Goodnight Sweet Prince (33 page)

‘Have you been to all of these churches? The ones on the walls, I mean.’ Powerscourt moved his religious pawn slowly up the board.

‘I’ve been to Mass in San Marco. That was fantastic. And I went to the Frari this afternoon.’ Gresham was looking closely at a mirror above Powerscourt’s head.

‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt, dismembering a bright red spider crab, ‘are you a believer? In the Catholic faith, I mean. I always think those services must mean so much more
if you belong to that faith.’

‘They do, they do,’ said Gresham, polishing off the last of the prawns. ‘And I am, I am a Catholic, I mean. I converted a couple of years ago. It means a lot to me.’

‘I have often thought about it,’ said Powerscourt. ‘So many people make the journey to Rome these days. Is it difficult? The converting, that is.’

‘The whole thing is quite difficult,’ said the young man, with the air of a religious veteran. The plates were being cleared away. Fresh cutlery was being laid. The Chablis was
nearly finished. ‘But then, you wouldn’t expect a proper religion to be easy, would you? I had terrible trouble with my mother. She couldn’t see why I was doing it. She refused to
come to the service where I was accepted into the faith. The priest said that she would understand in the end. I think the end may be a long time coming.’

Gresham laughed grimly. The last of the Chablis was poured into his glass. Risotto and fish soup replaced the skeletons of the seafood. Still he stared intently at the mirror.

‘It was after my wife died. That was when I thought of converting to Catholicism.’ Powerscourt was moving a knight, or was it a bishop, up the board. ‘It was so terrible. I
really wanted what they call the consolation of religion. I kept going to church services, different ones, all over the place. In so many of the Anglican ones I felt they were just speaking the
words. Oh, the words are beautiful, very beautiful. But I didn’t think they meant anything very much to the people saying them. How is that soup, by the way?’

Keep the proprieties going. Good manners to the end. We’re British, aren’t we? Old Etonians all?

‘The soup is excellent. Your risotto looks very good too. But tell me, Lord Powerscourt, how long ago did your wife die?’

A flock of pigeons shot past the window, heading for calmer quarters. The wind had risen and was blowing the day’s rubbish across the square.

‘Caroline?’ said Powerscourt, chasing his risotto’s last few peas across his plate. ‘Caroline died seven years, three months and five days ago.’

Silence fell across the table.

‘She died in a shipping accident. She was drowned. Our little boy was with her. He was only two years old.’

Briefly Powerscourt hated himself. He hated himself for using these devices on the young man, unaware that the confidences were rehearsed, the intimacy merely a ploy. He looked out into the
square, empty now. I wrote most of this script, he said to himself. He’s making it up as he goes along.

‘You can still remember the day after all these years,’ said Gresham, leaning back in his chair as the table was cleared once more.

‘Lord Gresham. Lord Powerscourt. Now we have the guinea fowl, and the vegetables, and the little salad. And we leave you for a while. Please, help yourselves to the red wine. It is far too
good to waste.’ Giovanni bowed deeply and closed the doors.

Another message sped round to the Danieli. First two courses gone. Serious talk. Not much laughter. Young man drinking too fast. Pannone added it to his pile and stared moodily out to sea.

‘I can indeed remember the day,’ Powerscourt carried on sadly. ‘I don’t think you ever forget it. I don’t think you ever can.’

‘My wife died too, Lord Powerscourt. Last year. It was 14th June. I shall always remember it.’

‘I’m so sorry, so sorry,’ said Powerscourt gently, refilling Gresham’s glass with the red wine.

‘Louisa and I were so happy.’ Gresham chewed reflectively at his guinea fowl. ‘She was a Catholic too. That’s why I converted. She said her parents wouldn’t approve
of our getting married unless she was marrying another Catholic. She was so beautiful, Lord Powerscourt, so beautiful. I knew the minute I saw her that I had to marry her. I knew we would be so
happy together.’ Gresham drank absent-mindedly from his glass, eyes staring inward now into some private memories of his own.

‘How did you lose her? If you don’t mind my asking?’ Powerscourt spoke in his softest voice. It could all go wrong here, he thought. Terribly wrong.

‘It’s a long story. Do you mind if it’s a long story?’

Powerscourt waved his arm at the room and the view outside. Welcome to the confessional, he thought. May the Lord have mercy on your sins.

‘My dear Lord Gresham, the night is young. Time does not matter much, here in Venice. They’ve had so much of it already. Please go on.’

The young man refilled his glass.

‘Shortly before we were married, Louisa and I met Prince Eddy. I can’t remember where. It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter at all. But, anyway, he used to come and
see us a lot after we were married. He’d just turn up out of the blue. Sometimes he would stay. Sometimes he would stay for days. I think he too was a little in love with Louisa. I mean,
anybody would have been in love with Louisa. She was so beautiful.’

Powerscourt poured himself a glass of Châteauneuf du Pape. Did they use this wine in their services, those Popes from Avignon all those years ago? The body and blood of Christ, grown on
the Pope’s own vineyards. Drink this in remembrance of me.

‘Sometimes he would call when I was away with the regiment. You know, manoeuvres, training camps, that sort of thing.’ Gresham shivered slightly. He continued his demolition work on
the guinea fowl’s leg, now staring intently at the wallpaper. ‘He came to stay again last year when I was away. It took me four months to find out what happened, what really happened, I
mean. You see there was only one other person in the house at the time. When it happened. The maid. And she ran away. She disappeared. She vanished right off the face of the earth as if she had
never existed. I looked for her everywhere. I looked for her at her parents’ house in the little village she came from in Yorkshire. The funny thing is, she was called Louisa too. Louisa
Powell. From Yorkshire.’

He stopped and stared into the fire. The audience outside in the square were very still. They’re mesmerised, thought Powerscourt. He said nothing.

‘Then I bumped into her near the Tottenham Court Road one day. Quite by chance. She’d changed her name. That wasn’t surprising. You wouldn’t want to go on being called
Louisa after that. She told me the story in one of those little tea rooms they have round there. Awful cakes. Terrible tea, I remember, terrible tea. I had to promise to give her fifty pounds.
Christ, I’d have given her five hundred.’

Powerscourt leaned forward and refilled Gresham’s glass in sympathy for the terrible tea. He spoke not a word.

‘This is what happened. This is Louisa’s story, Louisa Powell, Louisa from Yorkshire. Not my Louisa. Not the beautiful one. Not the girl I married. My Louisa.’

Powerscourt thought he might be going to cry. Greshams don’t cry, he remembered. They didn’t.

‘Eddy had been making advances for days. I don’t think he knew that Louisa was expecting a child. The house we lived in was built on a slope. At the back, opening out from the
drawing-room, there was a great long flight of steps leading out into the garden. Louisa was very fond of gardens. She knew a lot about flowers and things like that. They had some sort of a row,
Eddy and Louisa. The other Louisa heard shouting. My Louisa was saying No, very loudly, a number of times. The other Louisa came round to see if that would calm things down. Not in front of the
servants, that sort of thing.

‘She saw Eddy push my Louisa quite hard. Then he pushed her again. He pushed her down the steps. She thought she heard him shouting after her. My Louisa cracked her head open at the
bottom. That was that. My Louisa was dead. The baby was dead. Eddy ran away. Louisa ran away. I’ve been running away too. Ever since. Ever since Eddy killed her. “There’s no
bottom, none, in his voluptuousness.”
Macbeth.
Malcolm in Act Four. I played him at school. I’ve changed the words to suit him better.

Powerscourt thought you could add the sons and husbands to Prince Eddy’s list. Droit de seigneur. Eddy had watched his father all those years. Take what you want. Come to bed with the
Prince of Wales by Royal Command.

Except Eddy had men in his cistern as well.

He thought of the young Gresham on stage, like he was tonight in Venice’s grandest auditorium. He thought of Lancaster reciting Byron’s lines about the fallen at the age of twelve.
Lancaster had fallen too. So many bodies.

The young man stared at Powerscourt. His eyes went wild again. He stared out of the window. Silence filled the square. Silence filled the little room with the dark blue walls, flecked with
gold.

‘I’ve been followed, you know, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve been followed ever since I arrived here in Venice. There’s somebody behind that mirror above you, watching
everything I do.’

Powerscourt was saved by the return of Giovanni the waiter.

‘May I clear all this away? You have enjoyed the guinea fowl? Good. Now then, gentlemen, in a few moments, some fruit, a little tiramisu? We have a very good lemon tart this evening, a
speciality of the cook. And then some coffee? A little grappa with the coffee?’

‘That mirror, Lord Powerscourt.’ The waiter was still closing the doors. ‘The person watching us. I thought I saw a face in there earlier on during the fish course. Implacable
eyes, it had – the face, I mean. Like it was Judgement Day.

‘They’re out there too.’ The young man rushed from the table and flung open the windows, frightening a group of pigeons into flight. ‘There’s more of them.
They’re all watching me. Don’t tell me I’m imagining things, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve got a recess in my little room at the Hotel Pellegrini. There’s somebody on the far
side of that too, watching, listening. I shouted at them before I came out. I don’t think it made any difference at all. They’re still there.’

God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. The poor man’s going crazy. He can’t have been feeling very stable before he got here. Pannone’s waiters are pushing him over the edge.

‘Everybody sees things in Venice, Lord Gresham. I shouldn’t worry about it. Come, let me walk you back to your hotel.’

Gresham was talking non-stop as they left, as if he couldn’t control himself. He talked about the mirror, about the faces that followed him round the streets of Venice, about the gold
fleck in the wallpaper, turning into snakes, hissing at him across the room. The cold night air seemed to calm him down as they left. The great square was deserted, the Campanile soaring into the
night, the four lions on top of the Basilica of St Mark preparing for a night hunt across the rooftops of the city.

Out of the corner of his eye, Powerscourt saw two of the waiters vanishing up the Mercerie and the Calle dei Fabbri on the opposite side of St Mark’s Square. Gresham shouted at the
disappearing bodies.

‘There they are! There they are! I told you!’

He ran at great speed across the stones, the racing footsteps echoing into the walls. Powerscourt found him a few minutes later, panting sadly by the door of a hotel. ‘Bastards got away.
Bastards. I’ll get even with them. I will. I bloody well will.’ The two men walked slowly up the narrow street. At the top there was a left turn, then a little bridge, then another long
stretch of the Calle dei Fabbri. Three-quarters of the way up a face peered slowly out from an alleyway. When it saw the two people approaching, it disappeared.

Gresham was off again.

‘Come back! Come back!’ he shouted in despair, too late to reach the vanishing figure. He sprinted up the street, peering into the little roads that twisted off towards the Grand
Canal.

‘Lord Gresham, come, come. I think you need to rest. Here is the Hotel Pellegrini at last. Why don’t you call on me in the morning, at eleven o’clock at the Danieli. Things
will seem better in the morning. We could plan our day together.’

Powerscourt watched Gresham right into his hotel, the night manager solicitous, taking his coat and escorting him to his room.

As he walked back towards the seafront, he remembered that great brick building at Morpeth, set back from the town, filled with the isolation wards of the insane. The Northumberland County
Lunatic Asylum, full of people with visions, snakes in the wallpaper, mirrors with eyes. It’s full of Greshams, he reflected sadly, wandering round those long corridors, doctors with
strait-jackets waiting to protect them from the demons in their heads.

It’s a race, he said to himself.

A race between my ability to obtain Gresham’s confession. If he has one. And Gresham’s ability to go mad.

Very early the next morning Powerscourt took a trip out to sea in the Danieli gondola. ‘I don’t care where we go,’ he said to the boatman, ‘just bring
me back here in half an hour. I need to think.’

The gondolier took him out towards the Lido, the great curve of the seafront, Riva degli Schiavoni, named after the Slav traders who had done business there years before, gradually shrinking
into a pencil line on a map behind him.

Lord Gresham nearly told me something last night, he thought. At one stage we were just a second or two away. But that was in the evening when the messengers and the wine conspired to send him
almost mad. Powerscourt didn’t think there could be too many more of these heavy, confession-laden conversations. If he doesn’t tell me something this morning, I shall just have to ask
him a question.

Just one would do.

He finalized his plan of campaign as the gondolier brought him back to the landing stage with a last flourish of his oar. Powerscourt realized that the man had been singing solidly for the past
fifteen minutes. He hadn’t heard a thing.