‘I don’t know, my love,’ said Powerscourt, handing over the letter. ‘When you have read that, you will know as much as I do.’
‘A troubling and troublesome matter.’ Lady Lucy looked up at her husband. ‘Do you suppose it has to do with divorce, people running off with other people’s wives and husbands, that sort of thing?’
‘I do hope not,’ said her husband. ‘We shall find out tomorrow.’ Powerscourt stretched out in his favourite armchair by the fire and began to read his book. He began, as is only proper, with the introduction. He did not feel it necessary to tell his wife that, as well as vast properties in the south of England, the Earl of Lincoln also had great estates in Ireland.
Gervase St Clair de Bonneval Brandon, eighth Earl of Lincoln, was waiting for Powerscourt in what the butler told him was the Great Ante Chamber of Kingsclere, a vast Palladian mansion just outside the little town of the same name. Powerscourt had often wondered why most of these people ended up living somewhere other than their names. The Dukes of Norfolk were not to be found near Diss or Fakenham or Cromer, but in the heart of rural Sussex. The Earls of Pembroke were nowhere close to Haverfordwest or Fishguard but outside Salisbury. And these Lincolns you might expect to see near Boston or Grantham or Louth were nestling happily in the peaceful county of Hampshire.
Brandon was in his early sixties with a formidable shock of black hair on top of a broad forehead. His jowls were very heavy, his eyes dark brown. Powerscourt thought they showed a lot of pain. He was wearing dark trousers and a rather raffish black smoking jacket over a cream shirt. Behind him Powerscourt glimpsed a vision of gold leaf and elaborate plasterwork, of proportions made in heaven, of red Chippendale chairs and a painted ceiling, of marble-topped tables and embossed doors, of Axminster carpets and the seventeenth-century heiresses and long-faced aristocrats created by the Court painter to Charles the First, Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Ladders and great planks were being moved around the room and there was a subdued muttering in French which Powerscourt couldn’t quite catch. He felt privileged to have caught even a fleeting sight of one of the great rooms of England, the Double Cube Room, made, he believed, to designs by Inigo Jones. The owner of this slice of earthly paradise stared at Powerscourt from his deep red leather armchair. There was a small table beside him with papers scattered across it as if the Earl had been reading them before Powerscourt’s arrival.
‘Damned doctors!’ said Brandon, trying unsuccessfully to rise from his chair to shake his visitor’s hand. ‘Damned medicines!’ He placed his hands on the side of his chair and made another attempt to lever himself upright. His face grew red from the exertions. Powerscourt felt that offers of help would be inappropriate for this grounded aristocrat.
‘Damned gout!’ he spluttered. ‘Why does the bloody thing have to come back the day you come to call? Damn my calf! Damn my other calf! Damn the bloody medicine! Damn the bloody doctors!’
‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Powerscourt emolliently. ‘Please stay right where you are,’ and he leaned forward and shook Brandon by the hand in his sitting position.
‘Damned doctors!’ said the irascible Earl. ‘Do you know I once got this bloody gout in my big toe? Not once, twice, now I think about it. Do you think those damned medicine wallahs could do anything about it? Of course not!’
Powerscourt wondered if the whole morning would be spent on an extended philippic against his physicians. There was a loud bang from next door and the sound of a body falling to the floor. A string of French expletives followed, most of them completely new to Powerscourt who would, until now, have described himself as reasonably fluent in Gallic oaths. The accident seemed to cheer the invalid up, somebody perhaps more seriously handicapped than himself and about to be equally dependent on the passing whims of the medical profession.
‘Damned picture restorers!’ he said. ‘Cost me a bloody fortune and all they can do is fall off their ladders all day.’ With enormous effort and a continuous salvo of oaths the Earl managed to put one leg over the other. It appeared to bring some relief.
‘Damn my leg, Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘damn the bloody gout, we’d better get down to business, what!’
‘By all means,’ Powerscourt replied, accompanied by a groan from the picture-restoring department next door.
‘Don’t know if you know this, Powerscourt, but we own large estates in Ireland as well as round here.’ Brandon waved an arm in a circular fashion as if to indicate the range of his English holdings. ‘Good land, Westmeath and places like that, none of your damned peat bogs and perpetual rainfall out there in the mists of County Mayo. Damn this disease!’ The unfortunate Earl had apparently just endured a twitch of great ferocity in his lower leg which he was rubbing incredulously, as if in amazement that a part of his own anatomy could cause him so much distress.
‘Thing is,’ Brandon winced as he carried on, ‘there has recently been a series of robberies. Not just at our place but the one next door as well.’
Powerscourt felt slightly let down. If asked, he would have said he didn’t do burglaries. Murders, yes. Blackmail, yes. Disappearing diplomats, yes. But men with blackened faces climbing through a downstairs window and making off with the family silver, no. Some of his distaste must have made itself apparent. Brandon almost managed a laugh.
‘Don’t go looking down your nose at our little bit of crime yet,’ he said, holding firmly on to his calf. ‘Wait till you hear what they took, these Celtic burglars.’
‘What did they take?’ said Powerscourt, feeling like the feed man in the music hall.
‘They didn’t take the obvious things,’ Brandon carried on, interrupted by a torrent of French from the Double Cube Room. ‘They didn’t take the silver, they didn’t touch any of the antiques, they didn’t look for any cash, they just took paintings.’
‘Paintings?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What sort of paintings?’
‘In my place, called Butler’s Court, the family is called Butler. We own a great heap of land there, the Butlers own another great heap, they’re our relations, they live there, they farm the land for us. They’ve been there for hundreds of years and they’re related to those other Butlers who own half of Munster. Come to that, they’re related to about half the quality in the south of Ireland. So damned few of them left they’ll all be bloody well interbreeding soon.’ He paused briefly as if contemplating incest rife from Offaly to the Kerry peninsula. ‘I digress,’ he went on. ‘Eight generations of Butlers have disappeared from the walls, going right back to a Sir Thomas Butler in the seventeenth century. Four more Sir Thomases have gone – Butlers win no prizes for originality in naming their sons. And a Caravaggio. And a couple of Rubens.’
‘Do you know, Lord Brandon, if any of these portraits were by famous artists, any Romneys, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds, that sort of thing?’
‘Damned if I know, Powerscourt,’ said Brandon, eyeing his leg suspiciously. ‘I can just about keep it in my head that the stuff on the walls next door is by some character called Van Dyck. Not a clue who did these Irish daubs at all. Funny thing, here I sit, surrounded, they tell me, by all this priceless stuff, and it doesn’t mean a thing to me. My father said they should have bought horses with the money the ancestors spent. His father believed it would have been better invested buying vineyards in France. Never mind.’
Powerscourt wondered if the Caravaggio and a couple of Rubens were the real target and the portraits a diversion. Or was it the other way round?
‘And what about the neighbours, Lord Brandon? Did the same thing happen there?’
‘Ten out of ten, Lord Powerscourt. I can see now where your reputation comes from.’ Powerscourt wasn’t sure if he was being ironic.