Two hundred yards away the churchyard nestled under its yew trees. Birds, river birds replaced the noise of the barking dogs and the agony of Mr Robinson. Fresh graves, thought Powerscourt, that’s what I am looking for. Well, fairly fresh, not more than a year or two old. Lines of ancient memorials swept away towards the church path, names virtually eroded by time and weather. Here and there a defiant cross or angel marked a richer passing.
On the southern side, on the far side of the church, he found the more recent graves.
Mary William Blunt, beloved wife of Thomas Blunt, of Dorchester, passed away 15 January 1890.
Andrew James Macintosh, churchwarden of this parish, beloved husband of Elizabeth, father of Tabitha, Daniel, Albert. 18 July 1891. May he rest in Peace.
Maud Muriel Smythe, beloved wife of John Smythe, of Dorchester. 25 August 1891. Gone, but not Forgotten.
Peter James Cooper, beloved husband of Louise, father of the twins, 12 September 1891. May he see God.
Simon John Robinson, passed away 25 September 1891, beloved son of John and Mary Robinson, The Limes, Dorchester. Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Powerscourt sank to his knees and prayed. He prayed for the Robinsons, all three of them, he prayed for the growing community of the dead who seemed to surround him, he asked God’s forgiveness for his morning call on the Robinson household. He prayed for his family. He prayed for Johnny Fitzgerald. He prayed for Lady Lucy.
Lord forgive them, he thought as he rose from his knees, a respectful gardener waiting to do his work, for they know not what they do. Who, for the family Robinson, was them? The Prince of Wales and his household? The boys on the Britannia? Was it even, he thought fancifully, the tumours that marked the latter stages of the disease, eating away at the victim’s bones and his brain, unwitting and unfeeling instruments of God’s purpose?
The vicar, the church noticeboard proclaimed, was The Very Rev. Matthew Adams, BA Oxon, M.Litt, London, of The Vicarage, Dorchester.
Mrs Adams opened the door. No dogs this time, Powerscourt thought, as she showed him into a cold sitting-room.
‘My husband has just popped out,’ she said brightly. ‘But he’ll be back presently. Would you like to wait in here? He won’t be long.’
Biblical scenes adorned the room, great vistas of the lake of Galilee and the Mount of Olives. Powerscourt wondered if the vicar painted in his spare time, holidays always spent with canvas and brush. ‘I’ll just be a few moments more, dear, I’ve got to finish these angels.’
‘Good morning to you,’ said the Rev. Adams cheerfully as he strode into the room, a handsome man of about forty years, eyes wary beneath the smile.
I presume he knows I’m not bereaved or anything like that, thought Powerscourt. Probably his wife gives him a clue when unexpected visitors arrive, the weeping, the demented, the lost souls of Dorchester.
‘Please forgive this unannounced intrusion, most impolite of me. My name is Powerscourt. I have had some rather unsatisfactory business here in Dorchester, and I would welcome your local knowledge.’
Powerscourt handed over his card. He explained that he was engaged on an investigation which, by its nature, had to remain secret. He showed the Rev. Adams a copy of his letter from the Prime Minister.
‘Is there anything wrong? With the Government, I mean?’ The Rev. Adams looked as though he would be reluctant to add the troubles of Westminster and Whitehall to the heavy burdens of Dorchester upon Thames.
‘Anything wrong with the Government? No, I don’t think so, no more than usual. My concerns are with a recent parishioner of yours, recently interred in your churchyard. Simon John Robinson.’
‘Young Robinson.’ The eyes grew warier still. The vicar edged himself further back in his chair. ‘What can I tell you about him?’
‘Do you know what he died of?’
‘Oddly enough I don’t. One usually hears, you know, what people die of. I don’t think he actually died here. I think the body was brought from somewhere else.’
‘Were the family well off?’
‘I’m not their bank manager, Lord Powerscourt, but then I don’t suppose they tell even you anything at all. Sometimes I feel it would be helpful in our parish work if the banks could let us know who was in financial trouble and we could provide help of a different kind. But they don’t of course. Where was I? Ah, yes, the Robinsons. I think they were quite well off, they always seemed to live well. The son, Simon, was away a lot. He had been in the Navy for a while, you know.’
‘Was he still in the Navy at the time of his death, do you know?’
‘No, he wasn’t, but they said he was in receipt of a generous naval pension which supported him in all his trips abroad.’
‘Any indication,’ Powerscourt raised his hands towards the vicar, ‘that the rest of the family are not so well off now? Presumably the naval pension had to stop with his death.’
‘There was some talk of them selling up shortly after he died. But then that stopped. Normal financial service seems to have been resumed now.’ The vicar smiled a weak routine smile. Maybe they teach smiles in the theological colleges, thought Powerscourt, the polite smile, the sympathetic smile, the concerned smile, smiles for all seasons.
‘Any brothers and sisters?’
‘I think they were all boys. No daughters. Poor Mrs Robinson. I’m sure she would have liked a daughter. She always says how lucky we are. We’ve got two of each.’
The smile of the happy family man this time. ‘Two of the brothers are abroad. Canada, or is it Australia? The other one works up in London and comes down from time to time.’
‘Do you know what he does in London?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling it was time to leave.
‘I do, as a matter of fact. He works in a grand shop near Piccadilly, but they’ve got branches all over London. They specialise in guns, shooting stuff, hunting knives, that sort of thing.’
Hunting knives. Powerscourt could feel the colour drain from his face. Sharp hunting knives. Sharp enough to slit your throat. Sharp enough to sever your arteries.
‘Are you unwell, Lord Powerscourt? You look as though you had seen a ghost.’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine. I have these little turns every now and then.’ He smiled back one of the vicar’s weaker smiles.
Ghosts. Ghosts of boys on the Britannia. Lord forgive them for they know not what they do. Ghosts that lay under trees in Sandringham Woods, messages left for the living. Forever Faithful. Semper Fidelis. Ghosts dancing in the rigging of the Bacchante, sailing on a journey to nowhere. The living ghost on the beach at Amble with the red eyes and the sunken spirit. It wasn’t my fault I tell you. It wasn’t my fault.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Something to eat?’
‘No, I’m fine. The walk to the station will do me good, I promise you.’
The vicar walked him down to the town and escorted him right on to the platform itself. He’s making sure I’ve gone, thought Powerscourt. Dorchester doesn’t want to see me any more. Or they’ll put the dogs on me. Or sons from gunshops in Piccadilly, armed with hunting knives.
17
Maybe, Powerscourt said to himself, it’s because women, or more specifically, his sisters, weren’t educated properly. Back in St James’s Square Powerscourt was surrounded by his sisters’ notebooks, reporting their conversations across London about his six equerries. Random thoughts spilled across the pages, random sentences with no order and no logic. Surely, thought Powerscourt, those governesses must have taught them something up there in the schoolroom. Or maybe not. Maybe they had just gossiped all day long, looking out over the soft hills of Wicklow, dreaming of balls and horses as yet unridden.
Powerscourt’s mind kept wandering back to one phrase, just three words, spoken by the Rev. Adams as he sat in his chair underneath the Mount of Olives in The Vicarage, Dorchester on Thames.
Generous naval pension. That’s what he said. Powerscourt was so taken by the phrase that he had written it down
in his notebook and looked at it on the train back to London. He looked at it a lot. He didn’t think you got generous naval pensions. If you got naval pensions at all.
William Burke had laughed. ‘My dear Francis,’ the financier had said, ‘the Royal Navy and the First Lords of the Admiralty are not known for the generosity of their pensions. Quite the contrary. If they can get away with it, they don’t give you a single farthing. And the idea that they would start paying out to somebody – how old did you say our chap was, late twenties, was it – it’s absurd. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was impossible,’ the banker’s caution came to the fore, ‘but it’s very very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed.’
Suppose the payments coming from the Prince of Wales were disguised, disguised as generous naval pensions. It was a cover story, a convenient fiction to disguise the fact that the money came from Sir William Suter and Sir Bartle Shepstone, Private Secretary and Comptroller to the Household of the Prince of Wales. They wrote the cheques. The recipients welcomed another instalment of their generous naval pension. The blackmail circle was complete.
His mind wandered again, to the note he had sent to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police asking him to check on the movements of a man called Robinson, first name unknown, employed in the gunshop off Piccadilly. His parents lived in Dorchester on Thames. Could the Commissioner establish where this Robinson had been on the weekend of the 8th and 9th January. Had he, by any chance, been in Norfolk? This request was most urgent. Lord Powerscourt was most grateful for the assistance.
The notebooks of his sisters, lying unread on his table in St James’s Square, called him back to work.
It really is a remarkable collection of documents, he thought, nearing the end of his sisters’ writings. Future historians will find it fascinating. Who was poor, who was rich, which families rowed and which did not, which families were selling their paintings to Americans to keep themselves afloat, which younger sons drove their parents to despair. The marriages, fixed not in the hearts of tomorrow’s husbands and wives, but in the scheming brains of their mothers: where they bought their furniture, where they bought their curtains, where they bought their kitchens, where they met their lovers.
Charles Peveril’s mother was widely believed to have had an affair with William Brockham’s father, an affair that went on for years. This, according to Powerscourt’s sister Mary, must be the key to the whole affair. Quite how, she did not reveal, as further bits of gossip chased each other across the page. Harry Rad-clyffe’s father drank too much. Frederick Mortimer’s father kept selling parcels of land, thousands and thousands of acres at a time.
But of blackmail, of secret payments, dark shadows falling across a family’s fortunes, there was not a word. William Burke confirmed the absence of blackmail when Powerscourt met him downstairs.
‘Francis, I promise you, I have written it all down. But I have left the document in my office. Let me give you the main points now.’
He drew Powerscourt aside to stand by the windows. The lamps in the square showed not a soul walking the streets of St James’s. The great square was empty, except for its resident colony of crows.
‘Money,’ said Burke, familiarity and reverence in his voice. ‘As far as money goes, they’re about average for their kind. It all depends on who got out of land in time. Four of them are still heavily invested, or mortgaged, in land. They’re getting worse off all the time. Two of them got out of land, like you, Francis, and put their money elsewhere. They’re getting richer most of the time. But of blackmail, in the active or the passive sense, I can find no trace at all.’
Before he went to sleep Powerscourt looked again at some more of his correspondence, at two letters in particular. They came from the parents of two of the five boys who had been with Eddy in the Britannia affair. Both were very happy to see him. They would be delighted. But they both recommended that he should speak first to a Mr William Simmons, of The Laurels, Shapston, Dorset. ‘He is much better acquainted with these matters, better qualified to speak, than I am.’ The wording was identical in the two letters, as if they had agreed it beforehand, decided together what they were going to say. Or had the Simmons of Shapston, Dorset, agreed the wording with the other two?
Tomorrow he would find out.
The spire of Salisbury Cathedral disappeared slowly into its valley as Powerscourt’s cab took him up into the rolling hills of Dorset.
He had expected Shapston to be a pretty little village with a pond, a cricket pitch and rows of neat houses with well-tended gardens. It wasn’t. There was a very fine Jacobean mansion above the little hamlet, and a disparate straggle of miscellaneous houses. There were a great many cows. The cows seemed to think they owned the place.
The Laurels was a two-storey building with a thatched roof and a very ancient front door.
‘Welcome to our humble abode, Lord Powerscourt! Welcome!’ gushed Mrs Simmons, as she took his coat in the large hall. Mrs Simmons was a well-built woman in her mid-fifties with a look of command in her eye. A couple of feet behind her, William Simmons waited to shake his hand. Powerscourt wondered if the gap summed up the relations between them, Mrs Simmons always in the lead.
‘This is the dining-room in here.’ She seemed to be giving Powerscourt a tour of their humble abode. He shuddered at the sight of the dining-table and chairs, but the curtains looked satisfactory. ‘We only use this suite in the winter if William has to entertain clients from the bank, isn’t that right, dear? And this is the entrance to the cottage, our little extension here, the East Wing we like to call it.’ She laughed a bright laugh. ‘Alfred, our son, the one you are interested in, Lord Powerscourt, these are Alfred’s quarters.
‘Now then,’ she went on gaily, ‘this is the drawing-room. I expect you’d like to sit down, Lord Powerscourt, after your long journey. And I expect you’d like some coffee. William always likes a cup of coffee at this time of day.’
It was a handsome room with a blazing fire and a door opening out on the garden. A couple of robins picked their way delicately across the lawn, their red breasts very bright in the sombre winter landscape of withered grass and bare fruit trees.
‘I think we’ll wait until the coffee comes before we begin our conversations, Lord Powerscourt. Muriel always likes to be in the thick of the action. I sometimes wonder if she won’t come down to the bank in Blandford one day and try to take over.’ Simmons smiled a rueful smile. He looked a lot shrewder than his wife’s comments suggested. He was nearly six feet tall, expanding round the waist, with a very thin moustache and a splendid watch chain adorning his waistcoat.
‘Here we are! I expect you thought I’d lost the coffee!’ sang Mrs Simmons, reappearing with a tray.
Powerscourt took out his letter from Prime Minister Salisbury and handed it round for inspection. Simmons read it respectfully and passed it over to his wife.
‘Oh, I say! I say,’ said Mrs Simmons, ‘isn’t this splendid! Downing Street comes to Shapston! How appropriate that the letter comes from Lord Salisbury too. Just a few short miles away. What will they say about this in the bank, William?’
‘It must never reach the bank, my dear. Never. Or anywhere else for that matter. The whole business has been kept a secret for all these years. It must remain so.’
Powerscourt thought he could see what Mr Simmons might be like in his bank, firm words to those who strayed. Perhaps he wasn’t in his wife’s pocket after all. Perhaps he just played along with her because that was the easiest thing to do.
‘Mr Simmons. Mrs Simmons. I knew you would accept the need for secrecy. And I know that you will observe that need in the future. Perhaps I could give you an indication of what I am interested in.’
Powerscourt looked round the room. That was a mistake. The walls, he saw, were covered with old maps, maps of Dorset, maps of Blandford, maps of Salisbury. Some of them looked as though they could have cost a great deal of money.
‘Forgive me for interrupting!’ pealed Mrs Simmons
. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that you were admiring our collection of maps, Lord Powerscourt! It’s one of William’s hobbies. He’d go anywhere to find an interesting old map, wouldn’t you, dear!’
‘Everything in its place, Muriel. There’s a time and place for everything, as I always say. Lord Powerscourt, you were saying.’
‘I have talked to some of the officers who were involved in the unhappy business of the Britannia.’
‘That was too dreadful, too dreadful, Lord Powerscourt!’ Mrs Simmons could not be contained. ‘Forgive me for interrupting again. I’ll always remember where I was when we heard. William was mowing the lawn in our other house, much smaller than this one, I fear. And I was making him a steak and kidney pie for his lunch. It was Cook’s day off. It’s William’s favourite, steak and kidney pie. And then we heard the news! I dropped William’s kidneys all over the floor! Oh, I am so sorry.’ Her husband was glaring at her with a look of fury on his face. ‘I won’t interrupt again. I promise. I’m so sorry, Lord Powerscourt.’
Powerscourt smiled at her, one of the smiles he had learnt from the Rev. Adams in Dorchester. ‘As I was saying, I have talked with some of the officers on Britannia. I have talked with some of the officers on the Bacchante, the vessel that took the two Princes round the world. But I would really like to know how the families of the other boys reacted to these sad and unfortunate events. I don’t think we need bother with any of the medical details Mr Simmons.’
Powerscourt turned to Simmons on his left. He had the fire in front of him. Mrs Simmons, on the right, was poised for speech, like a bird of prey.
‘I have given this matter a lot of thought since your letter, Lord Powerscourt,’ Simmons was addressing the shareholders of his bank, ‘and I will try to keep it brief. Shortly after that Britannia business was over, the parents of the five boys met in London. We were trying to decide how to proceed, what to do for the best, how to look after our children in the future. The parents decided to ask me to be the spokesman for our little group. I have been so ever since.’
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