‘So we waited on the far side of the trapdoor. Once the smoke got thick in that corridor outside 607 we dropped a man down to hide behind the cupboards. He had a piece of string like that woman in the labyrinth in Crete or Rhodes or wherever it was. One tug meant they were coming up, two tugs meant they were going down. Once we felt the tugs that they were going down we went for those rooms. Lady Powerscourt was waiting for us. I think she thought I was you, my lord.’
Chief Inspector Robin Tait blushed. ‘I got a great big hug, my lord. But Lady Powerscourt was in rather a bad way. She needed fresh air, so we brought her along the roof. I think she’s better now.’
‘I am so grateful to you all,’ said Lady Lucy. Powerscourt was thrilled to hear the sound of her voice again.
‘I think Lady Powerscourt needs to stay up here in the fresh air for a bit longer,’ said Tait firmly. ‘It’s still very smoky down below. And you don’t look too good yourself, my lord.’
Chief Inspector Tait smiled. As he led his men down the stairs each one was embraced by Lady Lucy. They’re hers for life now, thought Powerscourt.
‘Lucy, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m so happy. I don’t know what to say.’
Lady Lucy smiled back at him. She looked around at her strange surroundings, up on the roof with chimney pots and great wires and cables running everywhere. Just beneath them a grey and silver sea stretched out towards the distant horizon. It looked like polished glass.
‘Just for the moment, Francis,’ she said, ‘up here on our own with the moon and the stars, you don’t have to say anything at all.’
34
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were taking a late breakfast in the Prince Regent the morning after the rescue. Powerscourt had not been able to get all the smoke out of his hair. He felt as if one of Joseph Hardy’s barrels was still smouldering on the top of his skull. Lady Lucy looked tired. The long strain of her ordeal had not yet passed. The man asking to join them was the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Schomberg McDonnell.
‘McDonnell!’ said Powerscourt with an air of great surprise. ‘How very nice to see you. Some coffee? I thought you had gone back to London.’
Powerscourt didn’t recall seeing McDonnell at the impromptu party in the King George the Fourth in the small hours of the morning the night before. Albert Hudson, the manager, had opened his bar in person, serving free drinks to the strange collection of policemen and firemen, departing from his post only to go down to his cellars and fetch more cases of champagne. Powerscourt particularly enjoyed overhearing Hudson asking the Chief Constable to whom he should send the bill for repairs to his hotel. Hudson had blinked several times when told he should post it to Number 10 Downing Street.
Johnny Fitzgerald had commandeered two bottles of the hotel’s finest Burgundy. ‘It tastes fantastic after a long period of abstinence, Francis,’ he had assured Powerscourt and Lady Lucy. ‘Nearly thirty-six hours without a drop. I think I might try this abstaining business again. But not for a while yet.’
The Chief Constable knew a remarkable collection of sea-shanties. Surprisingly the policemen knew all the words. Joe Hardy had wandered round the undamaged sections of the hotel, delighted at how well his plans had worked. ‘Wonderful!’ he had said to all and sundry after a couple of glasses. ‘Wonderful! Best night of my life!’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Schomberg McDonnell, looking carefully at Powerscourt, ‘that when I came down from London last night I had three letters from the Prime Minister in my possession. One was for our friend Mr Hudson. One was for the Chief Constable.’ He paused to demolish part of a kipper. ‘The third one is for you.’
Powerscourt opened the envelope. He felt sick.
‘My dear Lord Powerscourt,’ he read, ‘May I add my congratulations to those you must have already received on the successful liberation of Lady Powerscourt. I always knew you would succeed.
‘But I fear your country has more to ask of you yet. We have a major security crisis over the Queen’s Jubilee Parade. I am not au fait with all the details myself but Mr Dominic Knox of the Irish Office tells me that some German rifles have gone missing. Mr Knox tells me that you know of these rifles, that you were indeed instrumental in tracking them to their place of concealment. Knox thought he had intercepted the people he believed were bringing this weaponry to London. Now he thinks the messengers were merely decoys, designed to throw him off the scent. He believes that one or more of these rifles may be in London where an unknown assassin may be waiting to kill Her Majesty on Jubilee Day itself.
‘I would like you to return to London immediately and assist Mr Knox in his endeavours.’
Powerscourt handed the letter to Lady Lucy. He remembered that terrible night in the Wicklow Mountains where he had feigned death to put his enemies off the scent, two coffins filled with German rifles buried in the grave of Thomas Carew, two more interred in a windswept cemetery high up in the hills where Martha O’Driscoll shared her eternal rest with Mausers or Schneiders.
‘Francis.’ Lady Lucy’s voice was very firm. Many of her vast tribe of relations – enough, Powerscourt had once said, to fill two rotten boroughs in the days before the Great Reform Bill – had served in the military. Maybe the sense of duty passes down the generations. ‘I know it’s terrible,’ she said, ‘but there is no choice. We must go back to London at once. I so much want to see the children anyway. It’s only a few more days.’ She smiled bravely at him. Schomberg McDonnell had nearly demolished his kipper.
‘Can I ask you two questions, McDonnell?’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘Of course I shall come. But what does Dominic Knox think should happen if he doesn’t find these rifles?’
McDonnell drank some of his coffee. ‘He has a very devious mind, that Dominic Knox,’ he began.
God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. What kind of Machiavellian intelligence does the man possess if McDonnell thinks he is devious?
‘We can’t cancel the parade. One of his suggestions is to declare that the Queen has been taken ill. She does not ride through the streets of London at all but merely appears for the Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s.’
‘And the other?’ Powerscourt was fascinated.
‘The other is that we have a substitute, an old lady of the same shape and size, dressed exactly like Her Majesty, who rides out from Buckingham Palace on the great parade.’
Powerscourt wondered briefly if McDonnell wished he had thought of that one himself. ‘It’s bit tricky,’ he said, ‘if she happens to get shot and the world thinks it was the Queen.’
‘At least the Queen would still be alive,’ said McDonnell frostily. ‘You said you had two questions, Lord Powerscourt. What was the second one?’ McDonnell sounded like a man anxious to get away.
‘You said you brought three letters down to Brighton with you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I just wonder if you didn’t bring four.’
‘What would the fourth one have been?’ said McDonnell, taking refuge behind a large slice of buttered toast.
‘I think the first paragraph with congratulations about Lucy’s rescue would have turned into a paragraph of commiserations about its failure. But I think the second paragraph, bidding me come to London, would have been exactly the same. Am I right?’
Schomberg McDonnell, private secretary to the Prime Minister, confidant and colleague of the most powerful man in Great Britain, laughed.
‘I’m afraid you’re absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt. I tore the fourth letter into very small pieces first thing this morning.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘We’d better go,’ he said.
As they made their way out of the hotel dining room they were greeted enthusiastically by Joe Hardy. He embraced Lady Lucy and shook Powerscourt vigorously by the hand.
‘Just wanted to say, Lord Powerscourt, that I’m at your disposal for any further bonfires you may be planning. Gunpowder Plot, re-run of the Great Fire of London, burning down the Houses of Parliament again, I’m your man! Best night of my life!’