Powerscourt sat on the ground and began working through Mr Parker’s keys. There must have been over fifty on the ring. Beyond the island a cormorant beat its way across the lake, making guttural calls to its fellows. Blackwater foresters could be heard way in the distance sawing at a rotten tree. He wondered if the key had been kept by Old Mr Harrison himself on his own key ring. Perhaps it had been removed, like his head, before his last macabre voyage down the Thames to London Bridge. Then he found it. The key was stiff, maybe the lock was stiff after all that time in the tree. Powerscourt turned it and found a very small pile of papers at the bottom of the box. Damp had got to some of them, the ink fading before its time. There was a musty smell as if the papers themselves were going bad.
He pulled out four letters, all written in German. There were also two newspaper articles, going yellow with age. Both related to the fall of Barings Bank some seven years before. The old man had made marks on the articles in a red pen, circling some passages and underlining others. Maybe Harrison’s had been involved in the rescue, Powerscourt thought.
Should he put the letters back in the box? Should he take the box away with him? Should he take the box back to Mr Parker and tell him he was taking it and its contents back to London? He looked at the key, sitting comfortably on Mr Parker’s key ring. It looked as though it had been there for years. He wondered once more about Samuel Parker, sitting on the ground, looking out over the water. He could see his little rowing boat bobbing gently up and down. The classical facade of the Pantheon was on his other side, the statues within guarding their ancient mysteries. Was Samuel Parker secretly in league with Charles Harrison, reporting Powerscourt’s every move and repeating every word he said? He couldn’t be sure. He even wondered about an unlikely alliance between Parker and Jones the butler, praying together perhaps on the stone floor, whisky bottles drained beside the shells and the golden cross as they planned a campaign of fire and murder.
Whatever he did he must act fast. Powerscourt thought he had been on the island for about ten minutes. That he could describe satisfactorily. Anything longer might be a problem. He took the letters and the newspaper articles out of the box. He folded them carefully and put them in his pocket. Please God I don’t have an accident on the way back to the shore, he said to himself, the papers would become so sodden you couldn’t read anything at all. He locked the box and put it back in the tree. He covered it with the towels and its trapdoor. Then he gathered some leaves and moss from the bottom of the tree and placed them on top. He found a branch lying on the ground and brushed the area around it, trying to remove any footprints that might reveal his presence.
Then he went back. Mr Parker was waiting for him at the boathouse. Powerscourt wondered if Parker had watched his every move. He looked back to the island, reassured that you could not have seen a man removing boxes from the hollow tree. ‘Did your mission meet with success, my lord?’
‘In a way it did,’ said Powerscourt, handing over the keys. ‘I’d completely forgotten how much I enjoyed rowing. Maybe I shall get back on the river.’
Powerscourt was lost in thought about possible links between Blackwater, Berlin and Harrison’s Bank when he returned to Markham Square. The noise hit him as soon as he opened the door. There seemed to have been an insurrection on the upper floors. Doors were banging. Fists were beating on the walls. Occasional screams broke through the high-pitched racket. Punctuating the sound effects came the repeated cry ‘I don’t want to go to bed! I don’t want to go to bed!’ Thomas Powerscourt was not on his best behaviour.
His father took the stairs two at a time and confronted his wayward son. He was wrestling with the nurse in the corridor outside the bathroom over a pyjama top which she seemed to think he should be wearing. Thomas, for his part, had correctly identified the donning of the pyjama top as a form of surrender to the demands of bedtime. ‘I don’t want to go to bed, Papa. I don’t want to go to bed.’ He stamped a small foot defiantly on the floor.
Powerscourt couldn’t help smiling at the intensity of his son’s passion. Men had presented Bills or Budgets in the House of Commons with less feeling than this.
‘Now then, Thomas, let me tell you something.’ He picked up the angry bundle and pressed him tight against his shoulder. ‘Everybody goes to bed. I go to bed. Mama goes to bed. Your grandparents go to bed. The Prime Minister goes to bed. Queen Victoria goes to bed. I expect God goes to bed.’
He suddenly realized he might have made a mistake. He could be involved for hours in discussion about what kind of bed the Almighty slept in, whether God wore pyjamas, what time he retired, who read him a bedtime story. He took a quick look at Thomas. The waves of wrath seemed to be subsiding. Thomas looked as if he was about to ask a question.
Powerscourt thought rapidly about a diversion. He searched desperately in his pockets. Help was at hand.
‘Look, I’ve got you some more coins. For your collection. French ones. I don’t think you’ve got any of those, have you?’
He produced two gold French coins from his pocket. The little boy was fascinated by coins and had amassed a large collection, kept in remarkably tidy piles on a shelf in his room. Lady Lucy was already convinced he was going to be the foremost banker in London when he grew up. Powerscourt would tell her gloomily that the coin obsession could just as easily lead to an alternative career as London’s most successful burglar.
Thomas inspected them carefully. The crisis seemed to have passed.
‘Can I go and look at them in my room, Papa?’
‘Of course you can. Nurse Mary Muriel will see you into bed,’ said Powerscourt in what he hoped was his most authoritative voice. It worked.
‘I’d better see to Olivia,’ said Mary Muriel, looking anxiously at her employer. ‘I think she’s still in the bath.’
‘Don’t worry about her,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘I’ll look in on her now.’
Olivia Eleanor Hamilton Powerscourt was sitting happily in a few inches of water. Even at the age of two and a half she seemed to have the smile of satisfaction children sometimes wear when their elder brothers or sisters are in trouble with the authorities.
‘Hello, Olivia,’ said Powerscourt, sitting on a wet chair at the side of the bath.
‘Thomas naughty,’ said his daughter, pointing out of the door. ‘Thomas naughty boy.’
‘Never mind about Thomas,’ replied her father, anxious to change the subject. ‘We’d better get you out of the bath.’
He reached down and let the plug out. ‘Watch the way the water goes out. It’ll go round and round in circles in a minute.’
The little girl looked at him with disapproval. Then she watched, fascinated, as the water did indeed go round in circles.
‘Olivia,’ said her father, ‘I’m going to turn you into a parcel.’
Little Olivia’s favourite person in the whole world was her grandmother. Powerscourt’s parents were dead, but Lady Lucy’s had two houses, an eighteenth-century mansion in Oxfordshire and a huge castle in Scotland, full of dark corridors and Jacobite ghosts.
‘I simply don’t understand it, Francis,’ Lucy had often said of her mother. ‘When we were little, there was no affection at all. If you were lucky you got an occasional peck on the cheek, that was it. The horses and the dogs seemed to get much more love than the children. Just look at the difference now.’
Maybe it was because Olivia Eleanor Hamilton Powerscourt was Lady Macleod’s first granddaughter after a large collection of boys. The old lady would take Olivia round the garden, showing her the flowers. She would take her to the stables and promise her a pony of her own when she was a little bit bigger. Biscuits would appear at regular intervals. At bedtime she would read stories to the little girl as if she wanted to do nothing else for the rest of the evening. Perhaps she didn’t. But the last time the family had been there Powerscourt had seen a very special event. The butler had walked into the room in the middle of the morning with a very large parcel for Olivia’s grandmother. Her name was written on it in large letters. There was an impressive collection of stamps. It was wrapped in thick brown paper with copious amounts of string. Olivia had been fascinated. She had been enrolled as her grandmother’s principal assistant in the unwrapping of the parcel. This, Powerscourt remembered, had taken almost an hour. Knots had to be undone. The string had to be carefully rolled up in little bundles. The brown paper had to be taken off very carefully. It too had to be folded. There was another layer of paper inside which required similar treatment. The final contents, a jumper of a sensible brown colour, had proved of little interest after all the previous excitement.