Goodnight Sweet Prince (20 page)

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.