I’ve seen you very recently, thought Powerscourt. Only the other day I saw lots of you all over the walls of those Venetian churches, kindly saints with white beards, waiting for eternity beside some sad Madonna, mighty prophets with white beards, rallying their people to the justice of God’s cause, apocalyptic old men, God with a white beard, dividing the population of their paintings into saints and sinners in some final judgement.
Powerscourt, slightly nervous, still tired from his Venetian odyssey, was clutching a new black notebook.
Rosebery was wearing the neutral face of the politician, mentally preparing his last report for Prime Minister Salisbury on the strange death of Prince Eddy. Powerscourt had told him the full story the night before in Berkeley Square.
‘It’s like some terrible Revenger’s Tragedy,’ had been Rosebery’s verdict. ‘Let us hope there are no more bodies. Are congratulations in order, Francis? You seem to have got to the bottom of it remarkably quickly in view of the difficulties.’
‘Prayers for the dead would be more appropriate than congratulations. A whole lot of prayers. A whole lot of dead,’ said Powerscourt, shivering slightly.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ purred Sir William Suter, urbane courtier. ‘You said you wished to see us. You said in your cable from Venice that you had fresh news on the unhappy passing of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Were you in Venice on holiday, Lord Powerscourt? I believe the weather can be very inclement there at this time of year.’
‘I wouldn’t say it was a holiday, exactly,’ said Powerscourt with a rueful smile. ‘I went there as part of my investigations.’
Eight hundred miles away a young man with staring eyes was waiting for a church to open. The church was the Santa Maria del Carmine on the southern side of the Arno in Florence. A small sign, attached to the parish noticeboard, promised confession in English between the hours of nine and ten on Thursday mornings every week. Father Menotti SJ.
The young man was early. He was trying to remember what the Jesuits had told him about making a good confession. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou amongst women, Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus . . .’ He prayed while he waited.
Underneath Masaccio’s fresco of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, two figures fleeing in shock and terror from their crime, the beginning of sin, the original sin, Lord Edward Gresham was preparing to confess his murder.
Powerscourt had asked Rosebery the night before how much he should tell Suter and Shepstone. Everything? A sanitized version of the truth? Just the name of the killer?
‘For God’s sake, Francis, they’ve never been helpful to you. The roots of this affair go back such a long way. They’re used to hiding the truth. They never say yes, they never say no, as I said to you at the beginning. Just for once I think they should hear the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
‘I was originally approached about the affairs of the Prince of Wales and his family in the latter half of 1891,’ Powerscourt began. ‘At that time there were suspicions that the Prince of Wales was being blackmailed and there were fears, justified fears as it turned out, for the life of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. I propose to refer to him as Prince Eddy from now on in this narrative of events.
‘Shortly after I arrived on the scene the blackmail question seemed to go away. There were a lot of complicated manoeuvres in the affairs of the Prince of Wales and Daisy Brooke and an intemperate letter intercepted by Lady Beresford.’
Cisterns of lust, he thought to himself. He couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind.
‘These matters could easily have given rise to blackmail, but I was not entirely convinced of that. My inquiries revealed that there had been no blackmailers at large in what we call Society for at least twenty years. The cause of the blackmail must have lain elsewhere.’
Suter began taking notes. He would, said Powerscourt to himself. He’d be taking notes about the verdict of God on Judgement Day itself, preparing a memorandum for the Almighty’s filing system.
‘We then come to the murder itself.’ Powerscourt looked down at his book once more. ‘On the night of January 8th, or the morning of January 9th, Prince Eddy was murdered in the manner we all know.’ Better spare them something.
The confessional was very dark, dark brown wood surrounding the penitent. There was a strange smell, floor polish perhaps. Or fear.
Gresham knelt at the feet of his confessor, Father Menotti, invisible on the other side of the little booth.
‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned.’
He bowed his head, his eyes closed, as his confessor blest him. Gresham made the Sign of the Cross with the slow deliberate movements of the recent convert. A school choir was rehearsing in a distant part of the church, youthful voices singing the Kyrie. Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
‘I confess to Almighty God, to Blessed Mary ever Virgin, to all the angels and saints, and to you, my spiritual Father, that I have sinned.’
‘The Prince of Wales decided,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘for reasons which will become all too apparent, that he wished to hush the matter up, to conceal the truth. The convenient fiction was adopted that Prince Eddy had died of influenza.’
‘Influenza, yes, influenza.’ Sir Bartle Shepstone nodded wisely, as if he were an old friend of the disease.
‘The result of this was that the death was not officially announced to the world until January 15th. In the meantime Lord Henry Lancaster, one of six young men, equerries to Prince Eddy, who were staying in the house, was found dead in Sandringham Woods, shot through the head. At first sight it looked like a second murder. But the medical evidence was convincing. Lord Lancaster killed himself. He left me a note.’
Suter looked up from his papers. Shepstone sat upright in his chair. Powerscourt had not told them about the note before.
‘It wasn’t a very satisfactory note. I mean it didn’t clear anything up. If anything, it made things worse. This is what it said.’
He took the note from his pocket. ‘“By the time you read this, I shall be dead. I am sorry for all the trouble I am causing to my family and friends and to yourself. I am sure you will come to understand that I had no choice. I could do no other. Semper Fidelis.”’ Powerscourt folded Lancaster’s note carefully and returned it to his pocket.
‘I was greatly puzzled by the Semper Fidelis. Faithful to whom? To his country? To his friends? To Prince Eddy? To his regiment? At first I was confused. Things became clearer later on.
‘So this was the position, as it presented itself to me when the business of the cover-up was over.’
Lord Edward Gresham was shaking in his confessional. The church cleaners were going about their daily duty with mops and buckets. The youthful choir had progressed from the Kyrie to a Sanctus. They kept making the same mistake. The opening notes echoed round the building again and again as the music master tried to correct the error of their ways.
‘Father, I was at confession at Farm Street in Mayfair at the very beginning of this year. By the grace of God I received absolution, performed my penance, and went to Holy Communion. Father, I have sinned most grievously since then. I have murdered a man. I have broken the Sixth Commandment. May the Lord have mercy upon me.’
‘What were the circumstances in which you broke the Sixth Commandment, my son?’ Father Menotti’s voice came from far away. The other side of the confessional box seemed to Gresham to be a world he had lost, one he might never re-enter.
‘We could rule out the possibility of any outsiders having committed the crime. There were reports of Russians and Irish in the neighbourhood. Both were traced. Both were completely innocent. There were, it seemed to me, three possibilities.’
Powerscourt was delivering his verdict in the cold neutral tones of a judge summing up a complicated case. Sir Bartle Shepstone was stroking his beard.
‘The first was
a disgruntled army or naval officer who had served with Prince Eddy and thought the country would be better off without him. I can assure you that there are many such officers who despised his morals and his way of life and thought him unfit to be King.’
‘This is outrageous, outrageous!’ spluttered Shepstone.
‘He was a fine upstanding young man!’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Rosebery. ‘He was a disgrace. I have met many senior officers with the views of which Lord Powerscourt speaks. Pray be quiet.’
‘The second possibility was that it was one of the equerries. One of six, or rather five, after the death of Lancaster. I decided to find out everything I could about their lives, and about whether any of them might have good cause to murder Prince Eddy.
‘The third possibility was that the blackmail was connected in some way with the murder. I discovered that the Prince of Wales had been outspending his income by ?15-20,000 a year for over ten years, since 1879 in fact. That was the year in which the two young Princes left their training ship HMS Britannia, and were sent round the world on a two-year cruise on HMS Bacchante. One of the naval officers concerned believed that the main purpose of the voyage was to keep Prince Eddy out of England.
‘There was a great scandal that year on board HMS Britannia. Five young men contracted syphilis, after sexual contact with Prince Eddy. He was believed to have contracted the disease from some prostitutes in Portsmouth.’
Cisterns of lust, thought Powerscourt. Cisterns full of it. Five of them on board the Britannia. Wouldn’t one of the boys have done? Two, at the most? Suter carried on with his notes. Rosebery was looking carefully at Powerscourt, his features carved from stone.
‘Since that time the Prince of Wales has been paying regularly to all those families. You could call it medical assistance, help with treating the terrible disease. You could call it compensation for those young lives destroyed. You could call it naval pensions. Somebody did. Or you could call it blackmail, if you like. I suspect that one, or both of you gentlemen, knew all about this matter. But you did not see fit to tell me.’
Powerscourt looked up at the two servants of the Prince of Wales. They did not reply.
‘I was on the way to establishing whether or not any relatives of the victims could have committed the crime, a father or a brother. Revenge is a regular motive for murder. Two of the brothers were, in fact, in Norfolk at the time. But neither of them could have committed the murder. I was beginning to work my way through the rest of the families when a piece of news reached me about one of the equerries.’
‘Father, my sin concerns my wife. I met her two years ago near Birmingham in the middle of England. She was called Louisa. She was very beautiful.’ Lord Edward Gresham paused in his confession. Loving somebody wasn’t a sin, was it?
‘Continue, my son. Continue with your confession.’ Father Menotti’s voice was soft, but firm.
‘We fell in love. She was of the Catholic faith. I was not. She wanted me to adopt the Catholic faith before she would marry me. I received instruction from the Jesuits in Farm Street in London and was received into the Church. We were married eighteen months ago.’
A grunt, or was it a cough, came from the other side of the grille. Perhaps Father Menotti was clearing his throat. Perhaps he was rejoicing in the salvation of a Protestant heretic, in a land all too full of Protestant heretics.
‘Father, the man I killed was Prince Eddy, the son of the Prince of Wales, grandson of Queen Victoria herself. After we were married he came frequently to my house. He often came when I was away on army business. I am an officer in the British Army. Prince Eddy wanted my wife to commit adultery with him. He pleaded with her to give in to him. Everybody else did.’
‘Was he a regular fornicator with other men’s wives?’
‘He would have sexual relations with man or woman, Father. It didn’t seem to matter.’
Powerscourt looked round his little audience. It’s a soliloquy this time, he thought, somewhere towards the end of Act Five.
‘Two years ago, one of the equerries fell in love with a beautiful girl in the Midlands, near Birmingham. The girl’s father was very rich. But there was a problem. The family were Catholic. The equerry was not. To the horror of his mother he converted with the Jesuits in Farm Street, just up the road from here. They were married. The mother did not attend the wedding.’
What had Lady Lucy said to him, about Lady Blanche Gresham and the marriage?
‘Not to a grocer’s daughter’, she said. ‘Not to a Roman Catholic. Not in some pagan chapel, decked out with bleeding hearts and the false idolatry of Rome.’
‘Prince Eddy was a regular visitor to their house after they were married, especially when the equerry was away. He made regular propositions to the equerry’s wife. Equally regularly, she refused. He grew tired of these refusals. He was not used to them, from man or woman. One day he pushed her down a flight of steps and killed her. She was pregnant at the time.
‘It took our equerry four months to find out the truth. The only other person in the house, the only person who knew what happened, a servant girl, ran away. Eventually, last summer, he found her. That will have been the time he was requesting to become an equerry to Prince Eddy, I fancy. It tallies with the note you sent me, Sir William, about the dates of service of the equerries at the time of the murder.’
The cleaning party had moved on in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. The singers had moved on as well, to the Benedictus.
‘One day she refused him again. He pushed her down a flight of steps. It killed her. It killed our child as Louisa was pregnant. So I waited for my chance and I killed him. Prince Eddy had killed my Louisa. She was so beautiful. I adored her. Prince Eddy had killed our child before it was even born. Father, I know I have sinned against God’s Holy Law and Commandments. I know I have sinned against the Sixth Commandment. I do truly repent of these my sins and beg you for forgiveness.
‘I accuse myself also of all the sins of my past life, especially of those against purity and chastity. For all these sins and for those I do not remember, I ask pardon of God with my whole heart, and penance and absolution of you, my spiritual Father.’
‘On the night of 8 January or early morning of the 9th of this year, the equerry climbed over the roofs of Sandringham and murdered Prince Eddy. The equerry’s name is Lord Edward Gresham.’
Sir William Suter turned pale. Shepstone turned red.
‘Gresham? Gresham? Are you sure, Powerscourt? Dammit, I have known the family for years. I think I went to his christening in Thorpe Hall.’
‘I am quite sure, thank you, Sir Bartle. I would not tell you if I wasn’t.’
‘Dammit, Suter, this is unbelievable. Do you believe it?’
‘How can you be so sure, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘I told you I was sure of it. Gresham told me himself in Venice three days ago. Do you want any more confirmation than that?’
‘Dear God,’ said Suter, laying down his pen. ‘What a terrible business. A terrible business.’ He stopped and looked down at his notes again. ‘Could I ask you to clear two little points up for us, Lord Francis?’
The Private Secretary, the bureaucrat, must ensure that all the facts are included in the report to his master.
‘I have been haunted, ever since you told us, by Lancaster’s Semper Fidelis. What does it mean?’
‘I think he saw Gresham in the room. Maybe he heard him crushing the picture of Princess May into small pieces. Maybe he saw him climbing out of the window. He knew who the murderer was. He was being faithful to his friend. He wasn’t going to betray him. So he is faithful to him for ever. Forever Faithful. Semper fidelis.’
‘You have sinned, my son. You have sinned most grievously against God’s Holy Law and his Commandments.’ Father Menotti paused.
Lord Edward Gresham was still on his knees, tears on his face, terror in his heart. Father Menotti’s voice was very close now. This is my last judgement, G
resham thought, here in the middle of Florence. Father Menotti has turned into Savonarola. This is Judgement Day, on the Arno.
‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.’ The youthful singers had moved on to the Agnus Dei, innocent voices soaring into the roof.
‘The crime you have confessed is a most serious one. You are required to tell the authorities in your own country what you have done. Every day, from now until the end of your time on earth, you must say three Hail Marys for the mother of the young man you murdered. You must pray for the brothers and the sisters every day. You must pray for the soul of the bereaved every day. Each year on the anniversary of his death, you must say the Mass for the Bereaved. This you do in memory of him.’
‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.’
‘Do you heartily repent of your manifold sins and wickedness?’
‘I do.’
‘Do you promise to repent most truly of your crimes that you may come at last into God’s own gracious mercy and protection?’
‘I do.’
‘May Almighty God have mercy upon you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to life everlasting. Amen. Ego absolvo te. I absolve you. May the almighty and merciful Lord grant you pardon,’ Father Menotti made an elaborate sign of the cross, ‘absolution and remission of your sins.’
‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.’ Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.’
The words of the priest and the choir escorted Gresham out of the church and into the cold air of Florence. He had made his confession. The priest had forgiven him his sins. There was only one thing left he had to do.
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