Goodnight Sweet Prince (29 page)

Families with Doges. Families with Procurators of St Mark’s. Families with Popes. Families with Admirals. Families who traded in spices. Families who traded in silks. Families who traded
with Shylock.

The waters of the canal were choppy now, boats being unloaded, the gondoliers picking their way skilfully through the traffic. They were passing the Rialto Bridge, once the financial heart of
Venice, the City of London on the water where two banks went bankrupt when they heard of the great voyages of Columbus back in the 1490s, Venice’s monopoly of trade with the East supposedly
broken. Venice took three hundred years to die.

The gondolier was humming now, humming quite loudly as if in revenge. Powerscourt thought it was the drinking song from
Traviata
, the noise blending in with the wider noises of the city,
boatmen shouting at each other, porters warning the public to beware, other, better treated gondoliers bellowing away into the Basin of St Mark. The great bulk of the church of Santa Maria della
Salute loomed up, a giant in Baroque, built to commemorate the salvation of the city from the plague. One million piles were sunk into the soggy ground to build it, one third of the population
wiped out before they started. Even syphilis, Powerscourt thought bitterly, even syphilis hadn’t managed that yet.

The porters at the Danieli must have been warned of his arrival.

‘This way, milord. Your coat, milord, your hat, milord. Cup of tea, milord?’

The interiors were all gold leaf and dark red velvet, huge chandeliers of Murano glass hanging everywhere. Ornate rococo paintings, imitation Tiepolo, filled the walls with nymphs and satyrs
from some imaginary Venetian past.

The place was full of Americans, their nasal twang echoing round the great reception room that looked out across the water to San Giorgio and the Lido. Americans rushing around on the Grand
Tour, thought Powerscourt, who rather liked Americans. Buffalo come to meet Byron. Boston embraces Botticelli. Grand Rapids hails Giorgione. Tampa salutes Titian.

‘Five days in Venice, five whole days,’ one bulky matron was telling her compatriots indignantly. ‘I can’t believe it takes five whole days to look at Venice. The place
isn’t a quarter the size of Philadelphia! Then we’re down for seven days in Rome! Seven days! I mean, after you’ve seen the Pope and his pictures, what is there left to
do?’

A solemn little man with a small moustache, very correct in a frock coat, greeted Powerscourt. ‘Lord Powerscourt? Welcome to the Danieli. My name is Antonio Pannone. I am the manager
here.’

He led Powerscourt to a quiet table by the window and removed the reserved notice.

‘Lord Rosebery telegraphed to say you were coming. He is an old friend, Lord Rosebery. Any friend of Lord Rosebery must be a friend of the Hotel Danieli, no? It is so.’

The little man looked round. Tea appeared as if by magic. He poured two cups, his eyes watching steadily as the crowds passed by his windows.

‘Lord Powerscourt, Lord Rosebery said you were probably looking for somebody, no?’

Powerscourt told him about his quest for Lord Edward Gresham. ‘He is a young man, in his late twenties, with fair hair and brown eyes. Lord Edward Gresham always dresses well. His friends
used to tease him about his clothes.’

‘Here in Venice,’ said Antonio Pannone sadly, ‘everybody likes to dress well. It is the fashion. Do you have a picture or a photograph of him by any chance?’

Powerscourt did. Johnny Fitzgerald had pressed it into his hand minutes before his train left London two days before.

‘For God’s sake, Francis.’ Fitzgerald was panting after his long run up the platform, searching for his friend. ‘Why do you have to travel in a compartment right at the
front of the bloody train? I nearly missed you. Now then. If you’re going looking for somebody, then it sometimes helps to have a picture of them so everybody else can see what the bugger
looks like. I thought even you would have realised that by now.’

Powerscourt hadn’t. In his haste, he had quite forgotten. Lord Johnny pressed a copy of the
Illustrated London News
into his hand.

‘Page twenty-four.’ he said firmly. ‘Or maybe page twenty-five. There he is, on the steps of a house party somewhere in the country, looking very handsome too.’

‘How on earth did you get this, Johnny?’

There was a lot of activity up at the front of the train. Whistles were blown, flags waved. Almost imperceptibly, the seven o’clock express to Dover and Paris began to move.

‘It’s my aunt, Francis. Christ, I’m going to have to do some more running to keep up with you. I’m not running all the way to bloody Venice, Francis. She collects all
these magazines, my auntie. She’s got rooms full of them. She says they’ll be valuable in the years to come. She’s quite mad. She’s potty . . .’

Lord Johnny ran out of platform. The train gathered speed. Powerscourt just heard a parting message, shouted through the smoke.

‘Don’t go falling into any of those bloody canals now, Francis. And don’t talk to any strange women, courtesans or whatever they’re called. Bloody place is full of
them.’

Powerscourt handed over his
Illustrated London News
, opened at page twenty-five. It was indeed a formal photograph of the guests at a country house weekend. The hosts and the older people
were seated uncomfortably in front of a set of steps. The young women, clutching their parasols against the sun, were lined up behind them. Draped around the steps and the flowerpots were a group
of young men, boaters tilted. Most elegant of them all, lying languidly on the topmost step, one elbow on the ground, the other hand checking the precise angle of his exquisite hat, was Lord Edward
Gresham. He was staring insolently at the lens, as if it was disturbing his afternoon.

‘This one here. The one lying down. That’s Lord Edward Gresham.’

‘Thank you. Thank you, Lord Powerscourt. He looks the bit of the dandy. It is so?’ Pannone peered intently at the picture, checking perhaps, to see if there were any regular clients
of the Hotel Danieli in the frame. ‘Now, Lord Powerscourt. May I borrow this picture? Or I could get one of the local people to make a copy? Whichever you prefer. I have a plan. Have you
looked for people in Venice before, Lord Powerscourt? It is more difficult than you think. Sometimes we have done this before. For the authorities, you understand.’

More Americans were pouring their way into the great reception room. They were complaining about the prices, prices of Murano glass to take home, prices in the hotel, prices for hiring
gondoliers, operatic or not. Don’t they realise, thought Powerscourt, people have been complaining about the prices in Venice for centuries, the price of salt, the price of silks. But they
kept coming back.

‘Mr Pannone, sorry. I drifted off in my mind, like one of your gondolas. Of course you may keep the magazine. Now, tell me about your plan.’

‘My plan depends on the waiters, Lord Powerscourt. Everybody has to eat, it is so? So, they go to the hotels and the restaurants. Waiters serve them. Waiters have eyes and ears, none
better. Now then, in a moment, I take the picture to Florian’s in Piazza San Marco. Many of the tourists go there a lot. My friend, the top waiter in Florian’s, he and I circulate your
young man round all the hotels and the restaurants. For a day or two this Lord Edward will be the most famous man in the city! All the waiters looking for him!’

Waiters, thought Powerscourt. How very neat. The waiters of Venice would be pressed into service on his behalf. His very own secret service. Waiters as spies, his spies, their eyes flickering
across faces as they served the Spaghetti al Vongole or the Fegato al Veneziano, spies with the claret or the Chianti or the grappa. Such a secret service might have existed centuries before in the
days of the Council of Ten or the Council of Three, running Venice’s domestic intelligence services from their shadowy headquarters in the Doges’ Palace, the victims dumped
unceremoniously out to sea, or found in the misty Venetian mornings, buried heads down in the pavement by the waterfront.

Take care what you are ordering in Venice. Mind what you say. There are informers everywhere.

‘That sounds excellent, Mr Pannone. May I say how grateful I am for your assistance? I do not know how long Lord Gresham intends to stay here. He may have already left.’

‘Everybody stay in Venice longer than they intended,’ said Pannone loyally, ‘except for these Americans.’ He looked regretfully at the throng of transatlantic visitors
crowding round his bar. ‘Always they are in the hurry. Always they want to be somewhere else. It is as if they have some strange disease, the not able to sit still disease. Do you understand
Americans, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I think I find them as confusing as you do, Mr Pannone. But tell me, how long do you think it will take to find Lord Gresham?’

Pannone rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. ‘Two days at most, I should say. At most. The man has to eat. This system has always found people in that time before. Is he dangerous, Lord
Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt didn’t think it would help if he said that he was suspected of murdering the heir presumptive to the English throne.

‘No, I don’t think he is dangerous. I just need to speak to him. I shall be at Florian’s, or in here, every day at lunchtime, and from five o’clock in the afternoon. I
shall be waiting for him. We could have some of your excellent tea together. Or dinner.’

‘Good, Lord Powerscourt. Very good. Inside two days, I promise you. Now, let me show you to your room. It is the one Lord Rosebery stays in when he comes.’

As they climbed to the first floor, Powerscourt wondered just what he was going to say to Gresham when he found him. If he found him. He had a terrible suspicion that he had already gone further
south on his journey to Rome.

‘Did you kill Prince Eddy? Why did you want so much blood? How did you get into his room?’

What had the mother said about Rome? Powerscourt dodged his way round a mountain of crates heading from a waterfront boat towards the Danieli. He was walking, the following
morning, round Venice in an anti-clockwise direction, hoping against hope that he might catch a glimpse of Lord Edward Gresham on the way. ‘Edward said he had to make a journey to Rome. I
never asked him what he meant by that. Maybe something to do with that ghastly religion.’ The old lady had sat as stiff as a ramrod in that cold room, fingering her pearls as she spoke.

Maybe something to do with that ghastly religion. You didn’t have to go to Rome if you were a good Catholic, did you? It wasn’t like Mecca or wherever it was where the Muslims went
on their pilgrimages. What was so special about Rome? Had he promised Louisa that he would take her there? Was this a journey of expiation, Edward going where Louisa wanted to take him? In
Memoriam?

Powerscourt had now reached the forbidding gates of the Arsenal, half-way along the city seafront. A quartet of melancholy lions stood on guard outside, a fifth perched arrogantly up a gate.
They stole those lions too, the Venetians, Powerscourt remembered, just like they stole the ones on top of the Basilica of St Mark’s in the Piazza San Marco, just like they stole the body of
their patron saint St Mark from some tomb in Alexandria. Pirates, all of them, the inside of St Mark’s a pirate’s cave full of booty plundered from Constantinople and the trade routes
of the Venetian ships. They were built in here, those ships, thought Powerscourt, as he turned left and walked along the side of the great red walls that guarded the Arsenal’s secrets. They
could turn out a warship a day at the height of their power, he recalled, a mass production line running from keel to a full set of sails inside these walls in twenty-four hours.

Up here were the poorer quarters of the city, where the Venetians lived in hovels rather than palazzos, the streets paved with rubbish and hungry cats forever on the prowl. Lady Gresham had
mentioned something about that too. Powerscourt’s memory clicked into action as he crossed a small canal by a delicate wrought-iron bridge. ‘He loved walking round some of the poorer
quarters, you know, Lord Powerscourt, rotting palazzos falling into the street, washing hanging out above the windows.’ There’s plenty of washing round here, thought Powerscourt, as a
sheet escaped from its moorings and fell on to the narrow street a couple of feet behind him.

Bells were tolling right across the city, distant bells, nearby bells, sad bells, old bells, new bells, all calling the Venetians to Sunday Mass. Mass, Powerscourt thought. Did Mass have
something to do with it? Before he could pursue the idea, he realized that he was lost. The baffling topography of Venice had struck again. You could never keep your sense of direction in the
place, he remembered, where you thought the waterfront must be turning into some landlocked campo of the interior, St Mark’s itself appearing when you thought you had finally reached the
railway station. Mass. The Venetians were turning out for morning service. Some of them were carrying flowers. Old ladies were carrying flowers, grandmothers bent nearly double with the weight of
them. Where did the flowers come from, Powerscourt wondered? Perhaps they stole them too, like they stole the lions, early morning pirate flotillas despatched on missions of theft to the
mainland.

Then he knew. The old ladies were taking the flowers to the cemetery, not to Mass. Perhaps they’d been to Mass already, an early morning special for the bereaved. If he followed the old
ladies he would come out at the landing stage where the boats sailed for Venice’s Island of The Dead, San Michele in Isola, a cemetery ringed with water, its entire surface covered with
graves and tombs and ornate Italian statuary. Just the kind of place Queen Victoria would like to visit for her holidays, Powerscourt thought, surrounded on all sides by the dead.

He followed patiently behind a convoy of Venetian grandmothers, twisting their way slowly through a maze of passages and dark streets towards the waterfront at Fondamente Nuove.

‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.’ Powerscourt remembered the high clear voice of his parson in his little church at Rokesley. ‘We have followed too
much the devices and desires of our own hearts . . . Spare thou them, oh God, which confess their faults.’ You had to confess your sins before you could partake of the sacrament.