Death and the Jubilee

24

By half-past six on the Monday evening after the cricket match Richard Martin had still not come home. His tea was on the table. Richard always liked to have his tea once he came in, hungry from a long day in the City. Sometimes they had to work late at the bank, but Richard always knew well in advance. Only that morning he had said he would be home at the usual time.

His mother made another pot. He’s gone too far this time, she said to herself he really has. If he thinks that Sophie Williams is more important than his own mother, then he’d better think again. Rufus, the dog next door that Richard used to take for walks, was barking loudly. You could hear it through the walls. Mrs Martin tried to think of who could help her in the chastising of her wayward son. His grandfather would never do it, he had always been soft on the boy, especially since he lost his father. One of her sisters might be pretty fierce but she didn’t think Richard would take any notice.

Sophie Williams was worried too. Richard usually met her at seven o’clock by St Michael’s church with the dog. Tonight he was not there. Always in the past he had kept his word, always he had been reliable. By eight o’clock she knew he was not coming. She wondered if she should call on his mother. Perhaps Richard was ill. Sophie knew what Richard’s mother thought of her. She knew she might not receive a warm welcome at Number 67 if she rang the bell. Suffragists must have courage above everything else, she said to herself, courage in the rightness of their cause, courage in the prosecution of the battle against the monstrous regiment of men. Richard’s mother was just another poor woman, brainwashed by male propaganda.

At half-past eight she rang Richard’s doorbell. Mrs Martin was wondering if Richard had lost his key.

‘Miss Williams!’ said Richard’s mother. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about Richard,’ said Sophie, still standing on the doorstep.

‘He’s not come home for his tea,’ Mrs Martin explained. ‘I thought he was with you.’

‘I sometimes see him when he goes to walk the dog, Mrs Martin. But I didn’t see him tonight. I was worried.’

Mrs Martin wondered if she should pursue these evening meetings with the dog. But it was obvious that the girl was as worried as she was.

‘Come in, Miss Williams. Come in. We’d better have a cup of tea.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down his drawing room. Lucy was sitting by the fire with the letters from the Blackwater strong box beside her. She was making notes in a little book, a German dictionary by her side.

‘Can you do them all at once, Lucy, and then tell me what they say? I don’t think I could bear hearing them one by one and then waiting for the next translation.’

He paced on, hoping that at last he might have the key to the mystery, the riddle that linked a death by drowning, a death by fire, death under a tube train and a headless corpse in the Thames.

‘Do sit down, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, smiling at her husband. ‘All this walking up and down is making me nervous.’

Powerscourt sat down. He got up again. He walked rapidly to the other end of the room, his hand running through his hair. Then he sat down again.

‘Right, Francis. I’m going to take them two at a time – you’re so impatient. I shouldn’t get over-excited about the first couple if I were you.

‘This one here,’ she held up a letter written on plain white paper, ‘comes from an old friend in Frankfurt. It says that some distant cousin has just died at the age of ninety-three. She must have been older than Queen Victoria.’

‘That’s all it says?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘It is,’ replied Lady Lucy, ‘unless there’s a message written in invisible ink. This one,’ she held out another letter, written on pale blue writing paper, ‘comes from Berlin. I think the writer must have known the Harrisons when they were in Frankfurt. He says that there are a number of secret societies in Berlin, mostly centred on the university. Everyone is joining secret societies these days, he says, societies to do with the Navy, societies to do with the Army. But the writer doesn’t know very much about them.’

Lady Lucy’s clock struck the hour of ten. Powerscourt began walking up and down again.

‘If you give me a couple of minutes, Francis, I can tell you what the other two say. They’re both from Berlin. But please, stop walking up and down.’

Mrs Martin and Sophie Williams had drunk three cups of tea. They had talked about Sophie’s work at the school, about Richard and his work at the bank.

‘I must go home now, Mrs Martin. Perhaps he has had to work late at the bank after all.’

‘Do you think so, Miss Williams, do you really think so? I would be so relieved if he has.’

Privately Sophie did not believe Richard was working late. He would have told her if he was. She suspected there had been some terrible catastrophe at the bank.

‘I’m sure he’ll be home soon,’ she said. ‘I’ll look in on the way to school in the morning, just to make sure he got back safely.’

‘That would be very kind, Miss Williams.’

‘These two are both from the same man, Francis.’ Lucy was holding up the last two letters, written on more expensive paper. ‘I think he too was someone Old Mr Harrison knew before. He also says there are secret societies all over Berlin. The most secretive, and the one thought to be the most influential, is centred on the Friedrich Wilhelm University.’

Lady Lucy let the letter drop into her lap. ‘Oh, Francis, that’s where Charles Harrison went, the Friedrich Wilhelm.’ Powerscourt was staring at the letter. ‘Go on, Lucy, please go on.’

‘The society is devoted to the work and teachings of a history professor called von Treitschke. Have you heard of this historian, Francis?’

‘No, I have not. Is that all the letter says?’

‘The rest is all about mutual friends. Most of them seem to be dying off. The last one,’ Lady Lucy picked up the final letter in her little pile, ‘is from the same man. “I have tried on your behalf,” he says, “I have tried very hard to find out if the person of whom you speak is a member of the society or not. I have not been able to find out a definite answer. Secret societies after all are meant to be secret”.’

‘Do you think that’s some heavy German joke, Lucy?’

‘Probably,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘There’s more. “I would guess from the response to my question from one of my informants that the person of whom you speak is a member. Membership is not just for the length of the university career, it goes on until you die.” That’s it, Francis.’

‘No mention of who the person of whom you speak actually is, is there?’ Powerscourt was running his hands through his hair again.

‘No, there is not. Not a clue.’

‘I suppose, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that if some of this information was so important that it killed somebody, then you wouldn’t want to put too much of it down on paper. Particularly if your correspondent felt it wasn’t safe to read his letters in his own house.’

‘So it could be anybody.’ Lady Lucy wondered if she had guessed right.

‘For all I know,’ her husband said, ‘it could be Jones the butler, recruited way back, plotting away all these years. Talking of Jones, just for now I’m going to follow his example. I’m going to have a very large whisky.’

Mrs Martin did not sleep that night. All through the early hours of the morning she waited for a door key that never turned in the lock. As dawn broke over North London she was sure her Richard was dead, run over by a carriage perhaps, or fallen under a train.

Sophie Williams did not sleep either. All night she tormented herself with the way she had treated Richard. Had she been too brusque with him? Had she talked too much about her work with the suffragists or her problems at the school?

At half-past seven she presented herself at Richard’s front door. But it was his mother who opened it, looking terrible, her face lined with grief, her eyes red with the tears of darkness.

‘Please come in, Miss Williams. Richard’s still not back yet.’

With that she broke down, sinking into a chair and weeping uncontrollably.

‘Maybe he’s left home because I didn’t treat him properly,’ she sobbed. The words came very slowly, punctuated by shaking. ‘Maybe he’s dead and the next thing we’ll hear is the policeman knocking at the door. Thank God his father’s not here to see all this.’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Martin.’ Sophie Williams put her arm round Richard’s mother. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea. I’m sure he’ll be back today. Maybe they had to work all night at the bank. Some banks do, you know.’ Sophie spoke as though she had an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary banking behaviour in the City of London.

‘I tell you what,’ said Sophie, returning with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits, ‘I’ll go down to the bank after school today and ask after him there.’

‘Could you do that? Could you really? That would be so kind. And then you’ll come back and tell me what happened? If I hear anything this morning, Miss Williams, I’ll drop a message into your school.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt felt he was in a time warp. He was back in his tutor’s room at Cambridge where he had sat so often over twenty-five years before. Outside the elegant windows the front court was bathed in sunshine. The grass was immaculate, divided into quarters by the paths that led off to other parts of the college and down to the river.

The porter at the front gate had recognized him after all those years.

‘Lord Powerscourt, how nice to see you again, sir. Welcome back to the college. Mr Brooke is expecting you, sir.’

Gavin Brooke, Senior Tutor in history at this establishment for over forty years, was waiting for him, showing him to a chair, leaning heavily on a stick.

‘Good to see you, Powerscourt. I’m not so mobile as I once was, as you can see. College is going to the dogs, you know, going to the dogs.’

Powerscourt remembered this as a familiar refrain. Change in any form had never pleased Gavin Brooke. His hair had turned white now, his handlebar moustache a shadow of its former self.

‘They can’t row, they can’t think, they can’t write essays any more, these undergraduates nowadays. And have you seen their clothes? Those waistcoats? The neckties? Do you know, one of these aesthetes as they call themselves asked the Master the other day if they could have an Aubrey Beardsley society. An Aubrey Beardsley society!’

‘What did the Master say, Mr Brooke?’ asked Powerscourt. Time never seemed to matter very much in Cambridge, he recalled, there was so much of it to squander until you realized it had all gone and your three years were over.

‘The Master – never did like the man, the Fellows should never have elected him, never – he refused. Refused point blank. Oh yes.’

The old man peered at Powerscourt as if he’d forgotten his name. Outside bells were ringing. Bells never stopped ringing, Powerscourt remembered, bells for meals, bells for chapel, bells built to announce the glory of God that now just marked the passage of the days.

‘You sent me a telegram.’ Brooke said it like an accusation.

‘I did, sir.’

The old man looked at his piece of paper.

‘You made it sound very urgent, Powerscourt, very urgent.’

The old man picked up a pair of spectacles, lying on the floor on top of a great heap of recent copies of The Times.

‘“Request most urgent audience with you on matter of great importance. Must come Tuesday morning. Please advise if impossible.” Audience, he grinned, ‘audience. I like that. As if I were the Pope or Cardinal Richelieu himself. How can I be of assistance to you?’

‘I want to know,’ Powerscourt said, ‘about a German historian called Heinrich von Treitschke.’

Sophie Williams’ class was very excited that morning. They were making decorations for the Jubilee. Some of the children were drawing pictures of Queen Victoria, with the black pencils in heavy demand. Some were colouring in a huge map of Victoria’s Empire, the red of her domains running right round the world. Some were cutting coloured paper into streamers to hang on the walls.

‘What’s a Jubilee, Miss?’

‘A Jubilee is a celebration, Betty, rather like a birthday party. This Jubilee is for the Queen’s sixty years on the throne.’

‘Will she wear lots of diamonds when she goes on the big parade?’

Sophie had heard that William Jones’ father was believed to be a burglar. Perhaps he hoped to collect some useful intelligence to improve the family fortunes.

‘I’m sure she will, William. Just a few diamonds as it’s her Diamond Jubilee.’

‘Why are our bits red on the map, miss?’ demanded a very small but rather clever little boy.

‘Red, Peter, has always been the colour for the British Empire,’ said Sophie loyally, improvising some sort of reply when she didn’t know the answer.

‘Why haven’t we got all of it, miss? All of the map. Why are there some bits of the world that are not in our Empire?’

Sophie smiled at her little imperialist who was called Tommy and always had a dirty face. ‘Some countries just like to do things their own way, Tommy.’

‘Will Queen Victoria live for ever, miss? My father says she looks as though she’s lived for ever already.’

Sophie looked at the little girl. Then she looked at the Queen Empress, remote and aloof in her black dress in the portrait on the wall above her desk.

‘I don’t think she’ll live for ever. One day she’ll die, just like everybody else. But not for a while.’

‘Heinrich von Treitschke? Heinrich von Treitschke?’ The old man made him sound like a pheasant that had gone off or a bottle of corked wine.

‘Yes,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that’s the man I want information about.’

‘I shall ask you why later, Powerscourt. Let me give you the bare facts. Professor of Modern German History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Believed to have been a supporter of Bismarck in his youth, God help him. Used to give very popular lectures.’ Powerscourt remembered that Gavin Brooke’s lectures on modern European history had never been oversubscribed. ‘The fellow died last year. Thousands of people turned out for his funeral. Von Treitschke was buried like a hero of the nation.’

‘Was he a good historian, Mr Brooke? Was he controversial?’ Powerscourt remembered that there was nothing dons enjoyed more than attacking the reputations of their colleagues.

‘Depends what you mean by good and what you mean by historian, Powerscourt.’ Gavin Brooke didn’t disappoint him. ‘If you mean good in the moral sense, of striving towards some kind of virtue, then I should say the answer is No. If you mean good in the sense of being an original scholar, then the answer is No. If by historian you mean an accurate interpreter of the past, somebody who tried to describe what happened centuries or fifty years ago, then the answer is No. If by historian you mean someone who tells the story of the past without any theories or hobby horses of their own, then the answer is No.’

Powerscourt felt that von Treitschke, however distinguished in Berlin, was about to fail the Historical Tripos of the University of Cambridge.

‘I can see you thought he was a bad historian. What sort of bad historian was he?’ Gavin Brooke looked up at the bookshelves that dominated his room.

‘Treitschke wrote a History of Germany,’ he said. ‘It’s in five volumes. I’ve got them all up there.’ Brooke peered up at his bookshelves, stretching to the ceiling. ‘He was a bad historian because he was a preacher, not a historian. If there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach everybody here it’s that history doesn’t move in straight lines. Nations or peoples are not marked out by God or fate for supremacy over other nations. God knows there’s enough nonsense produced here about how the history of these islands has made us fit to rule the world.’

Powerscourt remembered Brooke’s onslaught on imperialist historians, the ones who said it was Britannia’s fate to rule the waves. They were his contemporaries. People said they had denied Brooke the chair he deserved.

‘Treitschke preached a German version of the same rubbish,’ Brooke continued his character assassination. ‘Germany’s destiny is to be the most important power in the world. That’s what German history teaches, according to the late Heinrich. Of course he was too stupid to see that he’s got it the wrong way round. He wants Germany to rule the world. Therefore he says that’s what history teaches.’

History, Powerscourt remembered him saying, is never a straight line between two points, more a series of accidental curves along a winding road filled with crossroads signposted to different destinations. Sometimes, he remembered, Brooke said the signposts had no destinations on them at all.

‘Perhaps I could ask you now, Lord Powerscourt, why you are interested in this man?’

Gavin Brooke inspected Powerscourt sharply. They never realize we grow up, we grow older, Powerscourt thought. To him I’m still twenty years old, sometimes producing essays that he liked, only yesterday or the day before.

Powerscourt explained that he was an investigator, currently looking into a strange series of deaths in a London bank that seemed to have links with secret societies in Berlin.

‘Secret societies?’ The old man was scornful. ‘Of course there’s a secret society in von Treitschke’s honour. I think it was founded over twenty years ago. Why didn’t you ask me in the first place?’

‘How do you know about that, Mr Brooke?’ Powerscourt had come to Cambridge to learn about von Treitschke the man. He would never have expected an ageing history don, who rarely left Cambridge and then only to venture as far as Oxford or the London Library, to know about secret societies at the University of Berlin.

‘Lots of historians knew about it.’ Gavin Brooke looked pleased with his knowledge. ‘The old boy himself used to boast about it in his later years. Treitschke said he hoped the society founded in his name would do more to restore Germany to her rightful place in the world than all his lectures and all his history books. We had a German historian here, ten years ago it must have been. They’d asked him if he wanted to join. He did, just to see what it was like. He said they were all fanatical German nationalists. Whatever profession they went into, the law, diplomacy, finance, the military, they had to do whatever they could and whatever the leaders asked them to advance the German cause.’

‘Did it have a name, this society, Mr Brooke?’

‘It did, Powerscourt, it did. But I’m damned if I can remember it. It’ll come to me.’ The bells were ringing twelve, echoing round the courts and the cloisters, fading away across the meandering river and the flat lands of the Fens. The old man shuffled towards a large glass-fronted cabinet to the side of his bookshelves.

‘Sherry, Powerscourt? A glass of the college’s finest? Wine’s gone off, of course, bloody Master has reduced the money going to the cellars.’

Powerscourt accepted a glass of the driest sherry he had ever tasted. He remembered it was always dry, the stuff the dons gave you, so dry the taste almost stripped the roof of your mouth.

‘Staying for lunch, are you?’ Brooke asked, ‘You’d be welcome at High Table, of course. The food’s gone to the dogs too, the Master said it cost too much. It’s not much better than some bloody boarding school now.’

Powerscourt felt he had to move the conversation back to Berlin.

‘What sort of German nationalist was von Treitschke, Mr Brooke? Did he want to conquer Russia or swallow the Austro-Hungarian Empire?’

‘Sorry,’ said the old man, pouring them both a second glass of sherry. His hand was shaking slightly, drops of sherry falling on the old copies of The Times. ‘I should have told you that at the beginning. He didn’t want to conquer Russia, he wanted to be friends with Russia. He wanted to be friends with Vienna too, he thought it was easier to leave the Austrians with all those nationalities in the Balkans than for Germany to have to deal with them.’

Gavin Brooke leant forward in his chair, peering at Powerscourt like some wizened old bird.

‘For von Treitschke there was only one enemy. England, England with all her colonies and her trade and her fleet and her arrogance. He said, he preached, that only when Germany had a navy to beat the English would she come into her own. I think he really hated the English, you know, Heinrich von Treitschke.’

Powerscourt finished his sherry and announced that he had to return to London. Gavin Brooke saw him down the stairs, leaning on his stick, tapping his way towards the porter’s lodge.

‘Hope I’ve been some use to you, Powerscourt. Let me know how it all goes, won’t you?’

Powerscourt shook him warmly by the hand. ‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Brooke, your information has been invaluable.’

As he set off up the cobbled street of the Senate House Passage, young men wandering about arm in arm, he heard a shout behind him.

‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ The old man was hobbling up the street as fast as he could, shouting as he came. ‘I’ve just remembered.’

Powerscourt stopped by the side entrance into Gonville and Caius.

‘The secret society’s name,’ Brooke panted, ‘they named it after some bloody marching song that von Treitschke wrote years ago. “The Song of the Black Eagle”. And the man in charge is called Scholl, Helmut Scholl. He’s on the staff of Admiral Tirpitz.’

The old man was now completely out of breath.

‘Tirpitz?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Isn’t he the chap who wants to build up the German Navy?’

‘You’ve got it in one, Powerscourt.’ Gavin Brooke nodded furiously at him. ‘I always thought you were a promising student of history.’

Powerscourt found himself thinking about Charles Harrison as the train took him back to London. During his military career he had known men who had lost their parents for whom the Army and the regiment had become the centre of their professional and emotional lives, a substitute family round the mess table and the camaraderie of regimental dinners. For Charles Harrison, educated at von Treitschke’s own university, attending von Treitschke’s lectures no doubt, had the German secret society replaced the family he never had in his affections? A society devoted to the greater glory of Germany and bitter hatred of England?

Then, as the train reached the outskirts of London, he thought about the cache of letters on the island at Blackwater. And about the articles on the fall of Barings Bank, seven years before.