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  Lady Lucy shuddered. He remembered the two of them drinking coffee on the terrace of their hotel as evening turned into night over Florence. In front of them the muddy waters of the Arno gurgled noisily on their tortuous route to the sea. On the far side the Palazzo Pitti loomed large against the dark sky and San Miniato del Monte sat perfectly still, white and green and ghostly, on its hilltop above the city. Behind, not immediately visible from where they sat, the domes of San Lorenzo and the cathedral kept guard over the treasures beneath them.

  Lady Lucy was talking about the two Davids they had seen on their visit.

  ‘I don’t think there is any comparison, Francis, I really don’t. One is black and one is white – well, it was white when it was created. Donatello’s is life-size in its black marble, Michelangelo’s is huge, a Colossus in marble.

  ‘Did you look closely at the Donatello, Francis, or were you still thinking about assassins? It was so beautiful, so graceful, so much a tribute to the glory of the male form. If you had leant forward to touch the skin – I almost wanted to stroke it – I’m sure it would have felt warm. Maybe the boy David would have smiled. I’m sure he would have liked people stroking him. And the face, it’s almost the face of a girl, it’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Do I take it, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, looking solemnly into those blue eyes, ‘that you prefer it to the Michelangelo?’

  ‘I do, I do.’ Lady Lucy was passionate. ‘Of course the Michelangelo is impressive, it’s so big. But it’s much more about politics than about male beauty, I’m sure. It was commissioned by the city fathers to give glory to their little state. So Michelangelo made them this enormous thing, symbolizing the victory of Republican Florence over her latest batch of enemies, whoever they were at the time. Michelangelo’s David is about the victory of Republican virtue over tyranny. Donatello’s is about the victory of beauty over ugliness, youth over age – that slain Goliath looks about twenty years older, down at the bottom of the statue – maybe even of art over time. Did Donatello think that people would come to look at what he had done four hundred and fifty years later? I don’t know, I just think he wanted to create the most exquisite young man in the world. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, four centuries before Keats.’

  She stopped. A wandering owl hooted over the rooftops of Florence. The bridges over the river looked mysterious in the dark.

  ‘But come, Francis,’ said Lucy, rising quickly from her seat. ‘I want to show you something about the Michelangelo. Come along.’

  She took them to the Piazza del Duomo, Brunelleschi’s dome towering above them, the green marble of the exterior cold to the touch.

  ‘Right, Francis. It’s a summer evening in May, 1504 I think. From the workshops of the cathedral here a group of men are pulling something out on to the street. There are about forty of them. Waiting for the something is a very strange contraption indeed, a group of greased beams, with heavy ropes attached to them. It must have been nearly dark when they pulled Michelangelo’s David out of the workshops and hauled it upright and secured it to the beams. Most of the statue was encased in a wooden frame. Only the head was visible at the top.

  ‘The next morning, I think, they began to pull it on its final journey. Imagine the excitement, Francis. Most of the children in Florence must have come to stare at the Giant in a wooden frame. Maybe it gave them nightmares. The old people who lived round about must have looked out of their windows watching, fascinated, as the statue inched its way forward down the street. The forty men must have been like galley slaves, all pulling together on the cry of the foreman. Maybe Michelangelo himself was there, watching carefully in case it fell over. Maybe he helped to pull it, we don’t know. Strangers to Florence must have been amazed – did these mad people pull huge objects on greased beams inch by painful inch around their city every day?’

  Lady Lucy paused. Then she shuffled slowly forward.

  ‘Shuffle, Francis, shuffle. Imagine you’re one of the galley slaves, your back aching, your heart despondent as you realize how slow progress is. By the end of the first day they had come about fifty yards down the Via de Calzaioli to the junction with the Via del Tosinghi here. There are about another two hundred and fifty yards to go. I imagine the forty workers must have enjoyed their glass of Chianti or whatever it was at the end of the day. Keep shuffling, Francis.’

  Lady Lucy shuffled her way down the street very slowly, holding firmly on to her husband’s arm.

  ‘We don’t know if the Giant shook or nearly fell over on its journey. Imagine Michelangelo at that moment. Here is his masterpiece – and he is very sure it is a masterpiece – en route to its final resting place. The beams hit a rock perhaps. The men pull the wrong way. The Giant topples inside its wooden frame. It is about to disappear from history for ever, smashed into hundreds of pieces of marble on the hard streets of Florence. It would have broken his heart. He might never have been the same again.’

  ‘But it didn’t fall, Lucy, did it?’ Powerscourt had shuffled his way to the edge of the Piazza della Signoria.

  ‘No, it didn’t.’ Lady Lucy laughed. ‘It took four days, imagine the four days of pulling that huge weight for the galley slaves, to reach here. And there it is. Or rather its replica is.’

  A recent copy of Michelangelo’s David looked down on them proudly from its great height. There was nobody left in the square. Behind the Neptune Fountain other statues kept a night watch over the Piazza.

  Powerscourt held Lady Lucy very tight.

  ‘Please may I kiss you just here?’ he asked very quietly. ‘It’s always appealed to me. It’s the spot where they burnt Savonarola at the stake.’

  ‘Francis, you are quite incorrigible. I despair of you, I really do.’

  Lady Lucy raised her face and the moon came out behind Brunelleschi’s dome.

  Powerscourt had an enjoyable but fruitless visit to the National Gallery. The Claudes and the Poussins had been elegant, they had been charming, they had been enigmatic. But although he had seen the shapes of most of the buildings at Blackwater in their canvases, an Aeneas at Delos here, a Landscape with the marriage of Isaac and Rebeccah there, he was no further forward. Maybe I’ll have to read the whole of the bloody Aeneid, he said to himself as he returned to Markham Square.

  He found Lady Lucy, weeping in the drawing room as though her heart would break.

  ‘Lucy, Lucy, my love.’ He took her in his arms and held her tight. ‘What’s the matter, my love? Are the children all right? They’re not ill, are they?’

  Lady Lucy shook her head through her tears. ‘They’re fine, Francis. They’re absolutely fine.’ She wept on.

  ‘Has somebody died, Lucy? Someone in your family?’

  ‘No, Francis, it’s not that.’

  Powerscourt waited for the tears to cease. He caressed her hair and whispered into her ear that he loved her very much.

  She began to calm down. She dried her eyes and sat down on the sofa, tearstained eyes and cheeks gazing up at Powerscourt.

  ‘It’s just that we’re so lucky, Francis. We’ve got money, we’ve got nice houses, we’ve got lovely healthy children.’

  Powerscourt held her hand. He waited. Lady Lucy tried to straighten her hair.

  ‘It’s this family, Francis. They’re having such a terrible time. Sorry, I’m not making myself very clear.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. Powerscourt waited.

  ‘You know our church organizes visits to the poor in Fulham and Hammersmith, just a couple of miles away from here?’

  Powerscourt nodded.

  ‘You know there are all these terrible books nowadays about the condition of the poor and the labouring classes, Francis. Well, I have tried to read them. My mind goes blank with all those statistics, those huge numbers rolling out across the pages. I keep telling myself I should finish them but I can’t. But I have been going to see one particular family, Francis. I do what I can for them, clothes, food, money.’

  Lady Lucy stopped as if her mind had left Chelsea a
nd gone back to some tenement in Fulham.

  ‘They’re called Farrell, Francis. They have five children. The last one died in childbirth. Now the baby is ill, so very ill they think he is going to die too. He’s got this terrible fever, little Peter, he’s so small and so hot all the time, they can’t get him cool at all.’

  ‘Where do they live, Lucy?’ asked Powerscourt quietly.

  ‘Their flat is fine, Francis. It’s at World’s End in one of those blocks the charities have put up to house the respectable poor so they don’t have to live in squalor. The other children are thin, terribly thin. I don’t think the husband earns very much money. But think how dreadful it would be if little Peter died. It would break the mother’s heart.’

  Powerscourt knew she was thinking of Robert and Thomas and little Olivia, Robert at school, the two younger ones having their afternoon rest upstairs.

  ‘You must go again tomorrow, Lucy, and bring them money for the doctor,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I must,’ Lady Lucy replied, more cheertul now at the prospect of useful activity. ‘I shall go tomorrow. You don’t mind, Francis, do you?’

  ‘Mind?’ said her husband gently. ‘The only thing I would mind, Lucy, after all you’ve told me, is if you didn’t go tomorrow.’

  Part Two

  Ordeal by Fire

  12

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was tossing in his bed in Markham Square. Beside him Lady Lucy slept peacefully, one arm thrown lightly across her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt was in Blackwater again, inside the little temple by the lake, the Pantheon. The light was fading fast. Suddenly he heard the iron gates shut with a terrible clang. Outside them the two great wooden doors closed as well. Powerscourt did not have the keys. The only light came from the top of the cupola. He was looking at the statues who were now his companions, Hercules and Diana, Isis and Ceres.

  Then the whole temple began to fall, with ever-increasing speed. It fell as though there was a special shaft to carry it down to the hidden bowels of the earth. Procul, o procul este, profani. He remembered the inscription on the Temple of Flora, the Sibyl’s warning to the unsanctified in the Aeneid to keep clear of the entrance to the underworld. The temple was still shooting down, the flicker of light now reduced to a pinprick far far above.

  As suddenly as it had fallen, the temple stopped. The iron gates swung open. The wooden doors followed. A ghostly light shone through the dead trees and the withered bushes that made up the new landscape. Wisps of fog floated by in the gloom. I’m in the underworld, Powerscourt said to himself. Soon I shall meet the boatman Charon, his eyes alive with flame, who ferries the bodies across the river of the dead. Here in the shadows I shall meet pallid disease, dejected age, fear, the terrible spectres Death and Decline, War and Lunatic Discord with the bloodstained ribbons in her snaky hair.

  There was a loud and persistent knocking. Powerscourt wondered if the bodies of the unburied, doomed for all eternity to wait on the wrong side of Charon’s river, were beating on the side of his boat. The knocking grew louder. Powerscourt now felt sure that the noise was not caused by the unburied, but was a message from one of the other monsters of the underworld, the flaming Chimaera with her terrifying hiss, Briareus with a hundred arms.

  Lady Lucy was shaking him violently on the shoulder.

  ‘Francis, Francis darling, you’re not dead, are you?’

  ‘I’m not dead, Lucy. I was in a dream. I was in the underworld.’

  ‘Well, you’re not in the underworld now, Francis. There’s somebody knocking at the front door. They’ve been at it for about five minutes while you were down below.’

  ‘What time is it?’ whispered Powerscourt, fastening his dressing gown and looking in vain for his slippers.

  ‘It’s a quarter to six. Can’t you get a move on?’

  Powerscourt fled down two flights of stairs to his front door. As he opened it he found himself looking at the broad back of an officer of the Metropolitan Police.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, sir?’ The back turned round. ‘I have a message for you from the Commissioner’s office, sir.’

  ‘Come inside, man, come inside.’ Powerscourt struggled with a lamp in his hall. He ripped open the white envelope.

  ‘Dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘there are reports coming in of a terrible fire at Blackwater. We have no more information at this point. I know the Commissioner would have wanted you to be informed as soon as possible. Arthur Stone, Assistant to the Commissioner.’

  ‘My God. Oh, my God,’ Powerscourt said very quietly. ‘This is terrible news. May I ask you to take a short message back to the Commissioner for me, young man? I won’t keep you a moment.’

  ‘What is the matter, Francis? Good morning, Constable.’ Lady Lucy appeared unperturbed by her early morning visitor. From the floors above came the noises of younger Powerscourts greeting the new day a little earlier than usual.

  ‘There’s been a fire at Blackwater, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The Commissioner wanted to let me know.’ He was writing furiously. He shoved his note into a dark brown envelope and handed it to the constable. ‘Could you make sure that the Commissioner receives this as soon as possible? Thank you so much.’

  The constable made his apologies once again and departed into the cold morning air, fog drifting among the trees in the square.

  ‘Dear Commissioner,’ Powerscourt had written, ‘thank you so much for the news about the fire at Blackwater. I am more apprehensive than I can say. Pray God there has been no loss of life. Could you please arrange for the foremost fire investigator in London and the Home Counties to be sent to Blackwater without delay? Yours in haste, Powerscourt.’

  ‘Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, running up his stairs to get dressed, ‘I must get to Blackwater immediately. I dread to think what I will find when I get there. Could you follow me a little later on? I hope old Miss Harrison is still alive. It might be a good time to talk to her.’

  Paddington station had been crowded, sacks of mail being unloaded down the platforms, early morning arrivals hastening to their place of work. Sitting in a corner seat in his train to Wallingford, Powerscourt was exceedingly angry. Not with the twist of fate that had led to the blaze at Blackwater, not with the unusually early start to his day. He was angry with himself.

  Only last week, he reminded himself, I was thinking of warning the remaining Harrisons that their lives might be in danger, that they should consider removing themselves to a place of greater safety. I didn’t do it. Now one or two or three of them may be dead. And I could have stopped it. Pray to God there are no more funerals.

  The Thames could be seen now out of his window, neat cottages lining its sides, early morning river traffic toiling upstream. He thought of his last encounter with the Commissioner in his great office with the maps of London.

  ‘Officially, Lord Powerscourt, our inquiries into the death of Old Mr Harrison are proceeding. Proceeding quietly but methodically, I should say, if asked. In fact, we have almost closed the case down. Manpower is limited. We know that you are still at work. Do you think, Lord Powerscourt, that we have heard the end of this affair?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do not,’ had been Powerscourt’s reply. He told the Commissioner of his fears, of the mysterious death at sea, of the sense of foreboding he had about the whole case.

  ‘Rest assured, Lord Powerscourt,’ had been the Commissioner’s final words, ‘that we shall keep our eyes and ears open for you. Any assistance you require, all you have to do is to ask.’

  Samuel Parker was waiting at the station with a small carriage and a couple of horses. To his intense irritation Powerscourt found himself wondering what letter of the alphabet started their names. H for Hephaistos, god of fire perhaps? Better not to ask.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt,’ said Parker, ‘I wasn’t expecting you here this morning. I thought Mr Charles was to be on the train. Did you see him at all on your journey?’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt, shaking him gr
avely by the hand. ‘I did not see Mr Charles Harrison on that train at all. It was almost empty. Would you have time to take me back to the house before the next one arrives?’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said Parker, showing Powerscourt into the little carriage. Streams of travellers were waiting on the opposite platform to catch the next express to London. A distant roar announced the arrival of another train, smoke drifting back across the station.

  ‘What news, Mr Parker?’ said Powerscourt. ‘I heard there had been a fire but no more than that. What can you tell me?’

  ‘Well, sir, it’s all very confusing. There’s firemen all over the place, and policemen, and doctors too. Then there’s all kinds of locals with nothing better to do who have come to stare at the ruins. I don’t as yet know exactly what happened, sir.’

  ‘Ruins, Mr Parker, did you say ruins? Is Blackwater burnt down completely?’

  ‘No, it’s not, not completely, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead, ‘but it looks as if over half of it is. Those firemen won’t let anybody into the house at all.’

  ‘Was anybody injured?’

  ‘We don’t know that either, sir.’ Parker shook his head. ‘Them firemen won’t say. Old Miss Harrison, now, she’s all right. Jones the butler carried her out of the ruins and she’s resting in our little cottage. She’s in a terrible state. She seems able to speak in German and nothing else. Mabel’s doing her best. The doctor is with her now.’

  ‘Was there anybody else there?’ Powerscourt was desperate for news of the living and the dead. ‘Anybody who didn’t get out?’

  ‘Well, my lord . . .’ Parker had turned the little carriage into the main drive up to the house. All around were the signs of England in the spring, the green fields, the trees in bloom, the ever-present sound of the birds. Then Powerscourt saw the sad remains of Blackwater House. Over half of the front of the house was blackened. Thin wisps of smoke could still be seen rising from the upper floors. Firemen on great ladders were plying their hosepipes through the ruined windows.