Goodnight Sweet Prince (2 page)

Round his neck there hung a pair of the finest field glasses the Prussian Army could purchase. Up here, in the tower of his friend Powerscourt’s Rokesley church, Lord Johnny could indulge
his passion for bird-watching. There was a splendid view of Powerscourt’s house Rokesley Hall just beneath him. To the south, beyond the hill, was the pleasant market town of Oundle with its
fine eighteenth-century buildings and its architecturally less distinguished public school. To the east lay Fotheringhay with its square church tower, evoking memories of the incarceration of Mary
Queen of Scots. To the west and the north lay the broad expanse of Rockingham Forest which ran for some ten miles before petering out at Kings Cliffe.

Above the forest great hunting birds would circle, rising impossibly slowly in great rhythmic sweeps up the air currents before hurtling down towards their invisible prey. In his lair,
surrounded by the four evangelists and the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Fitzgerald would sit for hours at a time, watching the hunt, waiting for the kill.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking home from Oundle station. The boys from the school were playing a rugby match, the treble cheers of their supporters echoing shrilly back into the town.
Powerscourt was thinking about Latin unseens, passages of Pliny, speeches from Livy, rhetoric from Cicero staring up at you from a page you had never seen before. You might recognize a couple of
words the first time you read it through. The rest was a mystery to be unravelled. All his life Powerscourt had been fascinated by mysteries: puzzles as a small child, sitting by his mother’s
chair, a great fire burning in the hearth, the flow of Irish conversation passing literally over his head: codes and cryptograms during his time in the army in India, struggling in some stifling
tent to decipher the messages of Her Majesty’s enemies.

Each new investigation now seemed to him like another Latin unseen. You began with a few words, a few pieces of knowledge to be amplified and translated as the case went on. He remembered the
satisfaction he found at school, as the meaning of the Latin slowly became apparent, revealed like invisible ink under the solvent of his brain.

Some noise from above reached Powerscourt, walking briskly down the hill. Fitzgerald must be here, watching his birds from the top of the tower.

‘Johnny!’ shouted Powerscourt. ‘Johnny! Johnny!’

His cries had no effect on the bird-watcher up above. Powerscourt hurried across the drive to meet his friend in the churchyard.

Powerscourt and Fitzgerald had known each other growing up in Ireland. They had the special closeness of those who have fought side by side in battle. Fitzgerald was rash and impetuous and had
been saved more than once by the cooler head and accurate shooting of his friend. They still served together on Powerscourt’s detective missions. And on two occasions, as Powerscourt
sometimes reminded himself, Lord Johnny had saved his sanity.

Over twenty years before Powerscourt and his three younger sisters had been devastated by the sudden death of their parents and three of their grandparents in the great influenza epidemic that
decimated the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in and around Dublin. They were left in their huge mausoleum of a house, drenched in memories they could not escape. Two of Powerscourt’s three sisters
grew thin and pale and looked as though they would waste away. Powerscourt himself felt sick with the responsibility of unexpectedly becoming head of his family.

Uninvited and unannounced, Lord Johnny Fitzgerald and his mother came to stay. Quite what kind Lady Fitzgerald said to his sisters, Powerscourt never knew. But they began to get better. Johnny
Fitzgerald took Powerscourt off for five days in which they walked right round the Wicklow Mountains, staying at country inns, rising early, exhausted by nightfall. And at the end of their march,
Lord Johnny spoke harshly to his friend.

‘Look here, Francis, forgive me if I give you some advice.’ They were standing on top of the great marble staircase of Powerscourt House that looked out on to the fountain in the
lake and the faint blue of the Wicklow Mountains beyond the gardens. ‘You’re all going to hell in a handcart if you stay in this house any longer. You must get away. All of you. You
must begin again while you’re all young enough to do it and before those lovely girls turn into old maids of mourning. I know a man who will give you a tremendous price for that house and for
as much of the estate as you want to sell. A tremendous price.’ Lord Johnny nodded his head vigorously in admiration of the tremendous price he had negotiated with a Dublin coal magnate
before his visit. ‘You should move to London. You’ll get your sisters married off in no time at all over there.’

Reluctantly, then with increasing energy and vigour, Powerscourt followed his advice. They had all moved to London, the three sisters, possibly taking to heart the advice of Lady Fitzgerald,
enthusiastic for new friends and a different society. The lovely girls were indeed all married now, producing nephews and one niece with a speed that sometimes alarmed their uncle as the intervals
between birthdays grew shorter and shorter, the names of new babies harder and harder to remember. Soon he would have a cricket team composed entirely of Powerscourts if his sisters continued
breeding like this.

‘Johnny, I’m so glad to see you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think we have a new case. A real puzzle of a case. Come and have some tea and I’ll tell you all about
it.’

Fitzgerald had saved Powerscourt once in his twenties. He was to save him again at the end of his thirties.

At the age of thirty-six, in St George’s Hanover Square, Lord Francis Powerscourt had married Caroline Stone, eldest daughter of Albert Stone, a wealthy landowner in Dorset. One year later
their first child, Thomas, was born. Two years after that, mother and son were drowned when the SS
Amelia
, a passenger ship on the Dublin to Liverpool route, went down with all hands. One
hundred and sixty-seven people died. For Powerscourt, it was as though death came for him once a decade. Parents, wife, child, all had gone. This time Fitzgerald carried him off to Italy for three
months, hoping that Powerscourt’s love of classical antiquity and the masterpieces of the Renaissance would cure him of the terrible grief.

On their return to England once again Lord Johnny suggested flight. ‘You must get away, Francis, away to somewhere where you never knew Caroline, somewhere out of London. You don’t
need to be in London any more now. But if you stay you’ll end up withered and shrunk like that old Queen Victoria and her forty years of mourning.’

So Powerscourt had moved again and now he was pouring tea in Rokesley Hall for his friend in the little sitting-room that looked out over the lawns to the churchyard and Lord Johnny’s
bells.

‘I have been closeted with Lord Rosebery in his Dark Tower by the sea at Barnbougle. Somebody is trying to blackmail the Prince of Wales. The Princess is fearful for the life of their
eldest son. They say, God help us all, that he likes men as well as women. I am bidden to a great conference with Private Secretary Suter in Pall Mall two days from now. That’s it in a
nutshell.’

Outside a couple of very small birds were performing a slow dance across the lawn.

‘Bloody hell! Some shell. Some nut.’ Lord Johnny Fitzgerald looked closely at his friend. ‘That would be the very devil to crack. I’m not sure it can be done.
Nobody’s going to talk.’

‘We can’t give up at this stage, Johnny. We haven’t started yet. I think I am going to make some inquiries about the Prince of Wales’ finances.’

Fitzgerald helped himself to a couple of crumpets and a small mountain of butter. ‘And I could make some inquiries into what the rich and discreet homosexuals of London get up to. Prince
Eddy must be known in that world, if what they say is true.’

‘Do you think we could get a man on the inside, Johnny? Blackmailers usually have inside knowledge from somewhere. The most likely place is from the servants at Marlborough House or
Sandringham. I wonder if they’d let us put one of our own people in there, a senior footman or underbutler, somebody like that.’

‘You could try it, Francis. I think I know a man who went to school with that Private Secretary Sir William Suter. He was a mean little sod then. I don’t suppose he’s
changed.’

For two hours the two men talked until the fire had gone out and darkness had fallen over the Powerscourt estate beyond the windows. As they went off to dinner in Oundle’s finest hotel,
Lord Johnny had cheered up sufficiently to order a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet with the fish.

‘We’re celebrating,’ he told the wine waiter. ‘I saw three kestrels and a hawk today.’

The blinds were tightly drawn. The door was locked and bolted. Two lamps cast fitful light over the long table. At one end was a large pile of newspapers and magazines. Lined
up along the table, in four untidy rows, were the letters of the alphabet, cut loosely from their pages. The hands moved awkwardly with the paste as they composed a new message. Quite often the
hands spilt paste on to the table or on to the floor. The hands had always been bad at art at school, always bottom of the class. This Sunday afternoon another message was almost complete, capital
letters used in the middle of words, full stops in the wrong place, the letters themselves set at irregular angles on the page. The artist began to giggle, quietly at first, then almost
hysterically as the message was completed. Tomorrow the message would go to London. There it would be posted in an obscure West End postbox. As the hands tidied up the letters and opened the blinds
once more, the giggling stopped.

‘I’ve always thought London is much more interesting at this time of the morning,’ said Rosebery to Powerscourt as the two men set off to walk from
Rosebery’s house in Berkeley Square to their meeting with Private Secretary Suter at Marlborough House. A thin rain was falling, dusting the hats of the wealthy and the caps of the poor. At a
quarter to nine the streets were jammed, not with the carriages of the rich, but with the deliveries that made their life possible: hams, geese, truffles, oysters, cases of claret and champagne.
Carts laden with coal rubbed up against the lighter vehicles of the window-cleaners; local bakers’ boys were handing over great sheaves of loaves to undercooks on the pavements. Here and
there an anxious butler or senior footman could be seen hovering around a furniture van with instructions to beware of the Queen Anne table in the hall and not to hit any of the banisters on the
way up the great staircases.

The aristocrats of the early morning round were the liveried carriages of the great shops of London, the pale green of Fortnum and Mason, the dark green of Harrods, the dark blue of Berry
Brothers and Rudd. At the bottom of Berkeley Street, just where it joined the fashionable artery of Piccadilly, three coalmen were locked in furious argument with a young Turk from Justerini and
Brooks who refused to give way.

‘I don’t expect this will be an easy meeting,’ said Lord Rosebery, picking his way delicately past a grocer’s van that had drawn up on the pavement. ‘Anyone dealing
with the Royal Family has first to negotiate between the Scylla and Charybdis of the two Private Secretaries. Sir George Trevelyan, the keeper of Victoria’s chamber, and Sir William Suter,
the guardian for the Prince of Wales, have raised procrastination to an art form and obfuscation to depths undreamt of by Niccolo Machiavelli. They rarely say yes. They seldom say no. But between
those two extremes they have made all negotiations into a perilous voyage, with many squalls for the unwary and little prospect of a safe arrival at the final destination. It is one thing to decide
to send for you, my dear Powerscourt. It may be quite another to do something about any proposals you may have. I presume you have some crumbs of thought to bring to our humble table this
morning?’

‘I have indeed.’ Powerscourt smiled, pausing only to look at the arsenal of weaponry on display in the windows of London’s most exclusive and most expensive gun shop in St
James’s Street.

‘I have spent much time reading in the London Library. I have spent even more time talking to my two sisters who move about on the fringes of the Marlborough House set.’

A junior footman showed them up to the Private Secretary’s office on the second floor. It was a large well-proportioned room with high ceilings and tall windows that looked out over the
gardens to St James’s Park.

‘May I introduce the Treasurer and Comptroller of His Royal Highness’s Household, General Sir Bartle Shepstone?’ Sir William had the impeccable manners of the well-tempered
courtier.

The four men sat down round a table next to the window. To the right was a huge desk, cluttered with papers and correspondence, the raw material, Powerscourt presumed, of Suter’s world. A
full-length portrait of the Princess of Wales, standing by the lake at Sandringham, looked out at them from its command post above the fireplace.

‘Let me say first of all how grateful we are for your presence here this morning,’ Suter began, blessing each of them in turn with a wintry smile.

Sir William was tall, slightly stooped, with a high forehead and a well-tended moustache. His face, as Powerscourt observed it over the months ahead, was one of the most unusual he had ever
seen. Years of dealing with the scandals of the Prince of Wales, scandals he knew about, scandals he could only suspect, had trained him to lock all expression out of his face. The grey eyes were
always opaque. Neither smile nor grimace touched his lips. Sir William’s face betrayed no emotions at all. Suter was a Sphinx.

‘I presume, Lord Rosebery, that you have acquainted Lord Powerscourt with the information I imparted to you at our last meeting about the extortionate demands made of the Prince of Wales
and the method of delivery?’

Rosebery nodded gravely. Extortionate demands, thought Powerscourt, that’s not bad as a circumlocution for blackmail.

‘We at our end of Pall Mall have naturally been giving thought to what might lie behind such unreasonable behaviour. We have been trying to identify the circumstances in which an
extortionist could feel that a Prince of the Crown might prefer to offer some pecuniary obviation to prevent unfortunate outbreaks of publicity.’