‘And what does this early test show, Johnny?’ He picked up a bottle from the table and noted that two others appeared to have been carried up for inspection.
‘I’m glad to say that you’ve done well with this one. This Chablis is very good, flinty I believe is the word they use in the trade. I’m afraid I may not have the time to
sample those two over there as I have to buy dinner for a man I know in the City. On your business, Francis, Fitzgeralds never sleep.’
Lady Lucy laughed.
‘But I must tell you what I found out when I was down south inquiring about boating accidents, Francis.’
Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite red leather armchair and poured himself a small glass of wine. ‘You don’t mind, Johnny, if I just try a glass of my own wine in my own
chair in my own house, do you?’
Fitzgerald waved expansively from the fireplace. ‘Help yourself, Francis, help yourself. This is Liberty Hall.’
‘So what have you discovered down south?’
‘Well,’ said Fitzgerald, looking serious now, ‘the first thing to report is that every year the Harrisons take a house near Cowes on the Isle of Wight. A huge house it is too,
right on the water with a tennis court at the back and a little jetty at the front where you could keep small yachts. Harrisons from all Europe turn up at this place, Francis. Some of them come to
watch the races in Cowes Week. I shouldn’t wonder if the German ones are cheering for the bloody Kaiser rather than the right side.’
‘How many members of the family are there exactly, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘There could be up to fifty of them at a time,’ said Fitzgerald, squinting into his wine glass, ‘or so my informant told me. But the accident, Francis, the accident. Nobody
down there likes to talk about it at all, I don’t know why. One old seafarer told me it would bring bad luck all round. But a number of the locals don’t think it could have been an
accident at all. You can see that they think, though they wouldn’t quite say it, that there was foul play.’
‘What sort of foul play?’ said Powerscourt, unlacing his boots and turning his feet towards the fire.
‘That’s the thing, Francis. I got hold of the people in the boatyard at Cowes that used to look after the boat and they just couldn’t believe it. A different man in another
boatyard told me about how you could nobble a boat rather like you nobble a horse. There are so many ways that boat could have been fixed, not that I understood most of them. The most likely was to
make a small leak shortly before your victims went out for their sail. The water would come in gradually and nobody would notice. By the time the water came through the floor it would almost
certainly be too late. And if you were on your own, you would be hard pressed to bale out and sail the bloody boat at the same time. Or that’s what my man said. So you see, Francis, somebody
could have fixed the boat. But it could have been anybody.’ Fitzgerald shrugged his shoulders.
‘An English Harrison, a German Harrison, an Austrian Harrison – that’s just the beginning,’ said Powerscourt, running through his knowledge of the number of different
branches of the family.
‘What’s more,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all that part of the coast is overrun with people in the summer. Nobody would have paid any attention to anybody tinkering about
in the inside of a boat. Half the bloody island is doing the same thing.’
Two men were waiting for a third by the side of the lake at Glendalough, thirty miles south-west of Dublin. They were shielded from sight by the trees but they commanded a
clear view of the path that led down from the village and the hotel.
‘He’s half an hour late now,’ said Thomas Docherty, the younger man.
‘We’ll give him another fifteen minutes or so,’ replied Michael Byrne. Both men were whispering even though they were the only people to be seen on the fringes of the lake.
Both were leaders of small revolutionary bands pledged to the overthrow of English rule in Ireland. Both lived in fear of their lives from the authorities, their secret files in Dublin Castle
augmented daily by the reports of the informants, handsomely subsidized at the British Exchequer’s expense.
They heard the third man before they saw him, his footsteps crunching on the path. Behind them small waves were lapping the surface of the lake. The water was still dark blue, fading into black
with the coming of the night.
‘Should we go and let him know we’re here?’ whispered Docherty.
‘He knows. He knows exactly where we are going to be. Don’t move. I don’t think we were followed here but you cannot be too careful.’
The three conspirators had chosen Glendalough for its innocence. Any trip there could be excused as a visit to one of the ancient seats of Irish learning, the fifth-century tower further up the
hill still visible like a beacon against the Wicklow hills, a lighthouse placed by God to illuminate the journeys of his people. Even a clandestine conspiratorial assembly like this could be
excused by the need to pray at the lakeside. And Glendalough had a further advantage. It was a largely Protestant village, its loyalty rewarded by the visit some years before of the Prince of Wales
himself with a large party of friends. It was one of the most unlikely places in Ireland for a Catholic conspiracy to be launched.
‘God be with you, Michael Byrne. God be with you, Thomas Docherty.’ Fergus Finn, the last arrival, made his apologies. Docherty worked on the railways, Byrne was a schoolteacher and
Finn was a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Dublin.
‘Let’s get down to it,’ said Byrne, the acknowledged leader of the group. They sat on the damp grass beneath the trees, even more invisible to any watchers from Dublin Castle.
Behind them the water lapped as it had done for thousands of years. The circle of hills around Glendalough, the glen of the two lakes, was black.
‘This Jubilee. Two months from now,’ Byrne went on. ‘Should we make a noise in Dublin or in London?’
The others knew perfectly well what he meant by noise, an assassination, a bomb, a terrorist outrage that would bring their cause on to the front pages of all the countries of the known
world.
‘London,’ said Finn. ‘There will be enormous crowds there. Surely it would be easy to send a couple of our people in without the police knowing. They couldn’t possibly
vet every single citizen arriving in the city. It’s beyond reason.’
‘Dublin,’ said Docherty. ‘Sure, it has to be Dublin. However big the crowds are over there, it would still be impossible to get away. Whether it’s a bomb or a bullet we
are thinking of, the man doing it would be seized by the Londoners themselves. In Dublin there’s more chance of getting our man away, of being able to hide him decently afterwards.’
‘But it wouldn’t have the same impact in Dublin as it would in London.’ Finn was making his point emphatically, punching his right fist into his left palm as if he were
addressing a public meeting. ‘Think of all those troops from across the Empire marching through the city. Think of the crowds hanging off every balcony, sitting in their stands in Piccadilly,
lining the rooftops to get a better view. And then an incident somewhere just away from the main parade, a great explosion. That would make them sit up a bit. It would be grand, wouldn’t
it?’
Docherty was not impressed. ‘You’d never get away,’ he said dismissively. ‘They may all be watching the parade but there will still be thousands of them milling about the
streets, trying to get as close as they can. A good bomb in Dublin would do just as well. Michael Byrne, what is your opinion on the matter?’
Byrne paused before he replied. He pulled a small branch from the tree above him and peeled the twigs off one by one as he made his points.
‘I think it should be a bomb. We’ve got four lads just discharged with good records from the Royal Engineers. They’ve served all over the place and they know all there is to
know about making bombs. Two of them have settled in Hammersmith, not far from the bridge. Two more have come back to Dublin and they’re living beyond the brewery.’
He paused. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the surface of the lake and sighed its way around the trees that guarded its presence.
‘I think it has to be Dublin,’ he said finally. ‘It will be easier to organize in our own city. A bomb early in the morning of Jubilee Day. There must be some bloody statue we
could blow up. Then the Castle people will be worried all day in case there are more to come. Maybe even in London. I think that is going to be our best plan.’
He held his hand to his lips suddenly.
‘What was that noise?’ he said ever so softly. Three pairs of ears bent to one side, straining for the noise of policemen on the march, soldiers on patrol. Behind them the lake
continued to murmur, the roar of the waterfall on the other side occasionally breaking through.
‘Nothing, Michael, it was just the wind in the trees,’ said Finn, rather loudly.
‘We’re all too jumpy. Even here.’ Byrne began demolishing another branch. ‘There have been too many arrests in the last six months. Too many of them the right people too.
I think we should go. Could you both draw up some possible targets before the next meeting on the beach at Greystones?’
Finn and Docherty left at five-minute intervals to return to their homes. Byrne heard their steps gradually fading on the path back to the village. He turned and looked at the dark waters of the
lake. For months now he had suspected that Finn was an informer. He had set the meeting up as a trap. All informers were encouraged to press for the most extreme action, to provoke the terrorists
to the most violent measures. He had learnt this from two members of his own organization whom he had encouraged to sell their services to Dublin Castle. The information he obtained from their
instructions was invaluable; the payments the two men received strengthened the terrorists’ arsenal. Within two days, he thought, possibly three, news of this meeting would have reached the
authorities. He hoped they would believe what Finn had to tell them.
For Michael Byrne, implacable opponent of English rule, rated by his enemies as the cleverest foe they had, intended to make a noise in London all along.
He knelt down to the water’s edge and splashed his face. He made the sign of the cross. He tapped his jacket pocket to make sure his pipe was inside. Then, like the others, he left the
lake to make his plans.
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?