters owned the servants and the tenants and the farm labourers as they might own a cart or a horse or a field or a house. They were just one more possession to be used at will.

God knows what rumours had circulated in times gone by. Maybe a William had gone up to the house to model for a holy painting and never returned. An Albert came back with the most terrible weals on his back, so weak and in so much pain he could hardly speak. A Peter said he had been hung upside down on a cross and left for hours. As he bundled the pictures and the props back into the cupboards a terrible thought struck Powerscourt. Maybe these weren’t stories or myths of the Candlesby past. Maybe they were all true.