Goodnight Sweet Prince

18

‘Just you sit yourself in the back of the boat, Francis.’

‘I think they call it the stern, Johnny.’

Powerscourt and Fitzgerald were setting off from Hammersmith up the Thames to view the secret house of London’s homosexual rich. Powerscourt wanted to see the building for himself. It was late in the evening, a cold wind blowing across the river. Fitzgerald had procured an ancient rowing boat from somewhere.

‘The thing is, Francis, I’m getting very superstitious about that house. Twice now I’ve seen single magpies on my way back from there. No matter how long I waited I never saw another one. And I’m fed up with being stuck up that bloody tree. So we’ll creep up on them the way they’re least expecting. Christ, Francis, sit still, for God’s sake. We’ll all be in the water at this rate.’

The rowing boat seemed to have a will of its own, swaying, lurching, dipping at unpredictable moments.

‘Which way are we going, Johnny?’

Powerscourt wondered if he could swim back to the bank, as the vessel zigzagged its way towards a fatal rendezvous with the bastions of Hammersmith Bridge.

‘Shut up, Francis! I’ve just got to get the bloody thing into the middle of the river. The current’s not so bad there.’

At last the boat settled into a rhythm, Fitzgerald’s powerful arms moving them upstream. Hampton Court, thought Powerscourt, we could reach Hampton Court if we kept going, or Oxford. Though not at this rate, not this year. Even in the middle the current was still strong, progress very slow, the splash of the oars unnaturally loud in the middle of the Thames.

To Powerscourt’s right lay the waterfront of Hammersmith lined with taverns and fine houses, occasional sounds drifting out across the water. To his left, beyond Hammersmith Bridge, the trees of Barnes kept silent vigil over their progress. Strange pieces of river jetsam floated by on their passage towards the open sea: pieces of wood in fantastic shapes, bits of material that might have once have been clothes, bottles without messages. A rowing eight, dressed entirely in black, shot past them going the other way, a ghostly light at the front of their boat, the current sweeping them downstream towards Putney.

‘Nearly there, Francis.’ Fitzgerald took a brief break from the oars and drank deeply from his hip flask. ‘Look! You can just see the lights through the trees.’

The river had taken them round a bend. Hammersmith Bridge was no longer visible behind. Ahead the cold black waters of the Thames reached out towards the waterfront of Barnes, a mile or so away on the opposite bank. A couple of rooks stood sentinel on the top of the trees around the house.

There were lights on all across the top two floors. Powerscourt thought business must be brisk. Maybe it was one of those special evenings, a dinner dance or a masked ball. There was a stone balustrade running right round the top of the building, shafts of moonlight blinking intermittently through the clouds. Sentinels, he thought, watchmen on duty, searching a dark London for the unexpected visitor, the sudden rush of officers in uniform towards the front door.

‘It’s a grand place if you want to be alone, isn’t it?’ Fitzgerald was panting slightly from his efforts, holding the little boat steady in its place. They could see a small jetty to their right, a couple of boats moored, ready for a quick escape across the water. ‘I had another chat with my friend, Francis.’

‘The one with the Pomerol?’

‘The one with the Pomerol,’ Fitzgerald agreed. ‘He said two things that are relevant to our purpose, I think. The first . . .’

A muffled sound came to them from very close by. It echoed slightly across the water and disappeared into the trees.

Fitzgerald rowed on, past the house, round another bend in the River.

They waited. Neither spoke. They waited for two minutes, perhaps three. The River Thames was silent save for the timeless murmurings of the water. Then Fitzgerald turned the boat around. The current took them back towards London. Only slight adjustments were needed to hold their course.

‘What the hell was that?’ said Powerscourt as the house disappeared from view.

‘I think it was the front door opening and closing. Another member, another client. He must have been bloody quiet going up their driveway. We didn’t hear any footsteps, did we?’

‘No, we didn’t. That place gives me the creeps. You were saying, Johnny?’

What must we look like, thought Powerscourt? Two men, huddled in a tiny boat, going up and down the river in the middle of the night. Excise men, perhaps, going to inspect some forbidden cargo, or grave robbers, avoiding the main roads.

‘Two of them have died in the past two years. I think that’s what I was about to say. My friend shuddered when he told me about it. I expect he wondered if that was how he was going to go. Mad or blind or paralysed, or all three, his bones eaten away.

‘But I talked to him about blackmail, about whether any of our friends back there might have been blackmailing each other. He said he thought it was virtually impossible.’

Fitzgerald was whispering. Powerscourt had to lean forward to catch his words, the little boat bobbing precariously once more.

‘You remember the constitution of their club, Francis, each member having to give the names and addresses of two referees who didn’t know about their perverse habits. That threat is always there. Step out of line and you’ll be exposed. My friend said they were all so frightened of being blackmailed by their own club that they couldn’t possibly think about blackmailing anybody else.’

These were calmer waters, thought Powerscourt, a little bit choppy, perhaps, tiny waves beating helplessly against the shore, sailing craft bobbing about, minute bow waves inching across the pond.

The Round Pond in Kensington Gardens was host to Powerscourt and Lady Lucy and two small boys on a peaceful Sunday afternoon.

Lunch had been taken quickly in Markham Square. Lady Lucy had christened Robert’s boat Britannia by pouring a glass of champagne across the front.

‘I thought it might break. The boat, I mean. If I broke the bottle across the bows in the approved manner.’ Lady Lucy sounded as if she had been launching ships all her life. Perhaps she had, thought Powerscourt, a thousand of them, maybe, sailing across the blue waters of the Aegean to a tryst with death at windy Troy.

Robert’s friend, Thomas St Clair Erskine, recently released from jail or temporary domestic confinement, informed them solemnly that his ship was called the Victowy, his rs rolling like the original Victowy on patrol out in the Atlantic.

‘Can we go now? Can we go and sail them?’

Even Lady Lucy’s cook’s best apple pie, laced with slivers of orange and fortified with nutmeg, could not hold them. The boys ran, not too fast in case they dropped their boats, the grown-ups following more sedately behind.

Anxiety, great anxiety, surrounded the maiden voyage of the Britannia. Robert, his face drawn with nerves and concentration, kept making final adjustments to the sails. There were learned seven-year-old conversations about the direction of the prevailing wind. At last she was off, wobbling at first, then making steadier progress on an arc of a journey that left her marooned on the shore once more, not far from the launch position.

‘I do hope it’s going to be all right. The boat I mean. Think what would happen if it didn’t work.’ Lady Lucy turned to Powerscourt, a male consort who ought to know about such things.

‘We didn’t learn much about sails and things in the Army,’ said Powerscourt defensively.

‘Oh dear. Oh dear.’ Lady Lucy hurried towards the shore. Robert’s boat had performed two more irregular journeys before returning to port and refusing to move at all. There seemed to have been a mutiny on board. Robert was close to tears. His friend was urging him to let the sails out so that Britannia could take advantage of the breeze, blowing strongly across Kensington Gardens.

‘Then it might fall over and sink. I don’t want it to sink. Why won’t it go, Mama? Everybody else’s boat is going fine.’

Lady Lucy’s look of helpless despair brought rescue from an unexpected quarter. An old gentleman, dressed in a dark blue coat, buttons brightly polished, muffler round his neck, had approached the sad party.

‘Could I offer you assistance? I have some experience in these matters.’ The old gentleman addressed his request to Lady Lucy. The two boys looked up at him warily. ‘I do know about sailing ships, I promise you. I sailed in one of them for years.’

The two boys stared at him, wonder in their eyes. Here was a man in a sailing ship. Perhaps he had climbed all the way to the top of the masts when he was young. It was nearly as good as meeting W.G. Grace himself.

‘How very kind of you,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble.’

‘No trouble at all. We can’t have these boats not sailing properly, can we?’

‘It’s Wobert’s boat, sir.’ Thomas had obviously decided that the old gentleman must have been a naval captain, if not an admiral. ‘It just wolls awound in the water, sir. The wigging must be wong.’

There followed a long inspection of the errant Britannia. The old gentleman bent down slowly to the water’s edge. Powerscourt wondered if he had back trouble, or stiff joints. Lady Lucy thought she had seen a miracle. Knots were undone. Rigging was adjusted. The tiny rudder was repositioned on the advice of the ancient mariner.

‘If you put it like that, the ship is bound to go round and round,’ he said kindly. ‘Now, Robert, just make sure all those knots are tied properly. They are? Good. Put her back in the water. Give her a little push. Big ships have tugs to tow them out to sea when they are launched. Nothing wrong with giving it a push. Same thing really.’

This time around the Britannia performed creditably, sailing steadily across the pond and ending up beached on the far side beside a very large dog. The two boys hurried to the rescue. ‘I told you it was the wigging,’ shouted Thomas triumphantly. ‘The wigging must be wight now.’

And so it went on all afternoon. The light was fading when the sailing ships were finally withdrawn from service, their keels inspected for damage underneath, the sails shaken clear of water. The old gentleman took his farewells. He leant down as he said goodbye to the two boys.

‘I was once the captain of a sailing ship, you know, a real one. HMS Achilles she was called. Back in the 1860s that must have been. Very fast she was too. As you would expect with a name like that. I come here most Sunday afternoons. My wife can’t get out any more. Her navigation systems have all gone. Maybe I shall see you here again. Good afternoon to you both.’

‘Wasn’t he a nice old gentleman,’ said Lady Lucy, her hand poised over a Spode teapot back in Markham Square.

‘I think it made his day,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I wonder if he’ll be there again the next time the boys go sailing.’

‘Lord Francis,’ Lady Lucy’s slender arm reached out to pour the milk into his tea. ‘You don’t take sugar, do you?’

‘How clever of you to remember,’ Powerscourt replied gallantly, thinking that Lady Lucy was looking a little apprehensive.

‘You remember I said I had something to tell you about those equerries of yours. The day we met at the bottom of St James’s Square.’

Lady Lucy as Anna Karenina, thought Powerscourt, himself a reluctant Vronsky, the high fur collar and its owner tripping off towards Piccadilly. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, I still haven’t written it down. I mean I have written it down, but it didn’t seem to make sense. It’s such a strange story, almost like a fairy tale from long ago. I was always very fond of fairy tales when I was a child, Lord Francis. Were you?’

‘I used to get very frightened,’ said Powerscourt, thinking that Lady Lucy’s childhood must be twelve to fifteen years more recent than his own.

‘A long long time ago, twenty-five or twenty-eight years ago . . .’ Lady Lucy spoke quietly, her eyes and her mind far away. Powerscourt thought she must tell Robert bedtime stories like this, the little boy’s head tucked up against the pillows, his mother’s soft voice coming from some still place deep inside her. ‘. . . a little boy was born into one of England’s oldest families. His mother was quite old, in her late thirties or early forties. This was her last child. All the rest were daughters. And she loved him so much. She watched him growing up on the great estate. She cried in secret when he went away to school. All through the long terms she waited for him to come home. Home to his mother.

‘When he was quite small his father ran away. He went off to Paris or Biarritz or one of those places where wicked husbands go and he never came home again, not even to see his little boy. The sisters got married and went away. There was only the mother and the little boy left in the great house with the park and the lake in front of the windows. The little boy used to go boating on the lake, rowing his mother round and round until it was time for tea.

‘The little boy grew up. He was a very pretty little boy, they say, and very handsome when he turned into a young man, almost like a prince with his very own castle. All the girls fell in love with him. And his mother didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all.’

It was growing dark outside. Lady Lucy got up and drew her curtains, pausing to toss a couple of logs on the fire. Her granddaughter clock ticked hypnotically behind her chair.

‘Not very far away, ten or fifteen miles away, there was a great city. As the little boy grew up, the city grew up too. But while he was growing in feet and inches the city was growing by the thousand, tens and tens of thousands of people, all crowding in, looking for work and happiness.

‘More tea, Lord Francis? I could make some more if this lot has gone cold.’

‘No, thank you.’ Powerscourt didn’t want to break the spell.

‘Most of the people in this city were poor. Terribly poor, poor souls.’ Lady Lucy shivered slightly although the room was warm from the fire. ‘But some of them were very rich. They made things. They ran great businesses. They owned shops. The man in our story, Lord Francis, owned a great many shops, grocers’ shops, in the great city and the other cities round about. He became the richest of them all. And he had a daughter, an only daughter. They say she was beautiful, so beautiful that the young men were almost frightened of her beauty.

‘The young man brought lots of girls back to his house in the country. There were dinners before the great dances and balls of the county, hunt balls, charity balls, that sort of thing. His mother looked at all these young women, coming to take her beautiful son away, and she sort of hated them. She couldn’t bear it. But he never grew attached to any of them. Perhaps he was being kind to his mother. We don’t know. Perhaps, like the prince in the story, he was waiting for someone else to come along.

‘They did, of course. Perhaps they always do. One day, the prince met the grocer’s daughter. I don’t know where it was. But they fell in love just like in the fairy stories. The young man had resisted all the great beauties of county society all his life. Now he fell over in a great rush, as if he was in a waterfall, hurtling towards the bottom. Can you have waterfalls of love, Lord Francis?’

‘I’m sure you can, Lady Lucy. I’m certain of it.’

‘Where was I?’ Lady Lucy was temporarily knocked over by her torrents of emotion. ‘Inside a month they were desperately in love. They wanted to get married. But there was a complication, Lord Francis. There usually is. The girl was a Roman Catholic. Her parents were very devout. They didn’t want her to marry a Protestant, even if he came from one of the oldest families in England. They said they would forbid the match.’

Lady Lucy took a sip of her cold tea. Powerscourt watched her tell her story, his mind racing ahead. He wondered where it would end. He didn’t like to think about the end.

‘But there was a complication on the other side too. The boy’s mother didn’t want her precious son marrying a grocer’s daughter, however rich her family were. And she certainly didn’t want him marrying a Roman Catholic. She said she would forbid the match too. She said she would bring the boy’s father home from wherever he had gone, whatever he had done in the meantime, to stop this marriage.

‘So they were all stuck. The young man, the beautiful girl, two sets of parents. Maybe it would have been better if the parents had never been so obstinate. What were the young lovers to do? What could they do?’

Lady Lucy paused once more, looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace as if the answer might be hidden in the blaze. ‘I don’t think young lovers are ever very sensible, do you, Lord Francis? The young man had to choose between his love and his mother, between his past and his future, perhaps, between old age and the glory of youth.

‘The young man started taking instruction in the Catholic faith. They say he followed his lessons far more intently than he ever did at Eton. When he was accepted, or whatever happens to them, they were married. The boy’s mother refused to attend. Not to a grocer’s daughter, she said. Not to a Roman Catholic. Not in some pagan chapel, decked out with bleeding hearts and the false idolatry of Rome.

‘Well, some of them were happy now, especially the young lovers. The girl’s father bought them a lovely little house between the city and the old house where the young man was born. The girl became pregnant, there was tremendous happiness all round. But it didn’t last, Lord Francis. It didn’t last.’

Lady Lucy looked thoughtful. Her eyes were far away, lost in the fairy story.

Powerscourt waited for the end, for some horror yet to come. The faces of the equerries he had questioned at Sandringham flashed through his mind. Five of them, one of them must be the young man in the story.

‘Then she lost the baby. She had some sort of terrible accident. The young man was away on military duty at the time. I think I forgot to tell you that he joined his father’s regiment. It was a terrible accident. The baby died. The young mother died. The young man rushed home to find his life in ruins, the love of his life lying at the bottom of a great set of stone steps, the baby dead inside her.

‘There was a row about the funeral, about where the body was buried. The boy’s mother wanted the girl and her grandchild buried in the family vault in the family chapel in the family seat, even though she had refused to attend the wedding. The girl’s parents refused. They said it was their grandchild too. I don’t know where they were buried in the end.

‘But the point of the story, Lord Francis, is this.’ Lady Lucy leaned forward and fixed her blue eyes on Powerscourt’s face. She looked at him intently. ‘The young man told very few people about his wedding. I suspect he thought of the pain it would cause his mother, all those county women inquiring about the church service and making pointed remarks about the price of groceries. I don’t think he told any of the other officers in his regiment. I don’t think he told any of his other friends.

‘But Prince Eddy knew. Prince Eddy knew the girl. When the husband was away, they say that Prince Eddy was never away from the house. They say that he was forcing his attentions on her. Maybe he thought married women were fair game, just like his father. Well, I don’t think this girl was. Fair game, I mean.

‘On the day she died, they say that Prince Eddy was at the house, that he was seen running away after a scream, a horrible scream that went on and on and on. They say that he didn’t go back, Prince Eddy. He just kept on running, running away.

‘I don’t think I know any more. It’s a terrible story.’

Powerscourt rose from his seat and walked over to the fire, as if to break the spell. ‘Who told you the story Lucy? Where does it come from?’

‘Two people, Francis. I had to invent some terrible pack of lies to get the story out of the second one. One of them was a cousin of the dead wife. The other was the uncle of the boy. You see, he’s my uncle too, in a roundabout sort of way. He’s my late husband’s father’s brother, uncle-in-law, if you see what I mean. I think he heard it from the boy’s mother.’

The truth was lying about on your own doorstep, thought Powerscourt. While he had been charging round England in a variety of trains, Lady Lucy merely talked to her relations round the corner.

‘And what is the name of the young man?’

Lady Lucy paused. She suspected that everything would be different after she told him. Then her courage came back.

‘The young man is called Lord Edward Gresham.’

Powerscourt had wondered about that for some time. Had there been something not quite right about his demeanour at Sandringham? Nothing tangible, maybe the kind of thing that would come over you if you had murdered the heir presumptive to the throne and smashed the picture of his fiancee into small pieces on the floor.

‘Lord Edward Gresham. Lord Edward Gresham, equerry to His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The late Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Prince Eddy.’ Powerscourt was already thinking about more journeys. ‘And his mother is Lady Gresham, Lady Blanche Gresham, of Thorpe Hall in Warwickshire. And the great city must be Birmingham. Am I right?’

‘You are, Lord Francis. You are. ‘The young man in the fairy story, the young man with the dead wife at the bottom of the stone steps, is Lord Edward Gresham.’