‘I would prefer it if you wouldn’t all talk at once for a start,’ said Powerscourt, exacting a minor revenge for the marmalade war.
The men laughed, a male combination against women and wives.
‘What I want is very simple. I want information about a number of people. I want information about their families, information about their finances, information about their fortunes, if they have any, or have recently lost them all. Informal information, the kind that comes easily in conversation, and, if I dare to use the word in this company, gossip. I have suddenly become a great fan of gossip. The kind of things, I am told, that ladies have been known to talk about when they are together. Not that there is anything wrong with gossip.’ He thought briefly of the witches conspiring again, spells cast, potions prepared, strange smells rising from the heath.
‘I have here,’ he said, anticipating what he knew was the next question, certainly from his sisters, ‘a list of the people involved. I should say that there is no suspicion at all that any of them has done anything wrong.’ He passed glibly over the lie, not daring to tell the family that one of his names might have murdered the heir presumptive to the throne. ‘No suspicion at all.’
Lord Henry Lancaster, Harry Radclyffe, Charles Peveril, William Brockham, Lord Edward Gresham, the Honourable Frederick Mortimer. Powerscourt recited the names easily. He used to recite them to himself in moments of boredom, shaving, or waiting for the underground railway trains to appear.
‘But, Francis -’ began Rosalind.
‘What exactly is it -’ said Mary Burke.
‘Do you seriously expect us -’ asked Eleanor, her face bright with interest and curiosity.
‘There you go again. You’re all talking at once. Just for a change.’ Powerscourt smiled at his three witches, as if their spells were kindly. ‘One at a time, please.’
‘Francis,’ said his eldest sister Rosalind, taking on the rights of birth, ‘do you actually expect us to go about interrogating people about these young men? As if we were policemen or something?’
‘I do not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I merely thought that at what you feel to be the appropriate moment you could try to steer the conversation in their direction. You haven’t heard anything about them for a while. Is it true that such and such a one is engaged to be married? Or that so and so has lost the family fortune? I am told,’ he smiled a rueful smile as he continued, ‘that ladies in society do actually have conversations of this sort from time to time.’
‘Did you know that one of those young men is dead, Powerscourt?’ Pembridge interrupted, looking very grave. ‘Lancaster. He was killed in a shooting accident in Norfolk, somewhere near Melton Constable, I believe. Terrible business.’
So that was what Dawnay had done with him, thought Powerscourt. He remembered the Major’s promise that he, Dawnay, would look after the business of the body in the woods, the brains scattered around the Sandringham trees. Forever Faithful. Semper Fidelis.
‘Yes, I did.’ Powerscourt too looked sombre. A hush had fallen in the dining-room, faint reflections of Pembridge’s shirt and Lady Lucy’s hands visible in the polished table. ‘But I am afraid that he too must be included in these conversations. His death, dare I say it, might provide a useful point of introduction.’
‘What do you want us to do with this information? Just tell you the next time we see you?’
‘No, I don’t want you to do that. I want you to write it down.’
This brought howls of pain and anguish from the three sisters.
‘Francis, you can’t be serious.’
‘We’re not going back to school.’
‘This isn’t some essay prize is it, Francis?’
William Burke came to his rescue. ‘If I may say so, that is a most sensible suggestion. People in my line of work are always forgetting exactly what people said to them. The only way to be sure is to write it all down. One of the companies I am attached to has declared it to be company policy now. Writing things down, I mean.’
‘And what should we do when we have written it all down in our little notebooks?’ Lady Eleanor was retreating defiantly.
‘You could give it to me in person. Or you could post it to me here.’
Powerscourt thought the battle was won, the witches retreating, the cauldron off the boil.
‘Tell me, Francis,’ William Burke spoke again. ‘Tell me about this financial information you want. Do you think there might be anything untoward about the situation of these young men?’
‘I would be most interested to know’ – Powerscourt looked round the table once again, daring to drop in the one word which he knew would command universal attention – ‘if any of them were being blackmailed. Or, for that matter, if they might have been blackmailing anybody else.’
15
Morpeth railway station arrived precisely on time, fulfilling the promises of Lord Rosebery’s train-obsessed butler. The sun was setting as Powerscourt set off towards the Queen’s Hotel in Bridge Street, grey clouds chasing each other across a darkening sky. The following morning, at ten o’clock, he was due to call on Captain John Williams of Station Road, Amble, one-time commander of the naval training ship HMS Britannia. Powerscourt had written his letter most carefully, timing his visit for the early morning when full defences might not yet be in position.
An enormous building, easily the largest in the little market town, was set back from the houses and the streets. The windows were small, narrow and barred all the way up to the top floor. A small mean entrance promised little welcome to the new arrivals. Northumberland County Lunatic Asylum, said the discreet sign on the driveway.
Powerscourt wondered how many were locked up inside. It must be hundreds, he thought to himself, hundreds and hundreds of lunatics, gathered together in this inhospitable northern town. The ones who couldn’t talk. The ones who wouldn’t talk. The ones who couldn’t stop. Silent people, lost to this world, possibly lost to the next, are wandering round this ghastly building.
Powerscourt suddenly remembered the haunting poems of John Clare, locked up in an asylum in his own county town of Northampton all those years ago. The defiant verses:
‘I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self consumer of my woes . . .
And yet I am . . .’
Were there hundreds of John Clares in there, scribbling furious protests about their own sanity, ever doubted by the hostile nurses and the overworked doctors, Julius Caesars, King Charles Is, Jesus Christs on patrol in the darkened corridors? Once you were in there, thought Powerscourt, hastening on his way to the saner quarters of the Queen’s Hotel, you might never get out. It was a sort of earthly limbo for the not yet dead, a prison for those whose most serious crimes had been committed inside their heads.
Captain Williams’ house stood in a little terrace of fishermen’s cottages, looking out over the river and the sea. A mile or so away inland the Percy castle at Alnwick stood proudly on its hill, surveying from its ruined battlements both land and sea.
Captain Williams himself opened the door.
‘I suppose you must be Lord Powerscourt,’ he said doubtfully, as if hoping that some other visitor might have knocked on his door. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, looking quickly round the little sitting-room. ‘How very good of you to spare the time to talk to me.’
Captain Williams’ sitting-room had seen better days. The wallpaper was beginning to peel off the walls. There were gaps on the walls, cleaner wallpaper visible, as if pictures had been removed, or sold, or pawned, though Powerscourt doubted if this little hamlet would boast a pawn shop. The fire in the grate sputtered hopelessly, trying in vain to light a room where the gloom seemed to have sunk into the furniture itself.