Down below in her drawing-room Lady Rosalind had an image of Francis and Lucy living in a large house. The top floor was a whole series of huge boards. Battles, soldiers, guns, drums were laid out across the attics.
Malplaquet, she thought. Blenheim. Oudenaard. She stopped.
She couldn’t remember any more battles.
9
The Times, Monday, 11th January 1892
The Influenza
Illness of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale
We regret to announce that the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, who is with the Prince and Princess of Wales at Sandringham, is suffering from a severe attack of influenza, accompanied by pneumonia. A telegram last evening from Sandringham states that his Royal Highness’ strength is well maintained. Dr Laking has been at Sandringham since Saturday. All the Duke’s engagements have, of course, for the present, been cancelled.
‘You must have seen lots of dead bodies, Lord Powerscourt?’ Lord Henry Lancaster was the man who had found the body of Prince Eddy. He was the younger son of the Duke of Dorset, twenty-five years old, tall and very slim, his fair hair blowing in the stiff North Sea wind. Powerscourt had taken him right away from Sandringham House to walk in the dunes and the sand beyond Hunstanton, a few miles up the coast.
‘I mean, I’ve seen a few,’ he went on, as if not wanting to seem a complete innocent in such matters, ‘but you must have seen lots and lots.’
Powerscourt looked at him with a sudden rush of sympathy. He had thought of this interview as an interrogation in his mind; he had rehearsed in his analytical way the various avenues he would explore, the points where the evasions would most likely come, the lies he might be told. Now he saw that it was not the mind of the historian that was called for, but the empathy of a father. Well, his period of fatherhood had been brief, but he had served a long and often painful apprenticeship as an elder brother.
‘Well, I saw quite a few in India in some of those Afghan wars and things, you know. It’s always all right in the heat of battle when the blood is pumping through your veins. If it’s going well, you think you’re immortal, that you can’t be killed that day. It’s only afterwards that men grow sad when they think of their fallen comrades. Like Byron in Childe Harold where he talked of
“the unreturning brave, – alas!
Ere evening to be trodden like the grass
Which now beneath them, but above shall grow
In its next verdure, when this fiery mass
Of living valour, rolling on the foe
And burning with high hope, shall moulder cold and low.”
‘I had to recite that in front of the whole school when I was twelve years old,’ said Lancaster. ‘I can still remember it word for word.’
‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You would remember something like that.’
They had crossed the dunes and were walking along the shore, an angry sea stretching its dark grey lines towards a faint horizon. Now, thought Powerscourt, now was the time to begin his questions.
‘What was it like when you found him?’ he said, throwing an idle stone far out into the waves. The stone was ice cold on his hand.
‘It was terrible, terrible.’ The young man shuddered as if trying to recover something he wanted to forget. ‘There was the smell.’ He trembled slightly. ‘It was thick, very thick so that it was almost hard to breathe and strong like some terrible perfume of the dead.’ He paused. Powerscourt said nothing. He waited.
‘Then there was the blood. They tell you it’s red. This wasn’t just red. It was black in places and where it was still dripping from his wrists it was this unbelievably bright red, as if it had been polished. There was a huge puddle of it over by the window.’
‘The army doctors will be able to tell us quite soon when he died. They were examining the body last night when everybody had gone to bed. You see, I don’t know why, I think he may have been killed first and then those other cuts made which caused all the blood.’
Even as he spoke Powerscourt regretted what he said. It was not for him in these circumstances to show off his clever theories. The special forces may have searched the roof and the grounds, they may have been conducting inquiries near and far about mysterious strangers in the area, the Prince of Wales may have been convinced that the murderer was some foreign fiend, some Russian or Irish fanatic in the pay of Her Majesty’s enemies. Powerscourt was virtually certain that the murderer had slept between clean sheets in a clean bed as a guest in Sandringham House before venturing up the stairs to slaughter Prince Eddy. And here he was, confiding his innermost thoughts to a man who must be one of the main suspects in the affair. How stupid! He cursed himself for his folly.
‘But tell me,’ Powerscourt hurried on, trying to conceal the import of what he had just said, ‘was he lying on his back when you saw him?’
‘He was. And, you know, I’ve been trying to get this out of my mind ever since, but he had a sort of silly grin on his face even with his throat cut like that. You’ve seen the body, I presume?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Powerscourt, ‘and I’m afraid that is rather a good description of it. Was the window open when you saw it?’
‘Yes, it was, but the breeze wasn’t enough to get rid of the smell.’
‘What else did you notice?’
‘Well, I’m afraid I’m not trained in these matters . . .’ His voice trailed away. The roaring of the wind and the crashing of the waves meant that the two men were almost shouting at each other. Their words were being carried away over their shoulders to be lost over the dark expanse of the North Sea.
‘I mean anything apart from the dead man, was there anything unusual about the furniture or the clothes or anything?’ Powerscourt was leaning close to Lancaster as he spoke.
‘I don’t think so.’ The young man sounded doubtful. The wind got up suddenly and a small wall of howling sand battered their eyes and faces. It would, felt Powerscourt, be the perfect cover for somebody with something to hide. Was this the moment for the lie?
‘You didn’t tidy anything away, or clear something up off the floor?’
‘How did you know, how did you know?’ Lancaster spoke very softly, and as he looked at Powerscourt, there was a terrible supplication in his eyes. Powerscourt was to wonder for weeks afterwards what it meant. For the moment, he remained silent. ‘There was a picture on the floor. It had been smashed into little tiny pieces. It must have taken a great deal of force to do it. It looked as if the murderer had swivelled the heel of his boot on the glass and the picture over and over again. It was as if there was as much hatred going into that as had gone into the murder itself.’
‘And could you tell whose picture it was?’ Powerscourt spoke slowly now.
‘Oh yes, you see that’s what must have made the murderer so cross, the fact that the image wouldn’t be reduced to a pulp. It was Prince Eddy’s fiancee, Princess May of Teck.’
‘And what did you do with the pieces?’
‘I – I tried to pick them all up,’ said Lancaster, his slim frame swaying in the wind. ‘I put them in my pocket and when everybody was busy, I took them into Sandringham Woods and threw them on to a pile of rubbish. Look here, you do believe me, don’t you?’
Powerscourt had no idea who to believe any more. But after his earlier mistake, he knew what he had to do. ‘Of course I believe you, Lord Lancaster.’ He put his arm round the young man. ‘Of course I do.’