Goodnight Sweet Prince

14

There were primroses everywhere, plaster primroses, stucco primroses. Were those marble primroses? Powerscourt had never really noticed them before. A field of artificial primroses surrounded the London home of Archibald Philip Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery. Now he thought about it he remembered seeing Rosebery once in evening dress, a pair of cuff links adorned with golden primroses glittering among the candles.

‘Lord Powerscourt. Good morning to you. I regret to have to inform you that my master is not at home. He should return presently, if Your Lordship would care to wait.’

William Leith, Rosebery’s butler, was a short square man with a gloomy expression like an undertaker off duty. Powerscourt remembered Rosebery once getting rid of a butler who was taller than himself. ‘Couldn’t stand the fellow looking down at me all the time,’ he had complained, ‘made me feel like a fag at Eton.’

‘It was not Lord Rosebery that I wished to speak to on this occasion,’ said Powerscourt, stepping into the hall.

‘Indeed, my lord.’ Leith deftly removed Powerscourt’s coat and hat.

‘I need some advice from you, Leith.’

‘Indeed, my lord.’ Leith deposited the coat in a vestibule off the hall.

‘I have to go on a long train journey, or journeys. I am not sure yet how many journeys.’

‘Indeed, my lord.’ A flicker of interest, indeed pleasure, crossed Leith’s face. Rosebery, in his more frivolous moments, referred to Leith as the Traveller’s Friend. He had a prodigious memory for the train timetables of Britain, an encyclopedic knowledge of the routes across the Continent of Europe. Rosebery believed he had recently purchased volumes of railway information about America and Africa. ‘If you want to get to Vienna without going through Germany, or if you need to reach Brindisi or Berlin in a hurry, Leith is your man. What he doesn’t know, he looks up. What he can’t look up, he finds out by devious means. He may have his own secret agents in Thomas Cook and the Compagnie of Wagon-Lits. I believe his library of railway timetables may one day be more valuable than my own humble collections.’

‘Perhaps Your Lordship would like to step this way. My lord.’ Leith ushered Powerscourt into his office half-way down the stairs into the basement.

I’m in the Holy of Holies, thought Powerscourt. Now I get to see the Ark of the Covenant itself. I wonder if Rosebery has ever been in here. Two walls were covered with books of timetables. The other two had railway maps of Britain and Europe, many places marked with Leith’s microscopic writing.

‘St Andrews in Scotland. Amble in Northumberland. Aberystwyth in Wales. Greystones, County Dublin, in Ireland. Those are the places I need to get to. I may only need to go to one of them if I find what I am looking for on the first journey. Or I may have to go to them all.’

‘Indeed, my lord. Your Lordship has been given a list of difficult destinations.’ Leith pulled a couple of volumes from his shelves. ‘Greystones, my lord. I fear it may be in County Wick-low rather than in County Dublin. No matter.’

Scarcely pausing to consult his library, Leith fixed his eyes on the ceiling, his face a smile of pleasure. The lights in front of him in his driver’s cab were green, the green flag waved in his mind and he was off.

‘Evening train to Liverpool, my lord. Euston. I would suggest Your Lordship takes the 3.30 as it is less crowded than its successors. Night boat to Dublin or Kingstown, preferably Kingstown. Arrives 7.30 in the morning. Local service every half an hour, stops at Greystones. I feel Your Lordship should be able to catch the 7.45.

‘Amble is easier, my lord. Express to Edinburgh, stopping at Morpeth. My Lordship and I travel that line regularly. The ten o’clock from King’s Cross is the fastest. Cab to Amble, not very far. Or irregular local service to Warkworth. Very infrequent, my lord.

‘Aberystwyth, 9.15 from Euston, change at Birmingham and change again at Ludlow. Very slow journey from there, my lord. Very slow. Stopping train.’ Leith looked down sadly as though stopping trains were a cross he had to bear. ‘Or you could take the 9.20 express to Cardiff. Paddington, I fear. Change at Cardiff on to the 4.15 North Wales connection. Very slow again. Mountains, my lord.

‘St Andrews, same train from Euston as for Amble, my lord. Continue to Edinburgh Waverley and change there. The eight o’clock from King’s Cross would enable you to catch the seven o’clock non-stop service to St Andrews.

‘Or, my lord,’ Leith, like his trains, was drawing to a halt, ‘you could circumvent all those problems of changes and connection by taking a special.’

‘A special, Leith?’

‘Indeed, my lord. A special train. My Lordship takes them frequently. You simply hire one train and it takes you everywhere you want to go.’ Leith’s face took on a rapturous expression as if he wished his last journey to be taken in a special, non-stop express to St Peter’s railway station.

‘I don’t feel a special would be appropriate on this occasion.’ Powerscourt could sense Leith’s disappointment, the funeral director’s look swiftly obliterating the glory of the special. ‘But I shall certainly bear it in mind for future occasions.’

‘Indeed, my lord. I have written down all the relevant details, times and so on, for Your Lordship. Is there anything else I can tell Your Lordship about these trains?’ Leith contrived to look impassive and hopeful at the same time.

‘Only this, Leith. Let us assume that one journey may suffice. Which of those places is the easiest to get to?’

‘The easiest to get to, my lord? There can be little doubt of that. Their engines are newer than most, my lord. Their carriages are better upholstered than most.’ Leith shuddered at the memory of some badly upholstered seats, his master’s fury echoing down the train. ‘They are usually punctual. Amble, my lord, is by far the easiest place to reach, if that fits in with Your Lordship’s plans.’

‘Indeed it does. I am most grateful to you, most grateful.’

Powerscourt wondered if the Russian Ambassador would serve him tea in a samovar. He did not. He served the finest Indian tea in the finest Meissen china.

Count Vasily Timofeyevich Volsky, Ambassador from the Court of the Romanovs, Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, to the Court of St James was charm personified. ‘He’s extremely rich,’ had been Rosebery’s verdict. ‘Extremely rich. Thousands and thousands of acres. Far more than I’ve got. Palaces full of paintings all over the place. Far more than I’ve got. Terrible wife. Probably can’t wait to get back to St Petersburg. God knows why they all want to go back to Mother Russia, but they do.’

‘Lord Powerscourt, I can be very brief in answer to the questions you raised in your letter. Is there any record of Russian anarchists or revolutionaries operating outside our country? The answer, I fear, is no. They confine their criminal activities to our own poor homeland. I do not believe they have ever operated abroad. Exile, of course, many of them are in exile in Paris or Geneva or even here in London, but they are always well behaved when abroad. They save their wickedness for home.’

He looked sadly at Powerscourt as though grieving for the sins of his compatriots.

‘And these gentlemen whose names you gave me. You said you were certain they were law-abiding citizens, but felt you had to check. I admire your thoroughness, Lord Powerscourt. These are all good citizens. The Professor I have met myself. He likes to read Pushkin in his garden. What could be more peaceful than that?

‘I do not know what you are seeking. I do know the answers are not be found in Russia. May I wish you good luck in your mission, Lord Powerscourt? ’

One last call, thought Powerscourt. Then the London end of this part of the investigation will be over. After that comes the bit I am not looking forward to, the voyage round the remains of HMS Britannia, that strange cruise of the Bacchante all those years ago.

Dominic Knox, of the Ireland Office, welcomed him into an enormous room overlooking Horseguards Parade. Out in St James’s Park the afternoon parade of nannies with perambulators was in full swing, the overfed ducks crowding round the hands that fed them. Knox was a small wiry man, casually dressed, with a neat goatee beard.

‘Now then,’ he seated them both in two comfortable chairs looking out over the trees towards Buckingham Palace, ‘let me try to help you in your business. Do you know much about the security operation in Ireland, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I am glad to say that I do not.’ Powerscourt wondered if he was in for a lecture for the rest of the afternoon. At least there were no dusty files hiding on the top of rickety steps.

‘Well, let me enlighten you. It is huge, the security operation, that is. Everybody remembers the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Secretary Burke ten years ago in the Phoenix Park. But the ferment started long before that. There were nineteen separate attempts on the life of Forster when he was Chief Secretary of Ireland before Cavendish. Nineteen, Lord Powerscourt.

‘Secret societies flourish over there like mushrooms in the dark. Fenians, Irish Republican Brotherhood, Invincibles, Captain Moonlight, once you think you have got to the bottom of one of them, another one pops up somewhere else. They’re like weeds, particularly obstinate weeds. You know how you can do battle with an obdurate bramble; you trace the damned thing back to its roots, you follow the roots along the earth, eventually you pull it up and think you have won. One week later the bramble is back again. That’s what Irish secret societies are like.

‘Dublin Castle now has one of the largest networks of informants in the world. Every one of these secret societies is infiltrated by the police or the Government. Some of their meetings probably have more informants in the audience than real people attending the meeting. Informants are tripping over each other to pay their subscriptions. Soon we’ll need informers to tell us about the other informers. I’m sure that a lot of them are doubles, working for the Irish secret organizations and reporting back on us. Maybe there are trebles, quadruples, it could go on for ever.’

‘Jesus Christ only had twelve, and one of them was a double,’ said Powerscourt flippantly.

‘If he’d come down to Ireland about four or five of his disciples would have been working for the other side. Thirty pieces of silver is pretty cheap these days when you think of the amount of money handed over to these Irish Iscariots.’

Knox looked down at a file in his hand. Out on Horseguards a troop of cavalry was rehearsing, the crisp upper class orders carrying across the park to the nannies and the babies on their peaceful progress through the afternoon until it was time for tea.

‘I come to your particular requests, Lord Powerscourt. We have run your names from the telegraph pole operation through our files in Dublin Castle. None of them appears. That does not mean that they may not be men of violence – any sensible assassin would take good care to keep out of our books, after all. But I think it very unlikely.

‘Sometimes they venture across the Irish Sea to place bombs in London. But on the whole, the Irish are obsessed with their own little island, their own place in it, the relative rights of any of the foreigners who have settled in it for the last 800 years. They look backward, not forward. They look inward, not outward.

‘In short, Lord Powerscourt, I think it unlikely that any of these telegraph people are dangerous. But I could be wrong. The English usually are, where Ireland is concerned.’

A small collection of admirers had gathered round Lady Pembridge’s new curtains in St James’s Square.

‘Aren’t they just divine? I think the colours go so well with this room, Rosalind!’ Mary, Mrs William Burke, middle sister of Lord Francis Powerscourt, was paying tribute to her elder sister, proud proprietress of the new materials hanging in splendour across the great windows of her drawing-room. ‘And the finish! They’re so beautifully made!’ Linings were fingered, pelmets assessed.

‘Do you know,’ said her sister, ‘I tried to interest Pembridge in the colours and the design. I might as well have asked the lions in Trafalgar Square. Completely hopeless. No idea about design at all.’

‘I think they’re all like that,’ said her sister. ‘Husbands, I mean. It’s probably just as well,’ she went on, thinking of the expense on the new sofas in her own house the previous year.

This was a gathering of the clans, a special Annual General Meeting of the Powerscourt family, summoned for a conclave by the eldest brother.

‘They may get pretty inquisitive. In fact they are bound to do so, I’m afraid,’ Lord Powerscourt had said to Lady Lucy as he prepared her for the initiation rites into a family evening in St James’s Square.

‘And what will they be inquisitive about, Lord Francis?’ Lady Lucy was inspecting her dress for the fifth time as they prepared to leave her house in Markham Square.

‘Why, inquisitive about you, Lady Lucy. Remember, my youngest sister, Lady Eleanor, has never met you. She will be consumed with curiosity, far worse than the Cheshire Cat.’

‘I think I shall be able to manage, thank you,’ Lady Lucy smiled. ‘At least it won’t be as bad as four brothers shouting at you over Christmas dinner about why you haven’t found a husband yet. One of them even told me I was over the hill. Fancy such a thing. But seriously, Lord Francis, I am flattered and pleased that you have seen fit to invite me to dinner this evening. Does this mean that you now consider me to be one of the family?’

Powerscourt was growing accustomed to her teasing. ‘My dear Lady Lucy,’ he laughed, ‘I am delighted to welcome you into the bosom of my family. But beware of the perils that lurk within.’

There she was now, looking perfectly at home as she talked to William Burke by the fireside, her blue eyes sparkling in the flames. At the other end of the room, the conversation had moved on from curtains. Powerscourt knew it would.

‘So where did you say Francis met her, Rosalind?’ Eleanor, like her brother, was beginning her investigations, pursuing them steadily, amassing evidence.

‘Why, they met here, I think. Lady Lucy came to dinner one evening and I believe it all started then. Pembridge claims he heard them fixing up an assignation at the National Gallery.’

‘Is she artistic, then? That would be good for Francis. But is she practical? Some of these artistic women make a point of neglecting their houses and their husbands.’ A vision of some sordid dwelling in Hampstead or Soho, filled with unfinished canvases and opened jars of paint, passed through Eleanor’s mind.

‘Oh, I think she’s practical enough,’ said Rosalind, looking across at the slim figure by the fire. ‘She’s got a little boy from her first marriage. The husband was killed with Gordon at Khartoum, you know.’

‘Really, really.’ Lady Eleanor, being married to a naval captain, currently on manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, was impressed. Clouds of glory were attached to this particular widow. ‘But tell me this, Rosalind.’ Eleanor also glanced over at Lady Lucy, a look intercepted with amusement and resignation by her brother. ‘Are they, you know, are they serious about each other?’

‘I think they might be very serious,’ said Rosalind thoughtfully, ‘there’s something about the way they look at each other now. As if there isn’t anybody else in the room.’

Further discussion was interrupted by the dinner bell. Powerscourt observed that Lady Lucy had been placed at the opposite end of the table from him, flanked by Eleanor on the right of Lord Pembridge and Mary on his left. He himself was surrounded by Rosalind and the good William Burke, conversational rescue missions in the direction of Lady Lucy difficult, if not impossible, to undertake.

Portraits of Pembridge ancestors lined the walls, bouncing off the huge mirror over the fireplace: a Restoration Pembridge, dressed in flamboyant red, his hat at a rakish angle, looking every inch the successful cavalier, a late eighteenth-century Pembridge with flesh-coloured hose and a black jacket and a puffy, dissipated face. Powerscourt remembered Burke telling him that this particular Pembridge had lost a great fortune gambling with Charles James Fox. There was a slightly later Earl, now the master of all the acres he surveyed, gun in hand, dog at his heels, probably repairing with hard work and good husbandry the damage done to the family fortunes by his predecessor. Family gossip, so much more vicious than any other, swirled round the table. Powerscourt had always been amazed at the way in which family members were prepared to say the most terrible things about each other, things that they would never countenance coming from an outsider.

‘There he was. I mean, there he was.’ William Burke was telling the story of a cousin, recently fallen on wicked times. ‘At breakfast he was married. Had been for twenty years, in fact. He had the normal breakfast, two kippers, strong coffee, a mountain of toast. He was always very particular about the marmalade, wasn’t he, my dear?’ He smiled at his wife, in search of confirmation of his cousin’s strange habits at the breakfast table. ‘It had to be that thick stuff with lots of bits of rind or whatever they call it piled very high on the toast so you could hardly see the bread.

‘Anyway, that was breakfast. By lunchtime he was gone. He never came back. He simply disappeared. Word came a few days later that he had been seen crossing the Channel with a young lady. Then he was reported in the South of France with the same young lady in Cannes or Antibes, one of those places. No questions asked in the hotels, no sign of him ever returning. He just fled at fifty and abandoned the whole lot of them.’

‘I suppose they’ll save on the marmalade bills.’ Powerscourt was unable to resist the aside.

‘Francis, you are awful! There is this poor woman, William’s cousin’s wife, deserted at her age. And all you can think of is the marmalade,’ said his eldest sister, never happier than when telling her brother off.

‘But was it Cooper’s Oxford marmalade? Or that stuff in the funny jars, Tiptree I think it’s called. It comes from somewhere in Essex.’

‘Do shut up, Francis!’ All three sisters joined forces to berate him. Witches, thought Powerscourt bitterly, remembering the days when they had ganged up on him as a boy and stolen his catapults. As he looked for assistance to Lady Lucy he thought he saw a sudden conspiratorial smile flash down the table to him. A private smile from Lady Lucy was worth the whole cauldron of his sisters’ wrath.

The last servants had cleared the last plates and the last glasses from the table. The doors were closed.

Pembridge, looking every inch the paterfamilias, coughed meaningfully and tapped his fingers loudly on the table.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, smiling at them one by one round the table, an extra strong smile for the pretty Lady Lucy. Francis has asked us here this evening because he wants to enlist our help. Francis, the floor is yours.’

All evening Powerscourt had wondered about the tone he should adopt in addressing this particular gathering. After his marmalade gaffe he knew he couldn’t be flippant. No jokes, he said to himself. For God’s sake, no jokes. He knew that his two brothers-in-law were likely to take him much more seriously than his sisters, however dearly they loved him. The witches, he remembered, had always thought of his investigations as yet another male hobby, not to be taken seriously.

‘I need your help,’ he began, deciding that a policy of abasement might be the best tactic. Throw yourself on their mercy. ‘I am engaged at present on a most difficult and important investigation. Two days ago I saw the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He has promised me all the assistance at his command. I have in my pocket,’ he paused to draw out one of his letters from No. 10 Downing Street, ‘a number of letters from the Prime Minister. The recipient is left blank for me to fill in as I choose. The letter instructs that every possible assistance is to be given to Lord Francis Powerscourt who is engaged on a mission of the utmost national importance.’

He paused, looking round the table. They had fallen silent and rather serious, Pembridge looking like some hearty squire from the Pembridge past, William Burke the man of affairs, serious about his duty to Queen and country, Rosalind impassive, Mary and Eleanor curious, Lady Lucy suddenly looking rather frightened on Powerscourt’s behalf. Maybe this is all going to be very dangerous, she thought suddenly.

‘Francis, can you tell us anything of what this matter is about? Anything at all?’ Asked Lady Rosalind.

‘I am afraid that I cannot. It would not help matters and it might make life more difficult for everybody involved. Especially me.’ He gave a self-deprecating shrug.

‘But you can’t expect us all to help if we don’t know what it’s about.’ Lady Eleanor neatly fulfilled her brother’s prophecy about her curiosity.

‘What is it that you would have us do, Francis?’ asked Lady Mary, practical wife of a practical man.

‘I would prefer it if you wouldn’t all talk at once for a start,’ said Powerscourt, exacting a minor revenge for the marmalade war.

The men laughed, a male combination against women and wives.

‘What I want is very simple. I want information about a number of people. I want information about their families, information about their finances, information about their fortunes, if they have any, or have recently lost them all. Informal information, the kind that comes easily in conversation, and, if I dare to use the word in this company, gossip. I have suddenly become a great fan of gossip. The kind of things, I am told, that ladies have been known to talk about when they are together. Not that there is anything wrong with gossip.’ He thought briefly of the witches conspiring again, spells cast, potions prepared, strange smells rising from the heath.

‘I have here,’ he said, anticipating what he knew was the next question, certainly from his sisters, ‘a list of the people involved. I should say that there is no suspicion at all that any of them has done anything wrong.’ He passed glibly over the lie, not daring to tell the family that one of his names might have murdered the heir presumptive to the throne. ‘No suspicion at all.’

Lord Henry Lancaster, Harry Radclyffe, Charles Peveril, William Brockham, Lord Edward Gresham, the Honourable Frederick Mortimer. Powerscourt recited the names easily. He used to recite them to himself in moments of boredom, shaving, or waiting for the underground railway trains to appear.

‘But, Francis -’ began Rosalind.

‘What exactly is it -’ said Mary Burke.

‘Do you seriously expect us -’ asked Eleanor, her face bright with interest and curiosity.

‘There you go again. You’re all talking at once. Just for a change.’ Powerscourt smiled at his three witches, as if their spells were kindly. ‘One at a time, please.’

‘Francis,’ said his eldest sister Rosalind, taking on the rights of birth, ‘do you actually expect us to go about interrogating people about these young men? As if we were policemen or something?’

‘I do not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I merely thought that at what you feel to be the appropriate moment you could try to steer the conversation in their direction. You haven’t heard anything about them for a while. Is it true that such and such a one is engaged to be married? Or that so and so has lost the family fortune? I am told,’ he smiled a rueful smile as he continued, ‘that ladies in society do actually have conversations of this sort from time to time.’

‘Did you know that one of those young men is dead, Powerscourt?’ Pembridge interrupted, looking very grave. ‘Lancaster. He was killed in a shooting accident in Norfolk, somewhere near Melton Constable, I believe. Terrible business.’

So that was what Dawnay had done with him, thought Powerscourt. He remembered the Major’s promise that he, Dawnay, would look after the business of the body in the woods, the brains scattered around the Sandringham trees. Forever Faithful. Semper Fidelis.

‘Yes, I did.’ Powerscourt too looked sombre. A hush had fallen in the dining-room, faint reflections of Pembridge’s shirt and Lady Lucy’s hands visible in the polished table. ‘But I am afraid that he too must be included in these conversations. His death, dare I say it, might provide a useful point of introduction.’

‘What do you want us to do with this information? Just tell you the next time we see you?’

‘No, I don’t want you to do that. I want you to write it down.’

This brought howls of pain and anguish from the three sisters.

‘Francis, you can’t be serious.’

‘We’re not going back to school.’

‘This isn’t some essay prize is it, Francis?’

William Burke came to his rescue. ‘If I may say so, that is a most sensible suggestion. People in my line of work are always forgetting exactly what people said to them. The only way to be sure is to write it all down. One of the companies I am attached to has declared it to be company policy now. Writing things down, I mean.’

‘And what should we do when we have written it all down in our little notebooks?’ Lady Eleanor was retreating defiantly.

‘You could give it to me in person. Or you could post it to me here.’

Powerscourt thought the battle was won, the witches retreating, the cauldron off the boil.

‘Tell me, Francis,’ William Burke spoke again. ‘Tell me about this financial information you want. Do you think there might be anything untoward about the situation of these young men?’

‘I would be most interested to know’ – Powerscourt looked round the table once again, daring to drop in the one word which he knew would command universal attention – ‘if any of them were being blackmailed. Or, for that matter, if they might have been blackmailing anybody else.’