The old man peered at Powerscourt as if he’d forgotten his name. Outside bells were ringing. Bells never stopped ringing, Powerscourt remembered, bells for meals, bells for chapel, bells built to announce the glory of God that now just marked the passage of the days.
‘You sent me a telegram.’ Brooke said it like an accusation.
‘I did, sir.’
The old man looked at his piece of paper.
‘You made it sound very urgent, Powerscourt, very urgent.’
The old man picked up a pair of spectacles, lying on the floor on top of a great heap of recent copies of The Times.
‘“Request most urgent audience with you on matter of great importance. Must come Tuesday morning. Please advise if impossible.” Audience, he grinned, ‘audience. I like that. As if I were the Pope or Cardinal Richelieu himself. How can I be of assistance to you?’
‘I want to know,’ Powerscourt said, ‘about a German historian called Heinrich von Treitschke.’
Sophie Williams’ class was very excited that morning. They were making decorations for the Jubilee. Some of the children were drawing pictures of Queen Victoria, with the black pencils in heavy demand. Some were colouring in a huge map of Victoria’s Empire, the red of her domains running right round the world. Some were cutting coloured paper into streamers to hang on the walls.
‘What’s a Jubilee, Miss?’
‘A Jubilee is a celebration, Betty, rather like a birthday party. This Jubilee is for the Queen’s sixty years on the throne.’
‘Will she wear lots of diamonds when she goes on the big parade?’
Sophie had heard that William Jones’ father was believed to be a burglar. Perhaps he hoped to collect some useful intelligence to improve the family fortunes.
‘I’m sure she will, William. Just a few diamonds as it’s her Diamond Jubilee.’
‘Why are our bits red on the map, miss?’ demanded a very small but rather clever little boy.
‘Red, Peter, has always been the colour for the British Empire,’ said Sophie loyally, improvising some sort of reply when she didn’t know the answer.
‘Why haven’t we got all of it, miss? All of the map. Why are there some bits of the world that are not in our Empire?’
Sophie smiled at her little imperialist who was called Tommy and always had a dirty face. ‘Some countries just like to do things their own way, Tommy.’
‘Will Queen Victoria live for ever, miss? My father says she looks as though she’s lived for ever already.’
Sophie looked at the little girl. Then she looked at the Queen Empress, remote and aloof in her black dress in the portrait on the wall above her desk.
‘I don’t think she’ll live for ever. One day she’ll die, just like everybody else. But not for a while.’
‘Heinrich von Treitschke? Heinrich von Treitschke?’ The old man made him sound like a pheasant that had gone off or a bottle of corked wine.
‘Yes,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that’s the man I want information about.’
‘I shall ask you why later, Powerscourt. Let me give you the bare facts. Professor of Modern German History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Believed to have been a supporter of Bismarck in his youth, God help him. Used to give very popular lectures.’ Powerscourt remembered that Gavin Brooke’s lectures on modern European history had never been oversubscribed. ‘The fellow died last year. Thousands of people turned out for his funeral. Von Treitschke was buried like a hero of the nation.’
‘Was he a good historian, Mr Brooke? Was he controversial?’ Powerscourt remembered that there was nothing dons enjoyed more than attacking the reputations of their colleagues.
‘Depends what you mean by good and what you mean by historian, Powerscourt.’ Gavin Brooke didn’t disappoint him. ‘If you mean good in the moral sense, of striving towards some kind of virtue, then I should say the answer is No. If you mean good in the sense of being an original scholar, then the answer is No. If by historian you mean an accurate interpreter of the past, somebody who tried to describe what happened centuries or fifty years ago, then the answer is No. If by historian you mean someone who tells the story of the past without any theories or hobby horses of their own, then the answer is No.’
Powerscourt felt that von Treitschke, however distinguished in Berlin, was about to fail the Historical Tripos of the University of Cambridge.
‘I can see you thought he was a bad historian. What sort of bad historian was he?’ Gavin Brooke looked up at the bookshelves that dominated his room.
‘Treitschke wrote a History of Germany,’ he said. ‘It’s in five volumes. I’ve got them all up there.’ Brooke peered up at his bookshelves, stretching to the ceiling. ‘He was a bad historian because he was a preacher, not a historian. If there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach everybody here it’s that history doesn’t move in straight lines. Nations or peoples are not marked out by God or fate for supremacy over other nations. God knows there’s enough nonsense produced here about how the history of these islands has made us fit to rule the world.’
Powerscourt remembered Brooke’s onslaught on imperialist historians, the ones who said it was Britannia’s fate to rule the waves. They were his contemporaries. People said they had denied Brooke the chair he deserved.
‘Treitschke preached a German version of the same rubbish,’ Brooke continued his character assassination. ‘Germany’s destiny is to be the most important power in the world. That’s what German history teaches, according to the late Heinrich. Of course he was too stupid to see that he’s got it the wrong way round. He wants Germany to rule the world. Therefore he says that’s what history teaches.’
History, Powerscourt remembered him saying, is never a straight line between two points, more a series of accidental curves along a winding road filled with crossroads signposted to different destinations. Sometimes, he remembered, Brooke said the signposts had no destinations on them at all.
‘Perhaps I could ask you now, Lord Powerscourt, why you are interested in this man?’
Gavin Brooke inspected Powerscourt sharply. They never realize we grow up, we grow older, Powerscourt thought. To him I’m still twenty years old, sometimes producing essays that he liked, only yesterday or the day before.
Powerscourt explained that he was an investigator, currently looking into a strange series of deaths in a London bank that seemed to have links with secret societies in Berlin.
‘Secret societies?’ The old man was scornful. ‘Of course there’s a secret society in von Treitschke’s honour. I think it was founded over twenty years ago. Why didn’t you ask me in the first place?’
‘How do you know about that, Mr Brooke?’ Powerscourt had come to Cambridge to learn about von Treitschke the man. He would never have expected an ageing history don, who rarely left Cambridge and then only to venture as far as Oxford or the London Library, to know about secret societies at the University of Berlin.
‘Lots of historians knew about it.’ Gavin Brooke looked pleased with his knowledge. ‘The old boy himself used to boast about it in his later years. Treitschke said he hoped the society founded in his name would do more to restore Germany to her rightful place in the world than all his lectures and all his history books. We had a German historian here, ten years ago it must have been. They’d asked him if he wanted to join. He did, just to see what it was like. He said they were all fanatical German nationalists. Whatever profession they went into, the law, diplomacy, finance, the military, they had to do whatever they could and whatever the leaders asked them to advance the German cause.’
‘Did it have a name, this society, Mr Brooke?’
‘It did, Powerscourt, it did. But I’m damned if I can remember it. It’ll come to me.’ The bells were ringing twelve, echoing round the courts and the cloisters, fading away across the meandering river and the flat lands of the Fens. The old man shuffled towards a large glass-fronted cabinet to the side of his bookshelves.