And so it went on all afternoon. The light was fading when the sailing ships were finally withdrawn from service, their keels inspected for damage underneath, the sails shaken clear of water. The old gentleman took his farewells. He leant down as he said goodbye to the two boys.
‘I was once the captain of a sailing ship, you know, a real one. HMS Achilles she was called. Back in the 1860s that must have been. Very fast she was too. As you would expect with a name like that. I come here most Sunday afternoons. My wife can’t get out any more. Her navigation systems have all gone. Maybe I shall see you here again. Good afternoon to you both.’
‘Wasn’t he a nice old gentleman,’ said Lady Lucy, her hand poised over a Spode teapot back in Markham Square.
‘I think it made his day,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I wonder if he’ll be there again the next time the boys go sailing.’
‘Lord Francis,’ Lady Lucy’s slender arm reached out to pour the milk into his tea. ‘You don’t take sugar, do you?’
‘How clever of you to remember,’ Powerscourt replied gallantly, thinking that Lady Lucy was looking a little apprehensive.
‘You remember I said I had something to tell you about those equerries of yours. The day we met at the bottom of St James’s Square.’
Lady Lucy as Anna Karenina, thought Powerscourt, himself a reluctant Vronsky, the high fur collar and its owner tripping off towards Piccadilly. ‘Of course.’
‘Well, I still haven’t written it down. I mean I have written it down, but it didn’t seem to make sense. It’s such a strange story, almost like a fairy tale from long ago. I was always very fond of fairy tales when I was a child, Lord Francis. Were you?’
‘I used to get very frightened,’ said Powerscourt, thinking that Lady Lucy’s childhood must be twelve to fifteen years more recent than his own.
‘A long long time ago, twenty-five or twenty-eight years ago . . .’ Lady Lucy spoke quietly, her eyes and her mind far away. Powerscourt thought she must tell Robert bedtime stories like this, the little boy’s head tucked up against the pillows, his mother’s soft voice coming from some still place deep inside her. ‘. . . a little boy was born into one of England’s oldest families. His mother was quite old, in her late thirties or early forties. This was her last child. All the rest were daughters. And she loved him so much. She watched him growing up on the great estate. She cried in secret when he went away to school. All through the long terms she waited for him to come home. Home to his mother.
‘When he was quite small his father ran away. He went off to Paris or Biarritz or one of those places where wicked husbands go and he never came home again, not even to see his little boy. The sisters got married and went away. There was only the mother and the little boy left in the great house with the park and the lake in front of the windows. The little boy used to go boating on the lake, rowing his mother round and round until it was time for tea.
‘The little boy grew up. He was a very pretty little boy, they say, and very handsome when he turned into a young man, almost like a prince with his very own castle. All the girls fell in love with him. And his mother didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all.’
It was growing dark outside. Lady Lucy got up and drew her curtains, pausing to toss a couple of logs on the fire. Her granddaughter clock ticked hypnotically behind her chair.
‘Not very far away, ten or fifteen miles away, there was a great city. As the little boy grew up, the city grew up too. But while he was growing in feet and inches the city was growing by the thousand, tens and tens of thousands of people, all crowding in, looking for work and happiness.
‘More tea, Lord Francis? I could make some more if this lot has gone cold.’
‘No, thank you.’ Powerscourt didn’t want to break the spell.
‘Most of the people in this city were poor. Terribly poor, poor souls.’ Lady Lucy shivered slightly although the room was warm from the fire. ‘But some of them were very rich. They made things. They ran great businesses. They owned shops. The man in our story, Lord Francis, owned a great many shops, grocers’ shops, in the great city and the other cities round about. He became the richest of them all. And he had a daughter, an only daughter. They say she was beautiful, so beautiful that the young men were almost frightened of her beauty.
‘The young man brought lots of girls back to his house in the country. There were dinners before the great dances and balls of the county, hunt balls, charity balls, that sort of thing. His mother looked at all these young women, coming to take her beautiful son away, and she sort of hated them. She couldn’t bear it. But he never grew attached to any of them. Perhaps he was being kind to his mother. We don’t know. Perhaps, like the prince in the story, he was waiting for someone else to come along.
‘They did, of course. Perhaps they always do. One day, the prince met the grocer’s daughter. I don’t know where it was. But they fell in love just like in the fairy stories. The young man had resisted all the great beauties of county society all his life. Now he fell over in a great rush, as if he was in a waterfall, hurtling towards the bottom. Can you have waterfalls of love, Lord Francis?’
‘I’m sure you can, Lady Lucy. I’m certain of it.’
‘Where was I?’ Lady Lucy was temporarily knocked over by her torrents of emotion. ‘Inside a month they were desperately in love. They wanted to get married. But there was a complication, Lord Francis. There usually is. The girl was a Roman Catholic. Her parents were very devout. They didn’t want her to marry a Protestant, even if he came from one of the oldest families in England. They said they would forbid the match.’
Lady Lucy took a sip of her cold tea. Powerscourt watched her tell her story, his mind racing ahead. He wondered where it would end. He didn’t like to think about the end.
‘But there was a complication on the other side too. The boy’s mother didn’t want her precious son marrying a grocer’s daughter, however rich her family were. And she certainly didn’t want him marrying a Roman Catholic. She said she would forbid the match too. She said she would bring the boy’s father home from wherever he had gone, whatever he had done in the meantime, to stop this marriage.
‘So they were all stuck. The young man, the beautiful girl, two sets of parents. Maybe it would have been better if the parents had never been so obstinate. What were the young lovers to do? What could they do?’
Lady Lucy paused once more, looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace as if the answer might be hidden in the blaze. ‘I don’t think young lovers are ever very sensible, do you, Lord Francis? The young man had to choose between his love and his mother, between his past and his future, perhaps, between old age and the glory of youth.
‘The young man started taking instruction in the Catholic faith. They say he followed his lessons far more intently than he ever did at Eton. When he was accepted, or whatever happens to them, they were married. The boy’s mother refused to attend. Not to a grocer’s daughter, she said. Not to a Roman Catholic. Not in some pagan chapel, decked out with bleeding hearts and the false idolatry of Rome.
‘Well, some of them were happy now, especially the young lovers. The girl’s father bought them a lovely little house between the city and the old house where the young man was born. The girl became pregnant, there was tremendous happiness all round. But it didn’t last, Lord Francis. It didn’t last.’
Lady Lucy looked thoughtful. Her eyes were far away, lost in the fairy story.
Powerscourt waited for the end, for some horror yet to come. The faces of the equerries he had questioned at Sandringham flashed through his mind. Five of them, one of them must be the young man in the story.
‘Then she lost the baby. She had some sort of terrible accident. The young man was away on military duty at the time. I think I forgot to tell you that he joined his father’s regiment. It was a terrible accident. The baby died. The young mother died. The young man rushed home to find his life in ruins, the love of his life lying at the bottom of a great set of stone steps, the baby dead inside her.