Death and the Jubilee

9

Lady Lucy Powerscourt had been practising her German for some days.

‘Don’t worry too much if there are pauses while you turn the English into German in your head,’ her husband had told her. ‘Old Miss Harrison wanders in and out of the last fifty years, so a second or two here and there won’t make any difference.’

She began with the rituals of sympathy. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your brother’s death, Miss Harrison,’ she said very properly, sitting in the same chair in the same salon that her husband had sat in the week before.

‘Death comes for us all,’ the old lady said firmly, ‘maybe it will come for me very soon. Nobody can escape it in the end.’

‘I’m sure you will be with us for a long time,’ said Lady Lucy brightly. ‘You look remarkably well to me.’

The old lady smiled a thin smile. The lines on her face suddenly multiplied as she did so, running down in crooked lines from the corner of her mouth.

‘I believe you wished to talk to me about my brother.’ The old lady looked up at Lady Lucy. ‘I find it so much easier to talk in German. You speak it very well, my dear. When we came here I found it so very difficult to learn English. Such an illogical language, English.’

Lady Lucy remembered her husband’s advice to her as their carriage rolled up the curving driveway of Blackwater House. ‘The most important thing, Lucy, is to get her on to her brother and his worries as soon as you possibly can. If you go in for the normal pleasantries her mind will have left before you get to the business. There is not a moment to be lost.’

‘My husband tells me that your brother was worried about something in the weeks before he died.’ Lady Lucy leant forward to make sure Miss Harrison could hear her. She wished she had a notebook. Now she understood why all those policemen were forever writing things down.

‘Yes, he was worried.’ The old lady paused, staring at a classical landscape on her wall. ‘Always worries in the bank, Father used to say. Always worries.’

Lady Lucy remembered Francis’ account of their first meeting, repeated virtually word for word in the drawing room in Markham Square, Francis changing seats for the different characters in the little drama, laughing at himself as he neared the end of his little play. This mantra, always worries, had cropped up over and over again. Oh dear, oh dear, Lady Lucy thought to herself. Don’t say her mind is going to start wandering already. I couldn’t bear to tell Francis I’d failed him.

At that moment her husband was greeting Samuel Parker just outside the door of his little cottage.

‘I’ve brought you that book of photographs, Mr Parker, the one I mentioned last time. The book with the photographs of the mountains in it. Look at this one here. It’s extraordinary.’

The two men gazed in awe at a photograph of the high Himalayas, taken some way off, but their snow-capped peaks looked majestic, the two tribesmen in the foreground like ants on the ground.

‘Thank you so much, my lord.’ Samuel Parker took the book with great reverence, ‘I shall look at it later if I may. But come, I promised to take you round the lake and all the places where Old Mr Harrison stopped off.’

Parker suddenly disappeared back into his cottage. He returned with a large ring with a number of different keys on it, each one labelled in stiff awkward capitals.

‘The keys, my lord. I always had to bring the keys with me. For the buildings and that.’

The two men set off down the path. In front of them was the lake, bright in the morning sunlight. Across the water a classical temple stood improbably in the middle of the view. To their left was a fine stone bridge – Palladian again, thought Powerscourt. Verona, or was it Vicenza where he had seen its like before?

‘So you would be walking, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt, slowing his pace to that of that of the old man. ‘Old Mr Harrison would be on his pony with his portable table and his papers. Tell me, did you always have keys to the buildings? I mean, were they always locked up in the past?’

‘They were not, my lord.’ Samuel Parker was indignant. ‘Old Mr Harrison only had the locks put on them in the last couple of years.’

‘Did he say why, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt was looking curious.

‘He did not, my lord. But the man who made them said to me afterwards that they was mighty strong locks. You’d think the old man had the Crown jewels inside them old temples rather than a couple of mouldy statues, he used to say to me. He’s still there. Harold Webster, my lord, up at the big house, the man who fitted them.’

They had reached the path that ran round the lake, disappearing out of sight from time to time as it curved round the water’s edge. A couple of rooks greeted their arrival, striking out over the water to the woods beyond.

‘Which way do we go here, Mr Parker?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well, my lord, we can go left or we can go right as you can see. I never knew which way the old gentleman wanted to go until we got here. But I think at this time of year we would have turned right.’

Soon the flowering chestnuts and the rhododendrons would paint the path with colour. This morning they walked on, the old man leading, through green conifers and huge oaks.

‘Did he talk to you much along the way, Mr Parker?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the classical temple had suddenly disappeared from view.

‘He didn’t talk to me, my lord. He talked to himself sometimes though. In German usually, I think, sometimes in some other language.’

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t rightly know, my lord.’ Samuel Parker shook his head. ‘I never had any time to learn any of those foreign languages at school. I found it hard enough learning how to spell this one. But Mabel thought it might have been Yiddish.’

‘How on earth did she know that? Does Mabel know Yiddish, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt marvelled again at the detective powers of Mrs Parker.

‘Mabel speak Yiddish, my lord? Never a word of it. I think the vicar told her. He’d heard Old Mr Harrison talking to himself too. Yiddish, the vicar said, or maybe some other language beginning with an A. Arabian? Aramaic? I can’t remember.’

They were now approaching another temple, not previously visible on the walk. It was quite a small temple with a portico of four Doric columns and an imposing inscription over the door. ‘Procul, o procul este, profani’, the message warned. Powerscourt had sudden memories of translating the Aeneid at school, watched over by an unforgiving master. Be gone, be gone, you uninitiated persons, he said to himself. It’s the Sybil speaking in Book Six, just as Aeneas was about to begin his descent into the underworld to meet his father and hear the story of the founding of Rome, a perilous journey from which few travellers returned. As he stood at the door while Samuel Parker fiddled with his bunch of keys, Powerscourt wondered if he too was entering some private underworld of the Harrisons where filial respect was marked out, not with piety and messages from the Sibyls, but with the bodies of the dead.

‘What was he worried about, Miss Harrison?’ Lady Lucy was looking concerned, hoping against hope that the old lady hadn’t lost her mind again.

‘He never told me very much, Lady Powerscourt. I tried to remember, after your husband called the time before. Germany, I think, it had to do with Germany. It’s not the same now it’s all one. I remember all those little states we used to have before that dreadful old Bismarck got his way and bundled them all up together like a big parcel.’

The old lady stopped suddenly and smiled a vacant smile. She’s going, she’s going, thought Lady Lucy. ‘Was that why he went to Germany in the last years? Was he looking for whatever it was that troubled him?’

‘Berlin,’ the old lady said definitely. ‘I know he went there. On business for the bank, he said. Frankfurt. He went there too. Berlin is full of soldiers now, marching up and down all the time, as if they want to fight somebody. That’s what he said.’

‘And did he have letters from Germany too?’

‘Letters, letters?’ said the old lady wildly, looking round as if the post had not been delivered that morning. ‘Letters . . .’ Old Miss Harrison was lost again. ‘Father used to check we had learnt our letters when we were very small. Letters are very important, my children, he used to say, nearly as important in this world as numbers. That’s what he used to say.’

‘I’m sure he was right,’ said Lady Lucy diplomatically. ‘Did your brother have correspondents in Germany?’

‘All our letters were handed out every morning by the butler at the end of breakfast. We children were so excited when we had letters of our own. I used to look at the stamps and the postmarks.’ She nodded as if confirming the educational value of the postal services. ‘He did have letters from Germany, my brother,’ she went on, ‘I remember the postmarks. Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt, one from Munich with a beautiful stamp on it. Mountains, I think. Do they have mountains near Munich?’

Lady Lucy assured her that they did.

‘Did he ever talk to you about his worries at all?’ she continued, stressing ‘at all’ as if she thought it impossible that the two old people could have shared a house without sharing their fears.

‘He talked in his sleep sometimes, he did. When he was sitting by the fire, just where you are now. After supper, he would usually fall asleep and sometimes he would mutter to himself in his sleep. I can’t sleep much now at night. I can get off all right, but then I keep waking up again. Mother never could sleep at all at the end, you know. One of the doctors said if she’d slept better she wouldn’t have been gone so soon after Father passed on. She wouldn’t have gone so soon. That’s what he said.’

‘And what,’ asked Lady Lucy quietly, praying for one last lucid moment, ‘did he say to himself in his sleep by the fire after supper?’

‘They call this one the Temple of Flora, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, ushering him inside. The air was damp. Spiders were taking over the left-hand wall of the little temple, their webs cascading down the walls. There were a couple of busts of ancient heroes and two sturdy seats, almost benches, on either side.

‘Did Old Mr Harrison ever stop here,’ asked Powerscourt, looking carefully at the statues, ‘to read his papers or to write?’

‘Only very rarely, my lord. Very rarely.’ Samuel Parker was shaking his head, the wisps of his grey beard waving in symmetry. ‘Once or twice he did, perhaps. One day I do remember him stopping in here and me bringing in his little table off the pony.’

‘Can you remember how long ago that was? Did he seem to be in a great hurry to get started that day?’ Powerscourt was looking carefully at the busts, Marcus Aurelius on the left, he thought, Alexander the Great on the right.

‘I think he was, my lord. In a hurry, I mean. And I think that would have been last summer. I remember it was very hot, even though it was early in the morning.’

They set off again, the path turning now uphill towards the tree-lined hills, now down towards the water’s edge. Sometimes another temple could be seen across the lake, sitting proudly on its semi-circle of turf. Sometimes it disappeared, lost among the bushes and the trees.

‘I presume, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that the garden was designed a long time ago, long before the Harrisons came here?’

‘It was, my lord. It was created in the seventeen hundreds, I think. But Old Mr Harrison knew all about it. He used to quote to me in Latin sometimes out of his head. He read all about the building of it in the library up in the big house.’

They passed through a grotto, where a statue of a river god pointed the way forwards and a marble maiden slumbered on her bed of rock while the water dripped on all around her.

‘I don’t suppose Mr Harrison did much work here,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, as he bumped his head on a rocky outcrop, the bottoms of his trousers watered by the local deities.

‘Not in there, my lord. But just a few yards up the road is what they call The Cottage. He worked a lot in there.’

The lake frontage was open at this point, with wide views across the water. A kingfisher, brilliant in blue, shot across the water at astonishing speed. On the hills above the lake the birds were singing happily, making occasional forays to forage at the water’s edge.

The Cottage was laid out like a small summerhouse, converted only a couple of years before.

‘In here,’ Samuel Parker wrestled with his keys again, ‘there is a table by the window as you can see. Sometimes I would wait for an hour or so while he wrote things or pottered about. Quite often he would break off in the middle of something and go and stare at the water, just by that tree over there. Then he would go back inside. The pony always liked to stop here. The grass is quite lush round this part.’ What on earth was the old man writing down here? thought Powerscourt. Who was he writing to? Did these peaceful pursuits lead to his death? What was he looking for? Of one thing he was certain. Long before he came on the scene somebody else had embarked on a journey of discovery. The old man had been here before him. But of the nature of his quest, or his success or failure, he had, for the present, no idea.

‘It must have been very peaceful for him here,’ he said, smiling gently at Samuel Parker.

‘It was, my lord, it certainly was. Now, there’s one last place he used to work and then we’ll have done the full circuit. It’s the Pantheon next, my lord.’

So that was what the temple reminded him of. Powerscourt knew he had seen it somewhere before. It had been on a trip to Rome with Lucy for a wedding anniversary. The Pantheon. The pagan gods of Rome had transplanted themselves from the banks of the Tiber to a new home in the depths of Oxfordshire.

‘Sometimes he would talk in German, sometimes in Yiddish.’ The old lady was concentrating hard, as if she knew her time was limited. Lady Lucy wondered if Francis would want her to take a crash course in Yiddish. She rather hoped not. She waited. She thought Miss Harrison’s mind was about to take off on one of its own private journeys once more.

‘Secret societies, secret societies,’ the old lady was whispering now. ‘Why do people want to have secret societies, my dear? Father used to complain about them at the universities. He said they were terrible organizations devoted to duelling and drinking and that sort of thing,’

She stopped, lost in thought. Lady Lucy tried to head her off before she disappeared.

‘Here, or in Germany?’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice.

‘He knew they were in Germany. Oh yes.’ The old lady was very definite suddenly. ‘He knew that. Do you know what they say about getting old, my dear?’

Lady Lucy shook her head.

‘They say that you can remember things that happened fifty years ago but you can’t remember what happened yesterday. He didn’t know if they were in England as well as in Germany. That’s what my brother said in his sleep. Father got so upset about these secret societies because his best friend’s son was left with a terrible duelling scar, right down one side of his face. Such a handsome boy he used to be before that.’

She drew a line from just below her ear to the side of her wrinkled mouth. Lady Lucy wondered if she had been in love with this handsome boy, all those years ago.

‘Did he ever say what the secret society was for? What its purpose was?’

‘No good will come of it, Father used to say,’ Miss Harrison went on, ‘no good at all. You don’t want to go round stirring up hatred. That boy with the scar, look what happened to him after all that fighting. The girls would never look at him after that. What a shame, Father used to say. Duelling finished his future, poor boy.’

Lady Lucy longed to ask if Miss Harrison had been in love with him before his terrible scar. But she pressed on. Francis would never forgive her if she encouraged the love stories of the old lady from sixty years before.

‘Did he ever say what the secret society was for?’ she asked, remembering Francis’ description of how he had wanted to shake Miss Harrison into sense as the interview went on.

‘It’s a secret brotherhood. It’s a secret bloody brotherhood. I remember him shouting that once, not so very long ago. We’d had goose for supper. We used to have goose sometimes for Christmas when I was a little girl. Sometimes there were so many of us that we had two or even three. I can remember the smell, you know, of those geese cooking in the oven. It used to spread all over the house. Father loved carving goose. I remember him saying once with the great carving knife in his hand that he should have been a surgeon rather than a banker. Then he could have carved away all day.’ Miss Harrison laughed a tinny laugh.

Lady Lucy smiled sympathetically. ‘Is there anything else you can remember, Miss Harrison? Anything else of what he used to say in his sleep?’ She tried another tack. ‘Just imagine that he’s sitting here now, in this chair, after supper, just the two of you. The fire is burning in the grate. It’s dark outside. The curtains are drawn. It’s very quiet. Gradually he falls asleep.’ Lady Lucy slowly closed her eyes. ‘Perhaps he begins to snore. Then suddenly he speaks. He mutters in his sleep, your brother. What is he saying?’ She let her head fall on to her shoulder.

The old lady puckered her face as if she was a small child confronted with a nasty piece of mental arithmetic. Then she too closed her eyes.

Lady Lucy waited, eyes closed. When she peeped out of them she saw that her device had failed. The old lady’s eyes had closed too. Her breathing grew slow and regular. Just at the point when she might have been about to tell the whole story, Miss Augusta Harrison had fallen asleep.

Six Corinthian columns flanked by a couple of ancient statues gazed out across the lake. This must have been the centrepiece of the whole place, thought Powerscourt, wondering not for the first time about the strange mind of the man who had designed these fabulous gardens, a mind where the ancient myths of Greece and Rome and the poetry of Virgil seemed to have been more important than the eighteenth-century world he actually inhabited. Powerscourt thought he would have liked to meet the mind, if it could be summoned forth from the springs and grottoes it had left behind.

The pony trotted happily down to the water’s edge to munch the grass. Samuel Parker was fiddling with his bunch of keys.

‘Did Mr Harrison rest under these columns in the summer? It must be nice and cool then.’ Powerscourt could see the little temple, with its columns, dome and assorted statuary, in some Roman landscape of the Campagna, providing welcome relief from the sweltering sun. In England, he reflected prosaically, you could always shelter from the showers.

‘He used to, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker. ‘Then I think he got worried about being overlooked, so he used to go inside. This was one of his favourite places to do his writing.’

Parker had opened the great doors and was wrestling with the key to an iron grille that protected the sculpture inside. Facing the lake was a marble statue of Hercules, flanked by Diana, goddess of hunting, Ceres, goddess of nature and harvest, and – more ominously – Isis, mistress of the dark mysteries of the underworld. Powerscourt inspected them carefully, trying and failing to remember all seven labours of Hercules.

‘He’d leave the doors open, my lord,’ Samuel Parker was placing himself exactly where he remembered the table being, ‘and then he could look out at the lake when he wanted. Sometimes I’d wait for an hour or more just outside while he was writing away in here.’

‘Did Hercules mean anything special to him?’ asked Powerscourt, rubbing his hand over the surface of the statue to see if it might be hollow, if there might be some pressure from the hand which might open up a hidden chamber inside the marble.

‘Hercules was very stupid, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, gazing out at the lake like his master.

‘Was he? Why do you say that?’ replied a puzzled Powerscourt.

‘He could never do anything right. None of them beginning with H, Hannibal, Helen, Hercules, ever had any brains at all.’

Powerscourt could see that Helen might have been all beauty and no brains, but Hannibal? Surely the wily Carthaginian had destroyed a couple of Roman armies?

‘Are you sure?’ Powerscourt was inspecting Diana’s flanks now, running his hand around the marble curves of her hips.

‘Sorry, my lord. They were horses, Hercules and the others. I wasn’t talking about the statues.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘Tell me, Mr Parker, if your master wanted to hide some of his documents, do you think he could have left them in here?’

Samuel Parker scratched his head. He took some time to answer.

‘I suppose he could, my lord. But I have no idea at all where he might have hidden them. This would be a queer place to go hiding bits of paper.’

‘That’s just what might have appealed to him, the fact that nobody would expect it. But I have no more idea than you have of where it might be.’ Powerscourt was feeling his way round Ceres’ feet, in case some hidden spring might answer to his touch. The marble was cold to his fingers. It was smooth. But it had no message for him.

Lady Lucy sat very quietly in her chair. Far off in the gardens outside she could hear the sounds of grass being cut, the cheerful cries of the gardeners, the tolling of a distant bell.

She wondered if Miss Harrison, like her brother, talked in her sleep. Some of the years seemed to have fallen from her face, smoother now than when she was awake. Sometimes the old lady turned, as if she was dreaming. Her mouth fell open. Then she spoke.

‘Secret societies,’ she said in a firm voice. She stopped. ‘In Germany. Maybe here. Conspiracy at the bank.’

Lady Lucy wondered if she was repeating what her brother used to say as he sat in his chair by the fireside in the evenings when he was still alive.

Suddenly old Miss Harrison sat upright in her chair. She was still fast asleep.

‘That poor boy,’ she said. ‘Poor Karl. What a terrible scar.’

She dropped back in her chair. Lady Lucy hardly dared to move. She looked around the room, its tables cluttered with paintings and photographs of past Harrisons. She wondered if there was a likeness of Karl, hiding his shame somewhere in a dark corner. She couldn’t find one.

Then Miss Harrison woke up.

‘Always troubles in a bank, that’s what Father used to say, always troubles.’ She looked defiantly at Lady Lucy.

‘Of course, Miss Harrison, how right you are. There are always troubles in a bank.’

‘There’s just one last temple, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, ‘but Old Mr Harrison didn’t go there. The path was very steep and he was worried he might fall.’

‘Then I think we’ll give it a miss today.’ Powerscourt’s mind was racing round the ancient myths and pagan gods that populated the lake, Aeneas travelling to the underworld to meet his dead father, Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, Isis presiding over her shadowy kingdom in the realms below.

To their right now was another lake, slightly lower than the one they had crossed, with a waterfall running into it.

‘No ancient temples down there,’ said Powerscourt, pointing down to the lower stretch of water.

‘No, there aren’t, my lord. I think we’ve got quite enough up here.’

‘Tell me, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt as they approached the Parker cottage once again, ‘where do you keep your keys? The ones you use to open all the temples.’

‘Why, my lord, they live on a big hook on the back of the front door. That’s where all the keys are, with a special ring for each one. You’d be surprised how many different bunches of keys you need to get around this place.’

‘And how easy would it be . . .’ Powerscourt turned for a last look at the circuit of the lake, two Pantheons, reflection and reality, sitting peacefully on their semicircle of grass. ‘How easy would it be for somebody to come and borrow them without your knowing?’

Samuel Parker stopped in his tracks. The pony made restive movements, anxious to return to her stall.

‘I’ve never thought about that.’ He paused to give the pony a reassuring stroke. ‘I suppose it would be easy, if the person knew I would be out most of the day. And Mabel’s going deaf, so she is, though she’d never admit it. Been going deaf for most of the past two years she has. Doctor says there’s nothing he can do.’

Powerscourt thanked Parker for their morning expedition. ‘It has been most useful, Mr Parker. I have to return again in a couple of days or so. Maybe I could borrow your keys and go for another inspection of the lake.’

He’s looking for something, Samuel Parker said to himself as Powerscourt strode off up the hill past the church. He thinks there may be some of Old Mr Harrison’s writings hidden away round the lake. I hope he finds them, he went on, hanging up his keys on the front door. But then again, maybe it would be better if he didn’t.