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.’