Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

28

The silver hairs first appeared on Powerscourt’s temples shortly before his birthday. For some days nobody talked about them in Markham Square. Oddly enough, it was Christopher, the reading twin, who had recently demolished The Hound of the Baskervilles over a single weekend when staying with some of his mother’s more boring relations, who solved the problem.

‘I know,’ he said suddenly one morning after his father had left the house, ‘let’s call Papa Silver Blaze. You know, like the horse in the Sherlock Holmes story that is stolen but comes back to win the big race.’

‘Didn’t he kill somebody on the way?’ said Thomas, who knew most Holmes stories virtually off by heart.

‘He didn’t mean to,’ said Christopher, ‘and they’d been cutting bits out of his leg or something.’

‘I think it’s horrid giving Papa a nickname, however nice it is,’ Olivia complained.

In the end the Powerscourt young did what they had always done — they talked to their mother. Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you could ask him, couldn’t you? I’m sure he would be rather proud to be known as Silver Blaze. The horse did win the Wessex Cup after all, didn’t he?’

For his birthday, Powerscourt decided to reverse the usual order of celebrations. He handed out the presents early. He took the twins, Christopher and Juliet, fifteen years old now, to Paris for the weekend. They talked non-stop through all the delights of the French capital in English and French — Powerscourt, in his role of educating parent, was delighted to see that their French, which Lucy spoke a lot to them at home, was now almost fluent. Only one place reduced them to silence.

‘Oh, my God,’ Christopher whispered, and began writing in his notebook when confronted with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. ‘Oh, my God.’

Christopher wanted to be a journalist. He really wanted to be an investigator like his papa, but he didn’t think that would go down too well at the family dinner table. Juliet, showing a greater maturity than people credited her with, wanted to be a doctor. Her fate had been sealed when she’d asked Lady Lucy if she could be a doctor and have lots of children as well.

‘Why ever not?’ her mama had said. ‘You carry on. I’ll back you all the way.’

Robert, Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, was now First Lieutenant of a frigate on patrol in the cold grey waters of the North Sea, playing war games against Tirpitz’s Dreadnoughts.

Powerscourt took the greatest care of his second child, Olivia. Caught between the precocious Thomas and the talking twins, she sometimes felt left out.

He asked Lucy to take Olivia shopping for some fashionable clothes. Although Olivia was young and coltish, Lady Lucy was correct in believing that Olivia would be the fairest of them all.

So here they were, Powerscourt and Olivia, drinking blanc-cassis in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly, only open for six years, but already the place to be seen for the young and the fashionable. Olivia shared her father’s intense dislike of champagne. Powerscourt suddenly thought back to when this about-to-be-very-beautiful young woman was small. Sometimes he would take a tiny Olivia out of the bath and wrap her in an enormous towel. Then he would write an imaginary address on her back with much tickling and thumps and bangs as the parcel progressed through the postal system. This process was usually punctuated by squeals and laughter. The whole event was characterized by a continuous running commentary by Olivia’s papa. The parcel was always addressed to Olivia’s grandmother. There, he was told later, she always behaved beautifully. As the only child in the house, she was fussed over at great length. She spent a lot of time talking to the animals. She had talked of a career with horses for as long as anybody could remember.

She still had not taken a sip of her blanc-cassis. There was a great sadness in her demeanour, as if she had been recently bereaved.

‘What’s the matter, my love?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s you, Papa. We’re all so worried about you. You don’t look well. You haven’t looked well since you came back. And those doctors keep coming and they all leave looking like sick owls.’

Powerscourt saw at once that this was a crucial moment in his relations with his — as it were — adult children. Tell the truth? Procrastinate? Try to muddle through? In the end he knew he had no choice.

‘I should have told you before,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his blanc-cassis. ‘It’s the gas, you see, the poison gas. I had to breathe in too much of it. The doctors have told me I should be dead by now.’

‘Gas? Poison gas?’ said Olivia. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘If there’s another war, my love, both sides are developing different forms of nerve gases which they say they would only use if the other side starts using theirs. They could kill people in enormous numbers. There you are, sitting in your trench or your tent. There’s a slight breeze. Your enemies have shells and other forms of ammunition filled with this poisonous stuff. The Germans — let’s not beat about the bush — the Germans are the best chemists in Europe and they are believed to have the most dangerous forms of gas. It can kill you. It can send you blind. It can destroy your mind but leave your body intact, or the other way round. It’s terrible stuff, my love. I just happened to inhale rather too much of it in my last investigation. I got caught up by accident in the British nerve-gas experiments. I sometimes feel as if I’m choking, as if the gas is going to pull my lungs out. It is getting better. It’s just very slow.’

‘And the scar on your arm, Papa, that terrible scar?’

Powerscourt told her of the death struggle in the nerve centre of the gas research establishment, hidden next to a hotel on the banks of the Thames so the toxic wastes could be carried away, and the Russian spy holding on to Powerscourt’s foot and his arm as he was sucked into the terrible mixture in the middle of that vast laboratory.

‘That’s it,’ said Powerscourt finally, ‘but there’s one thing above all else that is very important.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m still here,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘I’m bloody well still here!’

‘So you are, Papa, so you are.’ The girl’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘Thank God you’re still here.’

‘Don’t be upset, Olivia, please,’ said Powerscourt, noting that Olivia had still not touched a drop of her blanc-cassis. ‘I give you a toast, my love. Raise your glass, please.’

Two glasses clinked together under one of César Ritz’s more extravagant chandeliers.

‘Your future, Olivia.’

The girl’s eyes were brighter now.

‘And yours, Papa. I love you so much. We all do, you see.’

This special birthday celebration was taking place at Powerscourt House in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. When Lady Lucy realized that it was also twenty-five years since Powerscourt sold the family home in Ireland, she wrote to the new owners, a branch of the Guinness brewing dynasty, still there after all these years. Lady Lucy asked if the old owner and his friends could come back for a special anniversary and birthday combined. They replied that they would be delighted to welcome the Powerscourt family and friends back on this special day. Most of the invitations were carried out by telephone in case her husband became suspicious.

It was a beautiful summer’s day, the sea sparkling in the distance, the mountains keeping watch over the great house. A couple of kestrels circled overhead and the seagulls seemed to be flying in relays from the sand dunes to the great fountain at the bottom of the steps.

There was only one person who held the threads or the skeins of Powerscourt’s life in his hands, and that was Johnny Fitzgerald, a descendant of the famous rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had died of his wounds in the 1798 rebellion led by the United Irishmen. Johnny promised to bring one or two or three others who also claimed an affinity with the United Irishmen, a group composed of men of all religions who believed in the ideals of the French Revolution and freedom for Ireland. Their leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone, an unsuccessful Dublin barrister who had persuaded thousands and thousands of his illiterate fellow countrymen to sign the Oath of the United Irishmen.

Johnny was due in the early evening, bringing a man whose ancestors had betrayed the patriots for English gold, and another who said he was a direct descendant of Wolfe Tone himself. Then there was Lucy, love of his life, the only person who knew the complete guest list. After the party, Powerscourt was taking Lady Lucy back to the deep south of America they had seen on their honeymoon, to Charleston and Savannah and the antebellum mansions of the slave owners. Powerscourt himself wanted to see Atlanta, burnt to the ground by General William Tecumseh Sherman as his men went marching through Georgia. Powerscourt had secured a day pass for two trips related to the American Civil War, to Appomattox Court House where General Robert E. Lee had ridden through the cheering lines of the Confederate forces to surrender his flag and his country to Ulysses S. Grant. Powerscourt was also taking Lady Lucy to Gettysburg, where he proposed to find a forgotten corner of the battlefield and read the words that were among the many things that made Lincoln immortal, the Gettysburg Address. He thought they might both cry: for Lincoln; for the country he was never able to create because he was shot; for the arbitrary cruelty of history.

And hidden in the opening pages of his first edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were two tickets to cross Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. They would go through the Rockies and end their journey in San Francisco.

Some of the key players in Powerscourt’s previous cases had made the journey across the Irish Sea to join the celebrations. M. Fokine was temporarily confined to the ballroom in the big house, where he was teaching some of the girls the rudiments of ballet. Powerscourt hoped he wasn’t going to shout at them too much.

Here is Powerscourt himself, sitting on a bench in the shade by the great fountain at the bottom of the cascade of steps that lead down from the back of Powerscourt House. Here he was born. Here he grew up, his boyhood marked by his father’s worries about money, his mother singing with the young music teacher in the drawing room after dinner. He remembered the great parties for all of Dublin society, the bands, the dancing, all the Anglo-Irish excesses that his parents could no longer afford. It was the money or the lack of it that made Johnny Fitzgerald pull his friend from a place that should have been glorious — for its position, its history, the beauty of its interiors — but had turned instead into something like a prison house. Powerscourt had fled to London with his sisters and never looked back.

Now the house was owned by some obscure outriders of the Guinness brewing dynasty and had been perfectly restored.

Orlando Blane, the master forger from the investigation into a murdered art critic, was sitting at a temporary easel on the lawn, producing fake Renaissance-style portraits for all and sundry.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had brought with him for his birthday his son and heir Thomas, and Thomas’s closest friend from Westminster School, Gabriel. The boys had gone off to climb Sugarloaf Mountain and enjoy the views. Also in the party were Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke’s eldest son, a scholar of Merton College Oxford, and his girlfriend, the glamorous Contessa Eleanora Maria Paravicini, eldest daughter of an Italian duke, who had more titles than there are strands of pasta in a dish of spaghetti bolognese. The young Contessa, not yet in her twenties, looked like one of Botticelli’s Madonnas, but a wicked smile hinted that earthly pleasures might not be out of bounds.

Coming down the steps, Burke’s boy and the girl were as close as they could be without actually touching. Some way behind them was a smaller figure with an outlandish hat. It must be Lady Lucy, Powerscourt thought. He suddenly remembered her in an equally dramatic piece of headgear and an Anna Karenina coat, when she joined him in a box at the Albert Hall for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony twenty years before. Lucy had gone in as Lady Hamilton. She had come out almost somebody else entirely, as Powerscourt had asked her to marry him at the end of the third movement. He had written his proposal on a scrap of newspaper inside an advertisement for Bird’s Custard. Lucy, I love you. Will you marry me? Francis. Back came the answer, Of course I will. Lucy.

The former Archbishop of Tuam, now Archbishop of Dublin, who led Powerscourt and his friends on the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in the case of the missing Irish ancestor portraits, was sitting quietly in the shade under a tree planted by Powerscourt’s grandfather. He had promised to lead whoever might wish to join him in silent prayers at one of the most numinous holy sites in Ireland, Glendalough, the glen of the two lakes just a few miles away.

The young couple were holding hands now, in that surprised manner young people always have when they hold hands, as if they were the first humans to do so since God created the world all those years ago. They were now about a hundred yards or so from Powerscourt’s position. He sat further back on his bench. He could see Lucy coming down the steps clearly now, waving a tiny wave. Behind her came a couple of waiters with ice buckets and glasses and a couple of bottles of wine. Sauvignon blanc? Pinot grigio? Powerscourt wondered if Lucy had remembered the cases of meursault he had shown her down in the dark Powerscourt cellars, the last wine his father had laid down before he died.

They were embracing now, the boy and the girl entwined in an embrace so passionate you felt as if you were intruding merely by looking at them.

One of the five Powerscourt bands began playing ‘Tipperary, It’s a long way to go’. The fountain dropped for a moment and he could see them very clearly. He thought of the Taj Mahal, another monument to the power of love. These young people — Patrick Burke always called his Contessa Els, to rhyme with bells, he remembered — were making a different sort of monument to love: less permanent but, perhaps, more brilliant. It would be made of crystal, or gossamer or dew, and would fade or evaporate as nature changed its courses. It was as if they were living inside one of John Donne’s early sonnets, where the love burns so bright it could hurt your hands on the page.

Deus est caritas, Powerscourt remembered the young scholar saying the College Grace at a feast in Merton College Oxford that he and Lady Lucy had attended earlier that year, et qui manet in caritate manet in Deo et Deus in illo. God is love, and whoever lives with love lives with God and God lives with him.

The young couple, still graced with the drops and the spray from the fountain, turned into the Japanese garden.

Lady Lucy joined him and took his hand. This place will always be special, Powerscourt said to himself. It will be special for all members of the Powerscourt family and special for all members of the Burke family. Special, above all, for Patrick and Els and the brilliance of their love.

It was Natasha Shaporova who brought the news that finally closed this investigation. ‘You’ll never guess what Monsieur Fokine has just told me, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘And what might that be, Natasha?’

‘Well, you remember there has been a lot of talk about the music Stravinsky has been writing for the new opera?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, he’s finished it at last. It’s going to have its world premiere in Paris next summer!’

‘Do you know what it’s called, Natasha?’

‘I do. Well, I only know it in French actually.’

‘And?’

‘It’s going to be called Le Sacre du Printemps.’

‘How would you translate that into English?’

‘Some English professor has done that already. The new ballet is going to be called The Rite of Spring.’