Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 17

  The pen suddenly fell on to the table. Bertrand de Rothschild had lost control. It rolled unevenly across the surface and dropped to the floor.

  ‘Have you found any Goldschmidts, Lord Powerscourt?’

  The old man’s face was bright, the eyes keen. He’s like a bloodhound on the scent, Powerscourt said to himself, fascinated by the terrible intensity in de Rothschild’s face.

  ‘Have you found any Goldschmidts up there in Blackwater, hiding in the temples perhaps, lurking in the lake with the river gods?’ He laughed an old man’s laugh. ‘Have the ghosts of Frankfurt come to Oxfordshire, the past replayed once more?’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘You should have been an investigator, sir. You would have been a very good one.’

  ‘I suppose I am an investigator,’ the old man replied, bending in obvious pain to pick up his golden pen once more, ‘except I investigate the past and you investigate the present. I imagine the present is more dangerous than the past.’

  ‘Mr de Rothschild, I cannot thank you enough for your information,’ said Powerscourt, looking at his watch and thinking of his train. ‘I am most grateful.’

  ‘You have not answered my question, young man. Have you found any Goldschmidts up there in Blackwater?’

  He was leaning forward intently, the pen spinning in his fingers again, light dancing off the gold.

  ‘I do not know, sir, I do not know.’ Powerscourt looked around for his gloves.

  ‘I think that means that you have found some link,’ said de Rothschild, his eyes bright with the joy of the hunt. ‘Why else would you be here? But I can see that you do not want to tell me. I do not blame you for that. Sometimes the past may be more dangerous than the present, is that not so? Have no fear, I shall tell no one of our conversation here this morning. But it is interesting, very interesting. For a historian, you understand.’

  The old man rose from his desk to escort Powerscourt to his front door. Another series of cricket paintings lined the passage to the entrance hall.

  ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, do you have a favourite stroke? At cricket, I mean.’

  ‘I do,’ said Powerscourt, relieved that the conversation had returned to cricket. ‘I have always had a great weakness for the late cut.’

  ‘The late cut, Lord Powerscourt!’ De Rothschild was waving an imaginary cricket bat in his hands. ‘Such a very risky shot, I believe. If your eye is not absolutely right, if your judgement is ever so slightly at fault, then it’s the end of your innings, am I not right?’

  ‘You are absolutely right, Mr de Rothschild.’

  ‘And are you often out playing this shot, this late cut of yours?’

  ‘No, I am not,’ said Powerscourt happily, walking out into the cold morning, ‘I have not been out cutting for years.’

  ‘Oh, very good, Lord Powerscourt, very good. I like that. I do like that.’

  The old man’s cackling laughter followed him down the street.

  14

  The message had arrived by a strange and roundabout route. It had been sent, addressed to Powerscourt, care of William Burke in person at his bank. It came from the British Embassy in Berlin, despatched the day before.

  ’Germanii ad lapides nigros in Hibernia arma et pecuniam mittent. Maius XVII-XX. Iohannis.’ The Germans are going to send weapons and money to the black stones in Ireland, Powerscourt translated it from the Latin for the tenth time as he sat in his solitary railway carriage on the way to Blackwater, between 17th and 20th May. Johnny. Nothing more. A week away, Powerscourt reminded himself. I’ve got a week to get to Ireland.

  Inspector Wilson was waiting for him five minutes before the appointed hour of eleven o’clock on the portico of Blackwater House.

  ‘Good morning, my lord. Nasty-looking day we’ve got here.’

  Powerscourt wondered briefly if the entire population of the islands spent their time thinking and talking about the weather. The sky was overcast, dark clouds threatening to pour yet more water into the upper storeys of the house behind them.

  ‘Perhaps you could just get the details of his movements from Mr Charles Harrison in the library, Inspector. I want to have a quick word with the butler about the events of the last two days.’

  Or the last twenty years, he said to himself, smiling benevolently at the Inspector.

  ‘Very good, sir. The fire people are crawling about the place again,’ Inspector Wilson reported. ‘That Mr Hardy, sir, I’ve never seen such a cheerful soul. Singing away to himself he was, first thing this morning, crawling in and out of the floorboards. Some song about keys, my lord.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s in love, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘He’s certainly in love with fires, I can tell you that,’ replied the Inspector. ‘If he weren’t official, in a manner of speaking, I should say he was a pyromaniac.’

  Inspector Wilson disappeared into the rubble and proceeded towards the undamaged library. Powerscourt walked slowly to the servants’ entrance, contemplating his interview with Jones the butler.

  He found him in a large room in the servants’ quarters, polishing the silver. There was an enormous range in one corner, with copper pans hanging in orderly ranks below. There was a huge sink with a long draining board, cups and plates drying in regular rows. A portrait of Queen Victoria, listing slightly on its hook, hung above the fireplace, the monarch gazing strictly down on her subjects in the servants’ hall. There were a couple of armchairs behind the table with the candlesticks.

  ‘You must be Mr Jones, the butler here,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully.

  ‘That I am, sir. You must be Lord Powerscourt.’ A greyish hand stained with silver polish was extended.

  ‘And are you also Mr Goldschmidt, perhaps I should say, Herr Goldschmidt, formerly of Frankfurt and a member of the bank of Goldschmidt and Hartmann in that city?’

  Ever since he left London Powerscourt had been wondering when to play his Ace of Trumps. Play it too soon and he would lose the hand. Play it too late and all advantage might be lost. As he shook the butler’s hand he had had no idea of when to drop his bombshell. But he dropped it.

  There was a long pause. Jones went on polishing his candlesticks. Powerscourt could see fantastic reflections of the room, of Queen Victoria, of himself strung out to an impossible length like an El Greco portrait.

  Jones looked up at him. He was quite a short man, his hair turning grey, clean-shaven. He was almost skeletally thin. He picked up the last candlestick from the kitchen table. ‘Perhaps I could just finish this one, my lord. I always believe in doing the job properly.’

  What job? Powerscourt wondered desperately. The job of revenge, after a whole generation had passed by? The cloth squeaked from time to time as he worked it over the surface. Jones’s feet, Powerscourt noticed, were shuffling nervously from side to side, scraping on the floor.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better come this way, my lord.’ The last of the candlesticks was gleaming now, standing in a neat line with its fellows, waiting for candles, waiting for the light.

  Jones led the way down a narrow passageway. Shelves lined with brushes and pans, dusters and cloths and blacking polish lined the walls. At the end of the passage they turned left. A few feet in front of them was a door, once painted black, now fading into the anonymous grey of its surroundings.

  ‘Please come in, Lord Powerscourt.’

  For a single frightening second Powerscourt wondered if Jones the butler had a gun in here, if his last moment on earth had come in the basement of Blackwater House. Then he saw the room. It was the most astonishing room he had ever seen. Directly in front of him were two windows whose tops were level with the lawn. To his left was a wall covered entirely with reproductions of the life of Christ, from the Annunciation through the feeding of the five thousand to the last supper and the agony in the garden. Most of them were cheap things but Powerscourt thought he recognized a couple of Raphael prints. Below them was a simple bed. It looked like a monk’s bed, hard and unyielding. Fra Angel
ico comes to Blackwater, he said to himself, his mind taken over by the religious images.

  But the wall opposite was the most extraordinary of all. In the centre was a huge cross, made up of gold coins set into an iron framework. As he looked at it, Powerscourt could see that the coins must have been melted ever so slightly and pressed together with a heavy object in a blacksmith’s forge. The cross had a rough, unpolished air that made it more dramatic. On either side of the cross the wall was covered with shells. Identical shells. Shells that had marked out a route march across a continent, shells that had guided pilgrims to Spain for centuries to the sacred shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela. They were the Atlantic starshell, the signposts on the great trail that led from the church of St Jacques in Paris or Ste Marie Madeleine in Burgundy or the cathedral of Notre Dame at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne, across the high pass of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, and on across the last two hundred and fifty miles on the Camino de Santiago till the pilgrims stood in wonder and relief before the Portal de la Gloria. They were signposts on the long journey to the body of St James the Apostle, brought with its severed head in a stone boat from Palestine to the north coast of Spain in the fourth century, then entombed in glory in the cathedral at Santiago. There must have been hundreds of starshells on the walls. Powerscourt knew the story. As a child he had been fascinated by the invocation to St James that gave the Spaniards a desperate victory in the last battle against the Moors a thousand years before, the battle that decided that the cross and not the crescent should rule over Western Europe.

  There were no chairs in the room. Jones the butler sat quietly on the edge of his bed.

  ‘He had no head either, had he, St James the Apostle,’ said Powerscourt. ‘When they sent him to Spain the severed head was carried in the boat.’

  ‘That’s what the legend says, my lord.’

  ‘Old Mr Harrison had a severed head too, didn’t he,’ said Powerscourt brutally. ‘Only he didn’t leave in a stone boat, he was found floating by a steel one, right by London Bridge.’

  Jones the butler rose from his bed and knelt before the wall with the shells and the gleaming golden crucifix. He made the sign of the cross. He prayed for a long time. Powerscourt waited, saying nothing. Outside another carriage drew up at the portico of Blackwater House. Powerscourt wondered if St James the Apostle had left Santiago on another journey, called to the salvation of another of his faithful. At last Jones began to speak. He rose slowly to his feet and went back to sit on the bed.

  ‘I must tell you my story, Lord Powerscourt. I am Jones the butler here. I was once Immanuel Goldschmidt of the city of Frankfurt. I am also the pilgrim and the servant of these shells and of what they mean. I have never told my story before.’

  15

  Powerscourt sat on the floor at the end of the bed, facing Jones the butler. Overhead he could hear footsteps walking towards the library. Jones kept his eyes fixed on the cross and the shells as he began to speak.

  ‘Twenty years ago, perhaps it was twenty-five, I was Immanuel Goldschmidt. I worked for my father’s firm in the city of Frankfurt. We were bankers, my lord, like the Harrisons.’

  Powerscourt was looking at the flagstones on the floor, polished over and over to a smooth finish. He wondered if it was a penance.

  ‘There was a feud between the two banks, my lord. Terrible things were done, my lord, so terrible that I can hardly bear to remember them.’

  Jones stared on at the wall, looking for a message in the shells.

  ‘The feud was about winning a certain account. Whoever won that account would become rich, rich with all the vain trappings of this world. Certain people bore false witness against one of the Harrisons. I, my lord, was one of those that bore false witness, telling the holders of this account that the Harrisons were embezzlers, that they would cheat the account holders out of all their money. Mr Charles Harrison seemed to have lost the account. He killed himself. He jumped off the highest building in the city.’

  Dead before he even reached the hospital, Powerscourt remembered, his back growing stiff against the stone wall.

  ‘Then the truth came out,’ Jones went on, ‘the Goldschmidts were disgraced, ruined. He shall cast down the mighty from their seats and the rich he hath sent empty away. They that were powerful shall be cast down, and the humble exalted.’

  ‘So what did you do? Did you come to England? To work for your old enemies?’

  Powerscourt sounded incredulous. Jones the butler carried on as if there had been no interruption.

  ‘I knew I had done wrong. I had borne false witness against Mr Harrison. Then he committed suicide. It was as if I had killed him myself.’

  Perhaps you waited, thought Powerscourt. Perhaps you waited twenty-five years and then killed some more members of his family, the family that had ruined yours. He looked at Jones’s hands. There was no blood on them, only the greyish discoloration of the silver polish, the blue veins standing out on the back.

  ‘I fled from the city where I had done wrong. I had a little money. I carried it in a leather belt.’ Jones looked up at Powerscourt and pointed at the cross on the wall. ‘The belt is nailed to the framework of the cross. Underneath the gold coins.’

  Powerscourt held his gaze. The face told him nothing.

  ‘I went west. I don’t know why. By the time I reached Lyons I was destitute. I had no money. I had nowhere to sleep. I had nothing to eat. I would lay my head underneath the bushes in some city park or huddle at the back of the great railway sheds in the darkness. They were so big that nobody could have patrolled them all. I was having hallucinations I was so weak.’

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘I cannot remember much of those times, my lord,’ said Jones the butler. ‘I remember seeing high buildings, higher than you ever saw in this world, and myself falling from the top. It was a very long way down.’

  Jones paused again. He shifted uneasily on his bed, the springs creaking beneath him.

  ‘That was when I met Father Paul, my lord. He was a Dominican.’

  Jones stopped again, as if that explained everything.

  ‘He found me lying on one of the station platforms. It was the platform for through trains to Cologne, Hamburg and Bremen, my lord. That’s what Father Paul told me afterwards. He gave me food. He gave me shelter. He heard my story.’

  Jones made the sign of the cross again.

  ‘When I was well he told me I had to go on a pilgrimage to atone for my sins. I had to walk from Lyons to Santiago de Compostela, my lord. Father Paul said he would meet me at the other end. He said he would meet me by the west door of the cathedral in Santiago the day before the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That’s 15th August, my lord.’

  ‘So how long did it take you? To walk there, I mean?’ Powerscourt wondered, as he had wondered ever since the start of the man’s story, if Jones was telling the truth.

  ‘It took three months, my lord. Father Paul gave me a good pair of boots. He gave me a map with the names of the Dominican abbeys on the way. Every time I stayed there I had to attend the services, even though I was not a member of his Church. He said I had to remember my sins and pray to whatever God I believed in.

  ‘Conques, my lord. The Dominicans had a beautiful abbey there. Moissac, the abbey was full there, some of us had to sleep in the stables. San Juan de Ortega in Spain, my lord, the abbot was completely blind but he could walk unaided from the refectory to the chapel and then back to his cell. He said the Lord was guiding him. Villafranca del Bierzo, my feet had been bleeding for some time by then. The Dominicans said I must not have any treatment until I reached Santiago.’

  ‘Did you get there in time? In time to meet Father Paul?’ Powerscourt was fascinated now.

  ‘I met him on the day we arranged, my lord. He had come in a boat from Bordeaux. Some of the pilgrims did that, my lord. They take you to a special place in the cathedral if you are a pilgrim. There must be a thousand candles lit before t
he high altar and there is a huge sphere, full of incense, that swings above your head. Then we attended the service for the Assumption.

  ‘Prospere procede, et regna. Assumpta est Maria in caelum; gaudet exercitus angelorum.’ Jones the butler’s hands were folded in prayer.

  ‘In splendour and in state, ride on in triumph,’ Powerscourt translated. ‘Mary has been taken up into heaven. The whole host of angels are rejoicing.’

  ‘Exactly so, my lord. The next day Father Paul baptised me into the Roman Catholic Church.’ Jones the butler crossed himself again. ‘I can still remember how cold the water was. They say it came from a spring at Padron. That’s where the boat was found. The boat with the body of St James the Apostle that had come all the way from Palestine.’

  With a severed head in its cargo, thought Powerscourt. The severed head of a saint, not a Harrison.

  The sun was breaking through the clouds now. Shafts of light fell on the gold coins of the cross, glowing in Jones’s basement cell.

  ‘He gave me my life’s work, Father Paul. He said I had to do penance for my sins. I was to find out the Harrisons and serve them all my days. You must love your enemies, he said. Only thus can you find God.’

  Powerscourt wondered if he had found God here at Blackwater, surrounded by the pagan temples by the lake. Perhaps he had.

  ‘Why did you come to England? Why did you not go back to Germany?’

  ‘Father Paul said I could not go back to Germany. Not ever. My homeland was to be denied me. I had to be an exile from own country. He said it was my fate to wander, like Ruth, my lord, amid the alien corn.’

  Far off the bells of Blackwater church were ringing the hour of twelve. It’s the Angelus, Powerscourt remembered.

  Jones the butler rose from his bed once more and knelt in front of his altar and his shells.

  He prayed.

  Forty miles away a young woman was drawing by the side of the Thames. Marie O’Dowd came from Dublin. She was a teacher. She had a good reason for being here in London, attending an interview for a position as a teacher in a Catholic school in Hammersmith.