Death and the Jubilee lfp-2 Page 4

  ‘Cardinal Wolsey, wasn’t it?’ panted Richard. ‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey in fifteen hundred and something or other?’

  ‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey,’ said Sophie, moving effortlessly into teacher and suffragist mode in a single sentence. ‘Then he had to give it to Henry the Eighth. I expect he maltreated some of his wives down here. What right did he have to cut their heads off just because they wouldn’t give him another male to maltreat another generation of women? It’s dreadful. Just because men have the power they think they can abuse women as though they were cats or dogs or something like that.’

  Richard groaned inwardly. He hadn’t made the connection between Hampton Court and the suffragist cause when he proposed this expedition. Now he suspected this tirade could go on all afternoon.

  ‘Really, it’s all so unfair,’ said Sophie, looking, to the young man, impossibly attractive as her eyes flashed with indignation. ‘I have to go to a meeting of the Women’s Franchise League this evening. I shall remind everybody of how we are surrounded, even in our history, especially in our history, by the great injustices done to women by men. There is talk of another petition for the suffrage. This time we shall get more signatories than ever before.’

  Richard stared at her hopelessly, helplessly. If she felt like that about men, he wondered to himself for the hundredth time, how could she ever engage her emotions with one? Was conventional love incompatible with her views? Was his mother right all along?

  ‘Come along, Sophie, you can keep talking as we go along. What do you say to one of those pies on Eel Pie Island?’

  In a gesture that lit up his heart like a sudden flash of lightning, she squeezed his arm briefly and ran ahead. ‘I’d love one of those pies, Richard. Can’t catch me!’

  Every day the reluctant army made its way across London Bridge. Every day the slaves of Money and the Market went to their temple in the City by steam railway, on foot, by bus, by underground railway, by horse and carriage.

  On Monday the rumour might be that there had been further finds of gold in the Rand. On Wednesday it might be that there was a great loan to be floated for a railway to link the remotest parts of Russia. On Friday it might be the flotation of another great manufacturing interest, the shares guaranteed to reach levels well above par in a day or so for those wise or foolish enough to buy them well in advance.

  But of the identity of the corpse floating in the river there was no information. The popular papers printed stories on the body until even their over-fertile imaginations ran out. The procession of bounty hunters continued to make their way to the police offices, protesting their certainty of the corpse’s identity and barely concealing their greed for the gold of the insurance companies.

  Powerscourt, as requested by the Commissioner, had put the word about Mayfair and Belgravia. Lady Lucy, a veteran of such missions now, had invented a story of an aunt of hers in the Highlands who had disappeared one winter day and not been found for a month, when her corpse was found floating in a swollen stream, grossly disfigured. She worked conversations round to this story all across her considerable acquaintance, but she caught nothing. Powerscourt’s sisters, pressed reluctantly into service, did their best but failed.

  Only William Burke, Powerscourt’s financier brother- in-law, held out a faint glimmer of hope.

  ‘I’ve known men disappear for quite a long time – the pressure of debt, the fear of being hammered on the Exchange,’ he had said thoughtfully to Powerscourt in his club, savouring a glass of their finest claret. ‘I’ve known even more who should have disappeared and saved their fortunes while they could. But it seems a bit extreme to arrange to have your head cut off as well, unless there was some question of inheritance.’

  Sometimes the police were hopeful. Occasionally they would find what they felt were genuine cases of lost or disappeared persons. Constables would be despatched to houses in Muswell Hill or Mortlake, Camden Town or Catford, to make inquiries. Always the disappearance seemed to be genuine, but the height or the age was wrong. The body itself remained in splendid isolation in the refrigerated mortuary of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, watched over by a couple of porters and a flock of unruly medical students.

  And then, on a blustery Monday evening in April, at ten o’clock at night, there was an imperious knock on the door of the Powerscourts’ house in Markham Square. Lady Lucy was deep in Jude the Obscure. Powerscourt had fallen asleep by the fire, dreaming of cricket matches and late cuts in the summer months ahead.

  ‘Mr William Burke, my lord, my lady,’ said the footman.

  A rather weary financier strode into the room and fell gratefully into an armchair by the fire.

  ‘I have just returned from the Continent. I’m on my way home to see Mary and the children, if any of them are still awake.’

  ‘Some tea? A glass of wine? Maybe even some lemonade to quench your thirst?’ Lady Lucy was quick to offer comfort to the traveller.

  ‘What a capital suggestion that lemonade is, Lady Lucy. Those trains are very dusty. Lemonade would be just the thing.’

  ‘Francis, you remember the corpse in the river, the body by London Bridge? Well, I think I may have some news but I am not sure. I have been to Germany on business, to Berlin, that frightful city, so very Prussian,’ Burke shook his head, ‘and to Frankfurt and to one or two other places. The only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of the corpse – Oh, thank you so very much.’

  Burke paused to drink deeply of his lemonade.

  ’That is uncommon good for a weary traveller,’ he said to Lady Lucy with a smile. ‘Maybe we could make something of it in the way of business. Where was I?’ He looked round suddenly as if he wasn’t sure if he was in Frankfurt or Chelsea.

  ‘Ah yes, the only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of Francis’ body was Old Mr Harrison of Harrison’s Bank. I think he was christened Carl-Heinz but he came to be known over here as Carl and he was certainly the right age.’

  ‘How old would you say he was, William?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Probably over eighty. Maybe well into his eighties. I made discreet inquiries in the City – you cannot imagine what impact it could have on a private bank’s standing if its founder had been found floating in the Thames without his head – and the word came back that he was in Germany, either Frankfurt or Berlin.

  ‘Now . . .’ He paused to smile again at Lady Lucy, thinking that five years of marriage had made her even prettier than when he had first met her. ‘. . . it might seem odd for a man of that age to go off to Germany at this time of year – in a few months it would be different – but he was always a tough and resourceful old bird. However,’ Burke leaned forward and looked Lady Lucy full in the eye, ‘I made more discreet inquiries when I was in Germany. I said I’d heard he was in town, would he care for lunch or dinner, that sort of message. But everywhere the answer was the same. Carl Harrison was not in Frankfurt. Carl Harrison was not in Berlin. Carl Harrison was not and had not been in Hamburg. I must have been misinformed. So.’ He rose and clicked his heels together in the German fashion and bowed. ‘No Old Harrison in Germany. No Old Harrison in London. But why should they say he was in Berlin when he wasn’t? Over to you, Francis.’

  Powerscourt was looking at his fingertips, rubbing them slowly together. But it was Lady Lucy who spoke.

  ‘Could he not have gone somewhere else, William? The Italian Lakes, or somewhere on the Rhine, perhaps. It would be so dreadful if this corpse was that poor old man.’

  ‘I don’t think he was poor.’ Burke laughed cheerfully, a man reputed to be able to value the top men in the City to the nearest ten thousand pounds. ‘Certainly not poor.’

  ‘No matter how rich you are you shouldn’t have to end up like that. If it was Old Mr Harrison,’ said Lady Lucy, defending the rights of the dead.

  ‘I’m not sure how to proceed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s unlikely that further inquiries in the City will make any progress. Maybe some
body should scout around their house in the country – Oxfordshire, did you say it was, William?’

  ‘It is,’ said Burke, resuming the mantle of business. ‘But please be very careful, very discreet. The Harrisons may know that I was behind the inquiries made in Lombard Street. Word will surely reach them that I made further inquiries in Germany. We need to be very careful indeed.

  ’And I must be off home. Thank you so much for the lemonade. You won’t forget that you are coming to me for the weekend in the country, to be there at the installation of my new vicar? I never realized that when I bought the house and the land I bought an incumbency as well!’ William Burke laughed in the joy of his own prosperity. ‘You have to read a lesson, Francis, you will recall. And I’ve got the Bishop coming as well. Publish it not in the streets of Gath, as the parsons say,’ Burke smiled at his hosts, ‘but I saved his whole diocese from bankruptcy three years ago. But that’s another story.’

  With that William Burke, financier and man of property, departed into the night. ‘Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘come back, come back.’

  Powerscourt had disappeared into his own thoughts. Lady Lucy was used to it by now. She smiled at her husband as he stared into the dying fire.

  ‘Sorry, Lucy. I was only wondering what to do. I think we need somebody to work their way in towards the Harrison house, the village, the neighbours, the postman, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I know who you are going to send.’ Lady Lucy leaned against his shoulder and put her arm round his waist. ‘You’re going to send Johnny Fitzgerald, aren’t you? Well, you just tell him to be careful. That other time he was nearly killed because of you, and that was in the depths of Northamptonshire. I don’t see why Oxfordshire should be any safer for him.’

  Lady Lucy remembered the emaciated best man at their wedding, policemen guarding the doors, a wounded Fitzgerald strapped up like a mummy, almost fainting as he stood by the altar.

  Powerscourt smiled at his wife, remembering Johnny Fitzgerald’s speech as best man at their wedding. ‘We’ll take care, Lucy. Very great care.’

  4

  ‘Clarendon Park is a nabob’s seat, East India Company money,’ William Burke said to Powerscourt, pointing to his Palladian mansion not far from Marlow. They were waiting for their families as the women made last-minute adjustments to hats and children before the short walk to the small church for the installation of the new vicar. ‘It was built by a fellow called Francis Hodge who made a fortune in India and came home to retire in peace by the Thames. But things didn’t quite work out the way he thought.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ asked Powerscourt, slightly nervous, as ever, at the prospect of having to read the lesson.

  ‘The poor man – well, he was fairly poor by the end – got impeached for greed and corruption in the East, rather like Warren Hastings. There were huge lawyers’ bills. Hodge had to go up to Westminster for months on end to answer questions from sanctimonious MPs and watch the value of his shares in the East India Company falling like a stone. At one point, I believe, they dropped fifty thousand in a week.’

  Powerscourt could see the appeal of such a house, its fortunes so closely linked to the City of London.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that some of the uncertainty might rub off on to your own affairs, William? Daily appearances before some Commons committee? Radical lawyer MPs quizzing you about your affairs?’

  ‘No,’ said William Burke emphatically. He laughed.

  As they sat in the little church, pews filled with tenants and family, Powerscourt was wondering about his sisters. They loved each other dearly, of course, but there was always an element of competition between them. Eleanor, the youngest, had certainly married the most handsome husband, but he had very little money. Mary, the middle sister, had made a very prudent marriage to William Burke. Rosalind, the eldest, seemed to have won the marriage stakes by her alliance with Lord Pembridge, an aristocrat with a great deal of money and fine houses in St James’s Square and in Hampshire. But over the weekend he had noticed a certain smugness, an air of quiet but unmistakable triumph about Mary. It showed in the way she almost patronized her elder sister, showing off the glories of her new house, wondering aloud about how many servants and gardeners they would need to employ. And Rosalind, for once, looked as though she felt her position as the most successful of the sisters, the Queen Bee of her own little hive, was under threat.

  As he rose to read his lesson Powerscourt cast a careful glance at his family to make sure the children were behaving.

  ‘The First Lesson,’ he began in his clear tenor voice, ‘is taken from the twenty-first Chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew.

  ‘“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.”’

  The new vicar, a red-headed man in his middle thirties, was looking serious. The Bishop, splendid in his purple robes, looked as if he was falling sleep. Powerscourt wondered, for the sixth or seventh time since he had entered the church, how the Bishop could have almost brought his diocese to bankruptcy. Had he fallen asleep in those apparently tedious meetings of the diocesan finance sub-committees? Had he invested the church collections unwisely on the Exchange?

  ‘“And he said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”’

  There was a very faint creak as the door opened and a late arrival slipped quietly into a pew at the back and opened his prayer book. The newcomer winked at Powerscourt. It was Johnny Fitzgerald.

  ‘“And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple: and he healed them.”

  ‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’

  Powerscourt had grown up with Lord Johnny Fitzgerald in Ireland. They had served together in Army Intelligence in India. On a number of occasions they had saved each other’s lives. Johnny had been Powerscourt’s best man at both his weddings.

  ‘I have come to make my report, Francis.’ Fitzgerald gave a mock salute to his former superior officer as they walked through William Burke’s woods towards the Thames below. ‘You remember you said I had to approach the matter very carefully and very slowly? Well, I did, I just hope I didn’t exceed my powers at the end.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting you might have disobeyed orders, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

  ‘I was thinking of it more like Nelson with his blind eye. Copenhagen, was it, or the Nile? A temporary lapse for the greater good of the cause.’

  ‘I’m sure I should hear your report before passing any judgement, Johnny.’

  ‘Right,’ Fitzgerald bent down and picked up a stout branch to serve as a walking stick. ‘My story begins in Wallingford, the King’s Arms in Wallingford to be precise. I booked myself in there for a couple of days. Fine beer they have there, Francis, very fine beer with a fruity sort of taste to it. My story was that I left England some years before to be a banker in Boston in America.’

  ‘I don’t think bankers drink a lot of the local beer, Johnny, even if it is fruity. They’re sober, respectable sort of people,’ said Powerscourt, kicking a couple of pine cones out of their path.

  ‘American bankers are very different from English ones. They’re more open, more hospitable sort of characters. Anyway, I said I had been to London on banking business and then to Germany. I said I was looking for Old Mr Harrison who had taught me all I knew about banking twenty years ago when they had their offices in Bishopsgate. I checked out their old address with William, you see.’

  ‘And what did the regulars at the King’s Arms have to say about the old gentleman?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Not a lot, most of them. The House of Harrison is a couple of miles away, at least, quite close to the river. Very respectable family, very hard-working, very good people to work for. They said I might get more news of him at the Blackwater Arms, a sort of family pub, like Mr Burke�
��s family church, on the edge of the estate. It makes much more sense to have a pub rather than a church, don’t you think, Francis?’

  ‘I’m sure – no, I’m certain,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that you’re better qualified to be a landlord than a vicar, Johnny.’

  ‘They all said,’ Fitzgerald went on, ‘the natives in those parts, that Old Mr Harrison wasn’t at home, that he hadn’t been seen for a while. I was just about to go to bed when a very wizened old man called me into a corner. He fished about in his pockets and then he pulled out a piece of newspaper. It was an account of the discovery of the headless man by London Bridge. “See you here, young man,” he croaked at me, waving his piece of paper, “see you here. This dead body, floating in the Thames down there in London, that be Old Mr Harrison. Mark my words. It’s Old Mr Harrison.” Then he folded the paper as if it was a ten pound note and returned it to his pocket. “What on earth makes you think that, sir?” I said to the old scarecrow. “Jeremiah Cokestone sees things. Jeremiah Cokestone hears things. In the night or at first light before the sun has risen.” He spoke as if he was the Delphic oracle itself, I tell you. Then he downed his beer, almost a full glass, Francis, in a single pull, and he shuffled off into the night.’

  They had reached the edge of the river now. On the far side a few boats were setting out for a Sunday trip along the Thames. Behind them a stiff breeze was rustling through the trees.

  ‘The next day,’ Johnny Fitzgerald tried skimming a couple of stones across the water, ‘I went to see the vicar. And there I had one of the most uplifting experiences of my life. I shall always remember it.’

  ‘You were converted.’ Powerscourt looked suitably grave. ‘You saw the light. You repented of the error of your ways.’

  ‘I did not. But the vicar’s wife gave me some of her elderberry wine. ’95 she said it was, one of her better years. God knows what the bad years must taste like, Francis.’ Fitzgerald grimaced at the memory. ‘I cannot describe the taste. It was horrible, so sweet it made you feel sick. Christ.’