‘Young Robinson.’ The eyes grew warier still. The vicar edged himself further back in his chair. ‘What can I tell you about him?’
‘Do you know what he died of?’
‘Oddly enough I don’t. One usually hears, you know, what people die of. I don’t think he actually died here. I think the body was brought from somewhere else.’
‘Were the family well off?’
‘I’m not their bank manager, Lord Powerscourt, but then I don’t suppose they tell even you anything at all. Sometimes I feel it would be helpful in our parish work if the banks could let us know who was in financial trouble and we could provide help of a different kind. But they don’t of course. Where was I? Ah, yes, the Robinsons. I think they were quite well off, they always seemed to live well. The son, Simon, was away a lot. He had been in the Navy for a while, you know.’
‘Was he still in the Navy at the time of his death, do you know?’
‘No, he wasn’t, but they said he was in receipt of a generous naval pension which supported him in all his trips abroad.’
‘Any indication,’ Powerscourt raised his hands towards the vicar, ‘that the rest of the family are not so well off now? Presumably the naval pension had to stop with his death.’
‘There was some talk of them selling up shortly after he died. But then that stopped. Normal financial service seems to have been resumed now.’ The vicar smiled a weak routine smile. Maybe they teach smiles in the theological colleges, thought Powerscourt, the polite smile, the sympathetic smile, the concerned smile, smiles for all seasons.
‘Any brothers and sisters?’
‘I think they were all boys. No daughters. Poor Mrs Robinson. I’m sure she would have liked a daughter. She always says how lucky we are. We’ve got two of each.’
The smile of the happy family man this time. ‘Two of the brothers are abroad. Canada, or is it Australia? The other one works up in London and comes down from time to time.’
‘Do you know what he does in London?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling it was time to leave.
‘I do, as a matter of fact. He works in a grand shop near Piccadilly, but they’ve got branches all over London. They specialise in guns, shooting stuff, hunting knives, that sort of thing.’
Hunting knives. Powerscourt could feel the colour drain from his face. Sharp hunting knives. Sharp enough to slit your throat. Sharp enough to sever your arteries.
‘Are you unwell, Lord Powerscourt? You look as though you had seen a ghost.’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine. I have these little turns every now and then.’ He smiled back one of the vicar’s weaker smiles.
Ghosts. Ghosts of boys on the Britannia. Lord forgive them for they know not what they do. Ghosts that lay under trees in Sandringham Woods, messages left for the living. Forever Faithful. Semper Fidelis. Ghosts dancing in the rigging of the Bacchante, sailing on a journey to nowhere. The living ghost on the beach at Amble with the red eyes and the sunken spirit. It wasn’t my fault I tell you. It wasn’t my fault.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Something to eat?’
‘No, I’m fine. The walk to the station will do me good, I promise you.’
The vicar walked him down to the town and escorted him right on to the platform itself. He’s making sure I’ve gone, thought Powerscourt. Dorchester doesn’t want to see me any more. Or they’ll put the dogs on me. Or sons from gunshops in Piccadilly, armed with hunting knives.
17
Maybe, Powerscourt said to himself, it’s because women, or more specifically, his sisters, weren’t educated properly. Back in St James’s Square Powerscourt was surrounded by his sisters’ notebooks, reporting their conversations across London about his six equerries. Random thoughts spilled across the pages, random sentences with no order and no logic. Surely, thought Powerscourt, those governesses must have taught them something up there in the schoolroom. Or maybe not. Maybe they had just gossiped all day long, looking out over the soft hills of Wicklow, dreaming of balls and horses as yet unridden.
Powerscourt’s mind kept wandering back to one phrase, just three words, spoken by the Rev. Adams as he sat in his chair underneath the Mount of Olives in The Vicarage, Dorchester on Thames.
Generous naval pension. That’s what he said. Powerscourt was so taken by the phrase that he had written it down in his notebook and looked at it on the train back to London. He looked at it a lot. He didn’t think you got generous naval pensions. If you got naval pensions at all.
William Burke had laughed. ‘My dear Francis,’ the financier had said, ‘the Royal Navy and the First Lords of the Admiralty are not known for the generosity of their pensions. Quite the contrary. If they can get away with it, they don’t give you a single farthing. And the idea that they would start paying out to somebody – how old did you say our chap was, late twenties, was it – it’s absurd. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was impossible,’ the banker’s caution came to the fore, ‘but it’s very very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed.’
Suppose the payments coming from the Prince of Wales were disguised, disguised as generous naval pensions. It was a cover story, a convenient fiction to disguise the fact that the money came from Sir William Suter and Sir Bartle Shepstone, Private Secretary and Comptroller to the Household of the Prince of Wales. They wrote the cheques. The recipients welcomed another instalment of their generous naval pension. The blackmail circle was complete.
His mind wandered again, to the note he had sent to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police asking him to check on the movements of a man called Robinson, first name unknown, employed in the gunshop off Piccadilly. His parents lived in Dorchester on Thames. Could the Commissioner establish where this Robinson had been on the weekend of the 8th and 9th January. Had he, by any chance, been in Norfolk? This request was most urgent. Lord Powerscourt was most grateful for the assistance.
The notebooks of his sisters, lying unread on his table in St James’s Square, called him back to work.
It really is a remarkable collection of documents, he thought, nearing the end of his sisters’ writings. Future historians will find it fascinating. Who was poor, who was rich, which families rowed and which did not, which families were selling their paintings to Americans to keep themselves afloat, which younger sons drove their parents to despair. The marriages, fixed not in the hearts of tomorrow’s husbands and wives, but in the scheming brains of their mothers: where they bought their furniture, where they bought their curtains, where they bought their kitchens, where they met their lovers.
Charles Peveril’s mother was widely believed to have had an affair with William Brockham’s father, an affair that went on for years. This, according to Powerscourt’s sister Mary, must be the key to the whole affair. Quite how, she did not reveal, as further bits of gossip chased each other across the page. Harry Rad-clyffe’s father drank too much. Frederick Mortimer’s father kept selling parcels of land, thousands and thousands of acres at a time.
But of blackmail, of secret payments, dark shadows falling across a family’s fortunes, there was not a word. William Burke confirmed the absence of blackmail when Powerscourt met him downstairs.
‘Francis, I promise you, I have written it all down. But I have left the document in my office. Let me give you the main points now.’
He drew Powerscourt aside to stand by the windows. The lamps in the square showed not a soul walking the streets of St James’s. The great square was empty, except for its resident colony of crows.
‘Money,’ said Burke, familiarity and reverence in his voice. ‘As far as money goes, they’re about average for their kind. It all depends on who got out of land in time. Four of them are still heavily invested, or mortgaged, in land. They’re getting worse off all the time. Two of them got out of land, like you, Francis, and put their money elsewhere. They’re getting richer most of the time. But of blackmail, in the active or the passive sense, I can find no trace at all.’