Captain Williams wasn’t in much better shape himself. He must have been very tall when he was younger, Powerscourt thought, looking at the hunched figure in the chair. His hair had gone. His teeth were going, black and yellow against the sad pink oval of his lips. His spirit seemed to have gone too, his clothes hanging listlessly off him, as if he didn’t look at what he put on when he rose in the mornings. The eyes were red and Captain Williams tried to hide them, staring down at the fading patterns of his carpet rather than looking directly at his visitor. Drink, thought Powerscourt. The man must drink like a fish to have eyes like that. Appropriate in a place like this, fish everywhere. Good God, he can’t have been drinking already, it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. Even Johnny Fitzgerald, always drinking but seldom drunk, didn’t start at this hour of the day.
‘Did you come by train, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘I did, I came up yesterday and stayed the night at Morpeth.’
‘They say the trains get faster all the time nowadays.’ Captain Williams sounded as if he were playing for time, small talk postponing whatever interrogation might follow.
‘I’ve brought you this.’ Powerscourt took out one of his letters from Downing Street, now enclosed in a plain white envelope belonging to the Queen’s Hotel, Morpeth, and addressed in a clear hand.
‘You said you had a letter.’ Williams fumbled for his spectacles, perusing the document with a look of growing terror on his face. ‘Your business must be pretty important then, Lord Powerscourt.’ Captain Williams wondered if he could spirit himself away somewhere for a bracing dose of brandy.
Powerscourt looked at him sharply, the hands trembling as he handed back the letter. Thank heavens I came in the morning, he said to himself. God only knows what he’s like in the afternoons.
‘My wife has gone out for the day.’ Captain Williams looked desolate, as if his wife could have driven off what might follow.
‘What I want to know is quite simple, Captain Williams.’ Powerscourt tried to sound as gentle as he could. ‘What exactly happened at the end of your time in charge of HMS Britannia all those years ago? When you had the two young Princes in your charge.’
‘I knew you would come.’ Captain Williams wrapped his jacket ever closer round his thin frame. ‘Ever since, I have always known that somebody like you would come. Asking questions. Raking up the past. Dredging up things that happened long ago. Why can’t it be left in peace? Why can’t I be left alone? It wasn’t my fault, I tell you, it wasn’t my fault.’
Powerscourt felt sorry for him for a moment, a lost old man, waiting thirteen years for the knock on the door, the letter through the post. He, Powerscourt, was the exterminating angel, come to destroy what was left of an old man’s peace of mind. He thought of Prince Eddy and the rictus of death on his face, blood lying in pools across the floor, he thought of Lord Henry Lancaster lying dead in the forest. Semper Fidelis, he said to himself. Semper Fidelis.
‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ said Powerscourt suddenly, trying to temper perseverance with mercy. ‘You might find it easier outside. You can tell the waves. You can tell the seagulls. You can tell the sand-dunes. I shall just be listening in.’
‘A walk?’ Captain Williams looked at him as if he were mad. Walks, however good they might be for clearing the mind of drink, didn’t appear to feature in the old man’s morning routine.
‘A walk by the sea.’ Powerscourt pressed his case. ‘At least it’s not pouring with rain.’
Two figures set out from the little cottage, the old man hunched against the bitter wind, a threadbare coat small protection against the elements, Powerscourt wrapped in his warmest cape, buttoned right up to his throat. They crossed the river and began to trudge through the sand.
One hundred yards out to sea, sometimes two hundred, great breakers began to form, crests of foam flying proudly behind them as they crashed in towards the beach. The spray was like fine rain, drifting in towards the sand-dunes and the distant castle. A lone seagull tried an unequal contest with the wind, now stationary, now blown backwards with the force of the blast. The noise thundered along the solitary beach, waves driven forward on their final journey as far as the eye could see.
‘Begin wherever you like,’ Powerscourt shouted, trying not to sound too hostile.
‘That’s very kind of you. Very kind of you indeed.’ The voice was thin and bitter. Powerscourt strained to hear it through the gale, and huddled ever closer to his companion.
There was a pause, their feet scrunching though the sand. Powerscourt waited. Far out to sea, two ships were pitching violently in the swell. More seagulls tested their wingpower against the wind. Powerscourt waited.
‘I suppose it all began when those young officers took Prince Eddy off to Portsmouth.’
Captain Williams’ words flew past Powerscourt. He strained to catch them, like a slip fielder diving after a thick outside edge.
‘They were meant to bring him back that night. That had all been agreed. I remember it so clearly.’ Captain Williams turned to Powerscourt, red eyes weeping with the weather.
‘But they didn’t. They disobeyed orders.’
A pause followed as the Captain’s mind was forced back thirteen years to the events preceding his disgrace.
‘They took him to some seamen’s brothel. They said they wanted to make a man of him. They said it was time for a boy who would be a king one day to become a man. And after a couple of hours, they went back and took him to another one.’
‘Another brothel?’ Powerscourt tried to shout the words gently.
‘I’m afraid so. There may even have been a third one before the night was out. And then he was brought home. I threw the book at him for disobeying orders, not coming home when he was told. Do you know what he did, Prince Eddy? He just smiled at me, that rather silly smile of his.’
A smile he took with him to the grave, thought Powerscourt, remembering Lancaster’s description of the corpse.
‘What we didn’t know, of course, was what went on with the older boys in the dormitories last thing at night.’
Oh my God, thought Powerscourt. Oh my God. He remembered Lady Eleanor’s husband’s accounts of some of the activities that went on in places like the Britannia. The sea was now depositing great sausages of foam on the shore in front of them. As the wind drove them along the beach, they gradually evaporated, the foam blown away across the dunes.
‘There was a group of five of them,’ Williams went on, hurrying now, as if he was thinking of a large drink when his ordeal was over.
Five of them, thought Powerscourt bitterly. Just like those bloody equerries.
‘Illicit sexual relations, that’s what the admiral who conducted the inquiry called it. Five of them having illicit sexual relations with each other. They all got ill. Very ill.’
‘Ill with what?’ Powerscourt was whispering now.
‘Syphilis, that’s what they said it was. Syphilis. I’d never heard of it until then.’
Ulcers, Powerscourt remembered, it started with ulcers. Then fevers, headaches, spots, lesions, pustules. The New World’s revenge on the Old, carried back across the Atlantic by Colum-bus’s sailors and their successors to be spread round the cities of Europe. The French pox, very difficult to cure. Sea journeys, he said to himself, didn’t they think that long sea journeys might be the answer? Get yourself a ship, call it the Bacchante for want of a better name, pack on board the offending Prince and his brother, send them all round the world. Sea journeys. No chance of infecting anybody else, he said to himself, that bloody boat will have been patrolled night and day, the crew and passengers vetted right down to their buttonholes. God in heaven.
‘The Prince’s father was very good to the other boys, the ones who were ill. They said he paid for their treatment too, that he looked after them very well.’