Goodnight Sweet Prince Page 5

  ‘It is a pretty thought, Lady Lucy. I have to confess that I don’t know the answer.’

  Behind them was a great rolling of wheels. A large trolley was conveying a full-length portrait of some seventeenth-century gentleman through the gallery. He was a sombre figure, painted in black with a Bible in his hand and a small dog at his feet. Behind the trolley an anxious curator repeated instructions to the bearers to go more slowly, to mind the bumps in the floor.

  ‘Where are they taking that Dutch gentleman? Are they throwing him out, do you suppose?’ whispered Lady Lucy as the strange cortège passed within a few feet of them.

  ‘Maybe the Last Trump has sounded for him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘His maker, or rather his restorer, is probably making the call not for the last judgement, but for his paint to be restored. I fancy he is going to the workshops for cleaning, that sort of thing.’

  ‘It must be rather upsetting, if you’re a picture,’ said Lady Lucy, gazing at the retreating trolley as it rolled off towards the basement. ‘One minute you’re sitting happily on the wall, minding your own business, and then some horrid men come and take you away.’

  ‘It’s the same with people, don’t you think?’ replied Powerscourt. ‘One minute you’re sitting happily under the pictures on your wall at home, then Death comes with his trolley, and you’re on your way. Down to the basement with you.’

  ‘I don’t like that at all,’ said Lady Lucy, laughing. ‘Let me take you to some Turners.’ She steered Powerscourt away to a different part of the gallery. There were storms, shipwrecks, deaths at sea, blazing seconds of steam, sunsets, romantic ruins of ravaged Italian landscapes. Lady Lucy felt light-headed, dizzy, as she looked at them all.

  ‘But look . . .’ She planted Powerscourt on a bench looking out at The Fighting Temeraire. ‘Is this not the finest of them all?’

  At the far end of the room a party of students were rolling up their sketches and collecting their equipment. Two curators looked solemnly on, their faces bored or impassive. Outside the bells of St Martin in the Fields called the hour of twelve.

  ‘They say,’ said Powerscourt, stretching out his legs until they became a hazard for unwary passers-by, ‘that this is one of the most reproduced paintings in England. There are nearly as many Fighting Temeraires hanging on the walls of Britain as there are portraits of Queen Victoria.’

  ‘I know which one I would rather have,’ said Lady Lucy disloyally, checking that her hat had not got completely out of hand. ‘What do you think it means, Lord Francis?’

  ‘What did Turner mean? Or what does it mean to the spectator? I’ve always thought that paintings, like people’s faces, can have multiple meanings.’ He stole a quick glance at Lady Lucy’s face, mesmerized by the iridescent sunset, Turner’s golds and coppers gleaming over the Thames. ‘They say it has to do with the coming of the age of steam, don’t they? This is the valediction to sail, condemned to be pulled by that ugly black tug on its final voyage to the breaker’s yard. Farewell romance, hello smoke, farewell sail, hello mighty engines.’

  ‘I don’t think it means that at all.’ Lady Lucy was quite vehement. ‘I mean people may think it means that. But I think it’s much more about Turner himself.’ She leant back on the bench, combing her memory for the other Turners she had seen which would help her case.

  ‘Turner, the Turner who painted this, this glory, was an old man when he did it. But when he was young, he made his name and his fame painting the ships and the battles of the great war against the French. This ship, the Temeraire,’ she pointed dramatically at the ghostly vessel, ‘took years and years to build in Rochester or somewhere like that.’ Lady Lucy would have been the first to admit that her knowledge of naval construction yards was not that extensive. ‘It sails the Mediterranean. It patrols in the Pacific. Its life is entirely peaceful, in spite of the guns on board and the fearful death toll of its broadsides. It only fights for one day, Lord Francis. Just one day. But that one day was at Trafalgar when the Temeraire was closely involved in the action right beside the Victory and our friend Nelson on his column outside, one day of everlasting glory. And Turner painted it at the time.

  ‘After that, more patrols, more routine voyages, and then bit by bit, spar by spar, sail by sail, the great ship is taken to pieces. Then finally in 1834 or whenever it was, she is to be taken up or down the river by that horrid little tug to be broken up.

  ‘But for Turner, for Turner, Lord Francis’ – Powerscourt was bewitched by Lady Lucy’s eloquence and her feeling for the painting – ‘this was a symbol, a reminder of his own life, his past, his present, his future. Here was this ship of all ships, which he had painted as a young man so many years ago in her hour of glory. By the time the Temeraire made this last journey, she would have been a hulk, she would have had no rigging, she would have had no masts. Turner has put them all back. That’s why the painting is called The Fighting Temeraire. This ship, Turner’s ship, his beloved Temeraire, has to make her last journey decked out as she was in her days of pomp and power, not like some beggar being dumped in the workhouse.’

  Even the curators were listening intently now, staring spellbound at Lady Lucy.

  ‘This is Turner’s tribute to his vanished youth. The sunset is not just for the beautiful ship but for Turner himself. He knows that for him too the last journey will be coming soon. The crossing not of the Thames but of Jordan river cannot be very far away. This is Turner’s last elegy to his youth, his past life, his own career, gliding unstoppably away from him. After the sunset comes the dark. Death. Oblivion. No more Temeraire, no more Turner. But we have this to remember them both.’

  Lady Lucy stopped suddenly, as if worn out by so much emotion.

  ‘I cannot tell you how impressed I am by your learning, Lady Lucy.’ Powerscourt gazed at her with a new respect, with more feelings than he had brought with him into this gallery. Could she describe all the paintings with such eloquence?

  Lady Lucy was grateful to him for listening. It makes such a change, she thought. So often when she wanted to talk about paintings or about books, men changed the subject to horses or cricket or fishing. But this was a man who could listen. She remembered her mother saying to her when she was just eighteen, ‘Don’t be taken in by their looks or how well the young men whirl you round the dance floors of London, my girl. Find yourself a man who appreciates your mind as well as your pretty looks.’

  She turned to look at Powerscourt, who seemed to be inspecting the Temeraire’s rigging. Had she found such a man?

  Christmas came and Powerscourt was still no further with the courtiers in Marlborough House. It was a long tennis match of letters from the baseline, neither player prepared to go to the net.

  ‘What on earth are they doing?’ Powerscourt had asked Rosebery in his library in Berkeley Square.

  ‘The Prince of Wales can’t make up his mind, I suspect,’ said Rosebery, pouring them both a seasonal glass of white port. ‘He wants to know who the blackmailer is. But he’s terrified of what might come out of any investigations. Anyway, the Prime Minister has nearly settled the row with the Beresfords. Salisbury told me the Treaty of Berlin had probably been easier to negotiate.’

  Rosebery had bought himself a racehorse for Christmas which he was convinced would win the Derby.

  Prince Eddy became engaged to Princess May of Teck, to the delight and relief of both sets of parents.

  Powerscourt bought Lord Johnny Fitzgerald a case of Chassagne-Montrachet.

  His sisters clubbed together to buy Powerscourt a first edition of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  But Powerscourt’s Christmas present to his nephews was the one closest to his heart.

  Part Two

  Sandringham

  January 1892

  5

  The Voltigeurs were moving steadily down the slope, skirmishers who represented the advance guard of the French Army. Behind them, deployed behind and around La Belle Alliance, were the glory of Napoleon
’s Grande Armée, headgear glittering with the colours of different lands. There was a martial kaleidoscope, Lancers in red shapkas with a brass plate bearing the letter N and a white plume, Chasseurs in kolbachs with headgear of green and scarlet, Hussars with multi-coloured plumes, Dragoons with brass casques over tigerskin turbans, Cuirassiers in steel helmets with copper crests, Carabiniers in dazzling white and the Grenadiers of the Old Guard in massive, plain bearskins.

  Across the valley the British, a motley army in motley uniform, waited for their fate.

  ‘Fire!’ said a small voice. ‘Fire!’

  ‘Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!’ shouted two other small voices.

  ‘If I take a big puff on my cigar,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt, who normally loathed cigars but felt that sacrifices had to be made in the interests of history, ‘we can have smoke all over the battlefield.’

  This had been his Christmas present to three of his nephews, a huge board portraying the battlefield of Waterloo in minute detail, and toy soldiers representing all the different varieties of troops on duty that June day.

  William, Powerscourt’s eldest nephew, was eight years old and in command of two younger soldiers, Patrick and Alexander. Patrick was the drummer boy, equipped with a replica of the equipment used to drive the French infantry to success and glory across the battlefields of Europe. Alexander was the bugler, trained to give the different orders to the men of Wellington’s command.

  ‘After the artillery bombardment,’ Powerscourt puffed bravely on at his cigar, enveloping the battlefield with smoke, ‘the next thing is the attack on the farm at Hougoumont. Four regiments of veterans,’ he pointed to a small cluster of models, ‘began to advance towards the farm. Beat the drum.’

  As William moved his troops forward through the smoke Patrick beat out the pas de charge: boom boom, boom boom, boom a boom, boom a boom, boom boom.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now, Alexander,’ he brought in the youngest, ‘you are standing beside the Duke of Wellington, here, on his horse Copenhagen. Your job is to sound the bugle call that sends out his orders. Look! He has seen the French advancing towards the chateau. Reinforcements are needed. Now! Blow!’

  It could not be said that Alexander was master of the full repertoire of bugle calls from the reveille to the retreat. But he did make a great deal of noise.

  ‘Alors,’ cried Powerscourt, ‘some of the French did manage to get inside the building. And I’ll show you what happened then. Pretend that this door is the main entrance to Hougoumont. You three go outside, with your drums and bugles, and push as hard as you can to try to get in. You’re going to be French just for once, and I’m going to be Colonel Macdonnell who closed the gate.’

  The three boys pushed as hard as they could. ‘Make more noise! Shout in French!’ Powerscourt was getting carried away. Cries of ‘Allez! Allez! Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur!’ – Powerscourt himself had taught them that one – sounded out across the upper levels of the house and floated down to the drawing-room two floors below. With a mighty heave Powerscourt at last closed the door. Three small boys fell backwards on the floor in a tumbling melange of arms and legs.

  ‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ shouted Rosebery. He burst into the room, taking in the battlefield at a glance. ‘I think you’ll find that you have put the British cavalry a bit too far to the left,’ he said absent-mindedly, surveying the order of battle. ‘But come, Powerscourt, come, we must go at once! Reasons on the way!’

  Rosebery led a swift charge down three flights of stairs, pausing only to give apologies to Powerscourt’s sister at the bottom. ‘A thousand pardons for this invasion, Lady Rosalind! We shall return to fight another day!’

  With that Rosebery bounded down the flight of steps, pulling a bemused Powerscourt behind him into the night, and hurried his friend into a waiting brougham.

  ‘Liverpool Street! As quick as you can. I have a train waiting!’

  ‘A train?’ said Powerscourt feebly, wondering if this was all another dream.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. If you want to get anywhere in a hurry in this country you have to order yourself a special train. I’ve done it before.’

  Even at this moment of crisis Powerscourt found time to reflect on his friend. Most people in a hurry would consult timetables, seek out alternative routes, fret over possible delays on the line. Rosebery simply hired a train, and the best that money could buy, thought Powerscourt, as the engine pulled them slowly out of the station, real smoke billowing out over London’s suburbs.

  ‘Where are we going? What is the rush?’

  ‘Rush? Rush? Wild horses couldn’t get us there fast enough. We are going, my dear Powerscourt, to Sandringham. Something terrible has happened. Some disaster we don’t yet know about.’

  He thrust a cable into his friend’s hand.: ‘Come immediately. Most urgent. Bring Powerscourt. Brook no delay. Suter.’

  ‘Death closes all,’ Powerscourt muttered to himself, ‘but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods . . . sorry, I have been reading Tennyson again last thing at night.’

  ‘What makes you think of death, Francis?’

  ‘Think of it, my friend,’ Powerscourt went on, who had thought of little else since they fled the battlefield of Waterloo. ‘If there was some natural act, like a fire or the roof falling in, they would send for the fire brigade or the builders. If it were the death of an aged uncle or aunt, the family would not be summoning you in the middle of a January night. They would not be sending for me. They would be sending for the tribes of relations and a couple of parsons. Bishops, more likely. Maybe Archbishops.’

  ‘Are you possessed of second sight as well as a photographic memory, Francis?’ Rosebery was peering closely at his friend as if another telegram was about to appear, etched across his forehead.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But it seems to me the most likely explanation is that there has been some dirty work afoot in Norfolk. Death not by natural causes is usually called murder. But we must wait for some hard intelligence before our speculations run away with us.’

  The two men sat silently, lost in their thoughts. Rosebery was wondering about the political implications of a royal death. Powerscourt looked troubled.

  ‘I am sure that it is impossible to underestimate the effect a strange death could have on the Royal Family,’ he said, watching Rosebery’s cigar smoke drift down the carriage. ‘I have been thinking about this a lot lately,’ he went on, looking out at the occasional ringlets of light that gleamed faintly against the East Anglian sky. ‘Somewhere at the back of all the royal minds there must be a fear, maybe not a fear, an anxiety, a tremor in their dreams. On the surface, of course, all is serene, the palaces, the pomp, the pageantry. But underneath?

  ‘Think of it,’ he continued, in what for him was a most animated fashion, ‘like a painting by Claude. There’s a huge mythological landscape, elegant classical buildings, assorted Greeks and Romans like Dido and Cleopatra up to no good. You know the sort of thing.’

  Powerscourt drew a large frame in the condensation of the window between them. ‘All the normal Claude tricks are here, the fantastic buildings, the intense sunlight, the faint sense of being in another world. I expect you’ve got a Claude or two, Rosebery, lying about the place?’

  ‘I’ve got three, actually,’ admitted Rosebery, ‘maybe four. I can’t remember. But what’s going on in this one here?’ He pointed to the Old Master taking dim shape on the railway carriage window.

  ‘Here,’ said Powerscourt, drawing an ill-defined blob at the bottom of the frame, ‘is the fantastic palace, the grand pillars, the colonnades, the battlements, flags waving in the sunshine. And here, on an elaborate and bejewelled royal throne, we find the little Queen, resplendent not in a bonnet as so often, but in a proper crown. Around her are disported the usual crew, the courtiers, the secretaries, the equerries, the waiting servants – a mass of uniforms and all the decorati
ons in the kingdom. I think Claude would have fun with that.

  ‘But here, behind them, in the park,’ Powerscourt’s finger added a series of semicircular blobs to the window of the Great Eastern, ‘we have a series of statues. Some of them lurk invisible at the end of a terrace until you turn the corner, some of them are in semicircles, standing rigidly to attention waiting for time’s last roll call. Right at the back we find some of Royalty’s distant predecessors, Henry VII, Richard II, two small princes in the Tower, a reminder to their successors in the big house down here at the bottom of the picture, that their ancestors waded through rivers of blood to sit upon a throne. And threw a previous monarch out to get there.

  ‘At the back of the semicircle, here, Charles I on execution day. Kings of England can lose their heads, even on a balcony above Whitehall. Then, slightly closer to the house we find Robespierre, the man who struck Terror not just into the hearts of the French, but into the hearts of every crowned head in Europe. In his left hand he holds a model guillotine and at his feet, a tumbril, with the powdered heads of the aristocrats already overflowing. Do you not like the tumbril, Rosebery?’

  ‘No tricoteuses, Powerscourt?’ said Rosebery with a smile. ‘No room for Madame Defarge and the knitting needles of death?’

  ‘No room on the plinth,’ said Powerscourt, turning back to the window. ‘The picture is nearing completion. At one edge of the semicircle, nearest the house, we place the Queen’s relation and colleague in Royalty, His Most Serene Majesty Alexander II, Czar of all the Russias, blown to pieces by a terrorist bomb twelve years ago and with a face so disfigured that his relatives fainted when they went to kiss him a last goodbye in his coffin.