‘Did he talk to you much along the way, Mr Parker?’ asked Powerscourt, noting that the classical temple had suddenly disappeared from view.
‘He didn’t talk to me, my lord. He talked to himself sometimes though. In German usually, I think, sometimes in some other language.’
‘What was that?’
‘I don’t rightly know, my lord.’ Samuel Parker shook his head. ‘I never had any time to learn any of those foreign languages at school. I found it hard enough learning how to spell this one. But Mabel thought it might have been Yiddish.’
‘How on earth did she know that? Does Mabel know Yiddish, Mr Parker?’ Powerscourt marvelled again at the detective powers of Mrs Parker.
‘Mabel speak Yiddish, my lord? Never a word of it. I think the vicar told her. He’d heard Old Mr Harrison talking to himself too. Yiddish, the vicar said, or maybe some other language beginning with an A. Arabian? Aramaic? I can’t remember.’
They were now approaching another temple, not previously visible on the walk. It was quite a small temple with a portico of four Doric columns and an imposing inscription over the door. ‘Procul, o procul este, profani’, the message warned. Powerscourt had sudden memories of translating the Aeneid at school, watched over by an unforgiving master. Be gone, be gone, you uninitiated persons, he said to himself. It’s the Sybil speaking in Book Six, just as Aeneas was about to begin his descent into the underworld to meet his father and hear the story of the founding of Rome, a perilous journey from which few travellers returned. As he stood at the door while Samuel Parker fiddled with his bunch of keys, Powerscourt wondered if he too was entering some private underworld of the Harrisons where filial respect was marked out, not with piety and messages from the Sibyls, but with the bodies of the dead.
‘What was he worried about, Miss Harrison?’ Lady Lucy was looking concerned, hoping against hope that the old lady hadn’t lost her mind again.
‘He never told me very much, Lady Powerscourt. I tried to remember, after your husband called the time before. Germany, I think, it had to do with Germany. It’s not the same now it’s all one. I remember all those little states we used to have before that dreadful old Bismarck got his way and bundled them all up together like a big parcel.’
The old lady stopped suddenly and smiled a vacant smile. She’s going, she’s going, thought Lady Lucy. ‘Was that why he went to Germany in the last years? Was he looking for whatever it was that troubled him?’
‘Berlin,’ the old lady said definitely. ‘I know he went there. On business for the bank, he said. Frankfurt. He went there too. Berlin is full of soldiers now, marching up and down all the time, as if they want to fight somebody. That’s what he said.’
‘And did he have letters from Germany too?’
‘Letters, letters?’ said the old lady wildly, looking round as if the post had not been delivered that morning. ‘Letters . . .’ Old Miss Harrison was lost again. ‘Father used to check we had learnt our letters when we were very small. Letters are very important, my children, he used to say, nearly as important in this world as numbers. That’s what he used to say.’
‘I’m sure he was right,’ said Lady Lucy diplomatically. ‘Did your brother have correspondents in Germany?’
‘All our letters were handed out every morning by the butler at the end of breakfast. We children were so excited when we had letters of our own. I used to look at the stamps and the postmarks.’ She nodded as if confirming the educational value of the postal services. ‘He did have letters from Germany, my brother,’ she went on, ‘I remember the postmarks. Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt, one from Munich with a beautiful stamp on it. Mountains, I think. Do they have mountains near Munich?’
Lady Lucy assured her that they did.
‘Did he ever talk to you about his worries at all?’ she continued, stressing ‘at all’ as if she thought it impossible that the two old people could have shared a house without sharing their fears.
‘He talked in his sleep sometimes, he did. When he was sitting by the fire, just where you are now. After supper, he would usually fall asleep and sometimes he would mutter to himself in his sleep. I can’t sleep much now at night. I can get off all right, but then I keep waking up again. Mother never could sleep at all at the end, you know. One of the doctors said if she’d slept better she wouldn’t have been gone so soon after Father passed on. She wouldn’t have gone so soon. That’s what he said.’
‘And what,’ asked Lady Lucy quietly, praying for one last lucid moment, ‘did he say to himself in his sleep by the fire after supper?’
‘They call this one the Temple of Flora, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, ushering him inside. The air was damp. Spiders were taking over the left-hand wall of the little temple, their webs cascading down the walls. There were a couple of busts of ancient heroes and two sturdy seats, almost benches, on either side.
‘Did Old Mr Harrison ever stop here,’ asked Powerscourt, looking carefully at the statues, ‘to read his papers or to write?’
‘Only very rarely, my lord. Very rarely.’ Samuel Parker was shaking his head, the wisps of his grey beard waving in symmetry. ‘Once or twice he did, perhaps. One day I do remember him stopping in here and me bringing in his little table off the pony.’
‘Can you remember how long ago that was? Did he seem to be in a great hurry to get started that day?’ Powerscourt was looking carefully at the busts, Marcus Aurelius on the left, he thought, Alexander the Great on the right.
‘I think he was, my lord. In a hurry, I mean. And I think that would have been last summer. I remember it was very hot, even though it was early in the morning.’
They set off again, the path turning now uphill towards the tree-lined hills, now down towards the water’s edge. Sometimes another temple could be seen across the lake, sitting proudly on its semi-circle of turf. Sometimes it disappeared, lost among the bushes and the trees.
‘I presume, Mr Parker,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that the garden was designed a long time ago, long before the Harrisons came here?’
‘It was, my lord. It was created in the seventeen hundreds, I think. But Old Mr Harrison knew all about it. He used to quote to me in Latin sometimes out of his head. He read all about the building of it in the library up in the big house.’
They passed through a grotto, where a statue of a river god pointed the way forwards and a marble maiden slumbered on her bed of rock while the water dripped on all around her.
‘I don’t suppose Mr Harrison did much work here,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, as he bumped his head on a rocky outcrop, the bottoms of his trousers watered by the local deities.
‘Not in there, my lord. But just a few yards up the road is what they call The Cottage. He worked a lot in there.’
The lake frontage was open at this point, with wide views across the water. A kingfisher, brilliant in blue, shot across the water at astonishing speed. On the hills above the lake the birds were singing happily, making occasional forays to forage at the water’s edge.
The Cottage was laid out like a small summerhouse, converted only a couple of years before.
‘In here,’ Samuel Parker wrestled with his keys again, ‘there is a table by the window as you can see. Sometimes I would wait for an hour or so while he wrote things or pottered about. Quite often he would break off in the middle of something and go and stare at the water, just by that tree over there. Then he would go back inside. The pony always liked to stop here. The grass is quite lush round this part.’ What on earth was the old man writing down here? thought Powerscourt. Who was he writing to? Did these peaceful pursuits lead to his death? What was he looking for? Of one thing he was certain. Long before he came on the scene somebody else had embarked on a journey of discovery. The old man had been here before him. But of the nature of his quest, or his success or failure, he had, for the present, no idea.