I’ve seen you very recently, thought Powerscourt. Only the other day I saw lots of you all over the walls of those Venetian churches, kindly saints with white beards, waiting for eternity beside some sad Madonna, mighty prophets with white beards, rallying their people to the justice of God’s cause, apocalyptic old men, God with a white beard, dividing the population of their paintings into saints and sinners in some final judgement.
Powerscourt, slightly nervous, still tired from his Venetian odyssey, was clutching a new black notebook.
Rosebery was wearing the neutral face of the politician, mentally preparing his last report for Prime Minister Salisbury on the strange death of Prince Eddy. Powerscourt had told him the full story the night before in Berkeley Square.
‘It’s like some terrible Revenger’s Tragedy,’ had been Rosebery’s verdict. ‘Let us hope there are no more bodies. Are congratulations in order, Francis? You seem to have got to the bottom of it remarkably quickly in view of the difficulties.’
‘Prayers for the dead would be more appropriate than congratulations. A whole lot of prayers. A whole lot of dead,’ said Powerscourt, shivering slightly.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ purred Sir William Suter, urbane courtier. ‘You said you wished to see us. You said in your cable from Venice that you had fresh news on the unhappy passing of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Were you in Venice on holiday, Lord Powerscourt? I believe the weather can be very inclement there at this time of year.’
‘I wouldn’t say it was a holiday, exactly,’ said Powerscourt with a rueful smile. ‘I went there as part of my investigations.’
Eight hundred miles away a young man with staring eyes was waiting for a church to open. The church was the Santa Maria del Carmine on the southern side of the Arno in Florence. A small sign, attached to the parish noticeboard, promised confession in English between the hours of nine and ten on Thursday mornings every week. Father Menotti SJ.
The young man was early. He was trying to remember what the Jesuits had told him about making a good confession. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou amongst women, Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus . . .’ He prayed while he waited.
Underneath Masaccio’s fresco of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, two figures fleeing in shock and terror from their crime, the beginning of sin, the original sin, Lord Edward Gresham was preparing to confess his murder.
Powerscourt had asked Rosebery the night before how much he should tell Suter and Shepstone. Everything? A sanitized version of the truth? Just the name of the killer?
‘For God’s sake, Francis, they’ve never been helpful to you. The roots of this affair go back such a long way. They’re used to hiding the truth. They never say yes, they never say no, as I said to you at the beginning. Just for once I think they should hear the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
‘I was originally approached about the affairs of the Prince of Wales and his family in the latter half of 1891,’ Powerscourt began. ‘At that time there were suspicions that the Prince of Wales was being blackmailed and there were fears, justified fears as it turned out, for the life of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. I propose to refer to him as Prince Eddy from now on in this narrative of events.
‘Shortly after I arrived on the scene the blackmail question seemed to go away. There were a lot of complicated manoeuvres in the affairs of the Prince of Wales and Daisy Brooke and an intemperate letter intercepted by Lady Beresford.’
Cisterns of lust, he thought to himself. He couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind.
‘These matters could easily have given rise to blackmail, but I was not entirely convinced of that. My inquiries revealed that there had been no blackmailers at large in what we call Society for at least twenty years. The cause of the blackmail must have lain elsewhere.’
Suter began taking notes. He would, said Powerscourt to himself. He’d be taking notes about the verdict of God on Judgement Day itself, preparing a memorandum for the Almighty’s filing system.
‘We then come to the murder itself.’ Powerscourt looked down at his book once more. ‘On the night of January 8th, or the morning of January 9th, Prince Eddy was murdered in the manner we all know.’ Better spare them something.
The confessional was very dark, dark brown wood surrounding the penitent. There was a strange smell, floor polish perhaps. Or fear.
Gresham knelt at the feet of his confessor, Father Menotti, invisible on the other side of the little booth.
‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned.’
He bowed his head, his eyes closed, as his confessor blest him. Gresham made the Sign of the Cross with the slow deliberate movements of the recent convert. A school choir was rehearsing in a distant part of the church, youthful voices singing the Kyrie. Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
‘I confess to Almighty God, to Blessed Mary ever Virgin, to all the angels and saints, and to you, my spiritual Father, that I have sinned.’
‘The Prince of Wales decided,’ Powerscourt continued, ‘for reasons which will become all too apparent, that he wished to hush the matter up, to conceal the truth. The convenient fiction was adopted that Prince Eddy had died of influenza.’
‘Influenza, yes, influenza.’ Sir Bartle Shepstone nodded wisely, as if he were an old friend of the disease.
‘The result of this was that the death was not officially announced to the world until January 15th. In the meantime Lord Henry Lancaster, one of six young men, equerries to Prince Eddy, who were staying in the house, was found dead in Sandringham Woods, shot through the head. At first sight it looked like a second murder. But the medical evidence was convincing. Lord Lancaster killed himself. He left me a note.’
Suter looked up from his papers. Shepstone sat upright in his chair. Powerscourt had not told them about the note before.
‘It wasn’t a very satisfactory note. I mean it didn’t clear anything up. If anything, it made things worse. This is what it said.’
He took the note from his pocket. ‘“By the time you read this, I shall be dead. I am sorry for all the trouble I am causing to my family and friends and to yourself. I am sure you will come to understand that I had no choice. I could do no other. Semper Fidelis.”’ Powerscourt folded Lancaster’s note carefully and returned it to his pocket.
‘I was greatly puzzled by the Semper Fidelis. Faithful to whom? To his country? To his friends? To Prince Eddy? To his regiment? At first I was confused. Things became clearer later on.
‘So this was the position, as it presented itself to me when the business of the cover-up was over.’
Lord Edward Gresham was shaking in his confessional. The church cleaners were going about their daily duty with mops and buckets. The youthful choir had progressed from the Kyrie to a Sanctus. They kept making the same mistake. The opening notes echoed round the building again and again as the music master tried to correct the error of their ways.
‘Father, I was at confession at Farm Street in Mayfair at the very beginning of this year. By the grace of God I received absolution, performed my penance, and went to Holy Communion. Father, I have sinned most grievously since then. I have murdered a man. I have broken the Sixth Commandment. May the Lord have mercy upon me.’
‘What were the circumstances in which you broke the Sixth Commandment, my son?’ Father Menotti’s voice came from far away. The other side of the confessional box seemed to Gresham to be a world he had lost, one he might never re-enter.