Goodnight Sweet Prince (34 page)

He sent a cable by the hotel telegraph when he returned to the Danieli to William Burke, his brother-in-law in London, asking him to forward the message to Johnny Fitzgerald with all speed. The
answer was needed by 10.30.

Various changes were made to Powerscourt’s suite on the first floor. A large writing desk, adorned with many forms of pen and pencil, was installed in the centre of the room. Three
paintings were removed from the walls. Three of Mr Pannone’s finest mirrors replaced them, gold frames resting happily on the red walls. A reproduction Madonna and Child took over from the
Canaletto
View over the Basin of St Mark
. A large silver crucifix now hung beside the window, directly in the eyeline of the person sitting at the writing desk. And above the bed an empty
space was filled with a reproduction of Tintoretto’s
Christ on the Cross
, suffering and despair dripping from the canvas.

I’m not sure I’d like to sleep in this room any more, thought Powerscourt grimly. But I need all the assistance I can find.

Mr Pannone hovered, offering hints on how best to achieve the desired effect. The crucifix had been his idea. He offered to organize a parade of priests, patrolling ceaselessly outside the
window, ever visible from above. Powerscourt declined.

‘So, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mr Pannone checked the final arrangements. ‘It is now half-past ten of the clock. He is due here at eleven. As ever, we know when he come, the Lord
Gresham. You do not meet him in the entrance down the stairs. I take him up here to meet you.

‘Five minute after he come, I bring you the message. You do not have the message yet, I think. Ah, you do have the message. But there is the blank space left. You wait for the answer from
London, it is so?’

Powerscourt handed the hotel manager a piece of paper. He had written the message at eight o’clock that morning.

Lord Johnny Fitzgerald was late. Perhaps he couldn’t find the answer. Perhaps he wasn’t in London at all. Perhaps he was out when the message found him, though Powerscourt felt sure
he would still be having his breakfast. He wasn’t an early riser, Lord Johnny.

‘He has left the Pellegrini now! The Lord Gresham! He comes!’ Pannone looked rather nervous, flitting anxiously between the reception and the telegraph room. ‘He is looking
around a lot again. He’s walking fast. He should be here in ten minutes.’

Powerscourt took a last glance around his room. A smaller stage this morning, maybe a more intimate piece of theatre to play across these boards.

‘Now he is passing the Rialto!’

Powerscourt made a final adjustment to the pens on the writing table. He checked that you could see the three mirrors from the chair by the coffee table near the window.

‘He is just coming into St Mark’s Square! Do you wish me to hold him up down below while we wait for the message? No?’

Powerscourt looked out of the window. It was a grey day, wind and rain whipping across the seafront, tourists hurrying indoors, the braver ones marching on towards their chosen place of
pilgrimage, plenty of customers for the art galleries today.

‘Lord Powerscourt!’ Pannone rushed into the room. ‘It is here!’

He handed over a telegraph form. Lord Johnny’s not sparing the words this morning, thought Powerscourt. But I suppose William Burke is paying the bill.

‘Is there no peace?’ the message read. ‘Just when I have a few days rest your message comes to wake me up. Am I never to be left alone? Name you want is General George Brooke.
Not related to the Daisy. Beware the courtesans. Fitzgerald.’

There was just time to add three words to his earlier message. He could hear Gresham coming up the stairs. He slipped it to Pannone as he left.

‘Lord Gresham! How nice to see you again!’

‘Good morning, Lord Powerscourt.’

Gresham did not look much better this morning. The untidy tuft on his chin had gone. But his cravat was twisted. He was wearing the same shirt as the night before. The hair was unruly, the eyes
rather wild.

‘They’re still following me about, Lord Powerscourt. In broad daylight.’

Gresham’s eyes looked at the three mirrors, at the crucifix, at the Madonna and Child. They went back in terror towards the mirrors. Powerscourt wondered if he saw snakes, or eyes, or the
faces of murdered Venetians peering out from those golden frames. Two Doges, he remembered, had been killed just round the corner from the hotel.

‘Come, I have ordered coffee. We can make our plans.’

There was a knock at the door. Pannone entered, bearing a tray of coffee and a message for Powerscourt.

‘This has just arrived for you, Lord Powerscourt. It was delivered by special messenger to the hotel. Thank you, my lord.’ He bowed deeply to the crucifix and departed.

‘Goodness me. Goodness me,’ said Powerscourt, scanning the words he had written three hours before. ‘The British Military Attaché to the Italian Government is in town.
He is here with the Ambassador for some conference or other. He wonders if we would like to join him for lunch. Man by the name of Brooke, General George Brooke. Do you know the fellow, Gresham?
This Brooke person?’

Gresham had turned pale, very pale. He stared at the mirrors as if General Brooke was hiding on the other side of the glass.

‘I do. I do,’ he said very quietly. ‘He was my first commanding officer. For four years.’ He fell silent. Powerscourt stared at the silver crucifix. ‘I can’t
meet him. I just can’t. I’ve got to get away.’

He looked round as if he thought of jumping straight out of the window. Tintoretto’s crucified Christ bled slowly above the bedspread. The mirrors sent Gresham the cryptic messages inside
his head. The Madonna and Child looked gravely down, the Virgin aware across the centuries that the child she held in her arms was destined to die on the cross.

‘Lord Powerscourt, please help me. I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to get away from here.’

Powerscourt waited.

‘Will you take a message to England for me? I don’t think I shall ever go back.’

‘I should be happy to take a message for you. Of course, my dear Gresham. Why don’t you write it down? There seems to be lots of paper and things on the desk. I shall just go and
sort out this lunch. This General Brooke will have to find some other guests to entertain him.’

Down in the entrance hall, a fresh party of Americans had arrived from Vienna. Pannone was efficient in his reception, bags despatched here, porters summoned, welcomes and good wishes exchanged
with the transatlantic visitors. The Danieli cat, Powerscourt noticed, had fallen asleep, wrapped around a potted plant by the reception desk. Outside it was still raining, little streams of
moisture running down the hotel’s windowpanes in crooked lines.

I wonder if they have thought of it yet, Powerscourt said to himself, Father Gilbey and the Monsignors and the Cardinals. Confession by letter. You don’t need to speak inside those dark
boxes, just leave your message, posted through the grille. You could come back later for the answer.

The Venetians, Powerscourt remembered, looking at a portrait of a sinister-looking Doge on Mr Pannone’s wall, had a slightly different system. They believed in betrayal, not confession,
through the post, betrayal through those little post boxes,
bocca di leone
, mouth of the lion. They were emptied every night. There were several of them in the Doges’ Palace. You
denounced your enemies, or your friends, or your husband, or your next-door neighbour. All you had to do was write the letter and put it in the lion’s mouth. Or the lion’s den. The
secret police did the rest.

Fifteen minutes, thought Powerscourt. Surely he would have written his message by now. Pannone gave him a reassuring tap on the shoulder as he tiptoed back up the stairs to his room.

It was empty. Gresham had gone.

‘Pannone! Pannone!’

The little man had never heard him shout before.

‘He’s gone! The bird has flown! Gresham has cleared off!’

‘Don’t worry, Lord Powerscourt. The waiters are watching. Very soon, we shall know where he has gone. But see, he has left you the message.’

The envelope was addressed to Lord Francis Powerscourt, The Danieli Hotel. The ink was still wet. Powerscourt took a paper knife and slit it open.

‘He is back in the Pellegrini now, the Lord Gresham. He is packing his bags. Maybe he go to the railway station. We have many waiters there.’ Pannone rushed through his latest
report.

Powerscourt read it again, his hand shaking slightly. He folded Gresham’s last will and testament and put it in his pocket. This was what had brought him to Venice. For this he had planned
and plotted for four days, waiters posted across the streets of the city, pictures rearranged on the walls, false messages concocted on an early morning gondola ride across the lagoon. He should
have felt elated, pleased with himself. But there were no Hallelujahs sounding in his head, only a great sadness and the thought of another death, an Englishman found lying dead somewhere in Italy,
another one dead before his time.

‘Lord Powerscourt? You find what you want, I think. But it makes you sad. You have found what you came for?’

‘I have found what I came for, Mr Pannone. I did not think I would like it very much when I found it. But I have found it. And I like it even less.

‘But,’ he went on, ‘without your assistance I would never have found it at all. And thank you for all the assistance you have so kindly provided since I came here. I shall
always be in your debt.’

Pannone smiled. ‘We have a new saying now, in the Danieli, Lord Powerscourt. Any friend of Lord Rosebery, he is the friend of the Danieli, we used to say. Now we say, any friend of Lord
Rosebery or Lord Powerscourt, he is the friend of the Danieli!’

Powerscourt bowed in gratitude. I’m going to have to embrace him again, he thought. Maybe it’s the two kisses on the cheeks this time.

‘But tell me one thing, Lord Powerscourt, if I may ask the question. This lunch with the General, the General who never was. An Italian General I could have found for you, I am sure, maybe
a French one. I am not sure about a German one. But I could not have provided the English General. What does it mean, that name that came from England? Why was it so important?’

‘The reason that name was so important, my dear Pannone, was that it was the name of the General who used to be in command of Lord Gresham. I was sure he would not want to meet him. That
was why I sent the message to London. To find out his name.’

‘He was the Commandante of the Lord Gresham? So with that name, you were sure he would not stay here for the lunch. Even at the Danieli!’

‘I was sure.’

They embraced. Powerscourt delivered his kisses to the two ample cheeks of the little hotel manager. It’s over, he thought. It’s nearly over.

‘You must come back and see us again, Lord Powerscourt. Perhaps with the young lady you are going to marry? The honeymoons at the Danieli, they are the best in the world!’

Santa Lucia station. Lady Lucy’s trains. Lady Lucy’s trains were waiting to bring him back to London.

Back to Lady Lucy.

Back home.

Powerscourt was back in Suter’s office in Marlborough House, the same room where the four men had met before in the autumn of the previous year when Suter handed over his
memorandum about the misfortunes of his master the Prince of Wales. Sir William Suter was looking down at a great pile of documents on his desk, Sir Bartle Shepstone, Comptroller and Treasurer of
the Household, his white beard clean and bright in the morning light, was inspecting the polish on his boots.

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.’