Death and the Jubilee (33 page)

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Authors: David Dickinson

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: Death and the Jubilee
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His father took the stairs two at a time and confronted his wayward son. He was wrestling with the nurse in the corridor outside the bathroom over a pyjama top which she seemed to think he
should be wearing. Thomas, for his part, had correctly identified the donning of the pyjama top as a form of surrender to the demands of bedtime. ‘I don’t want to go to bed, Papa. I
don’t want to go to bed.’ He stamped a small foot defiantly on the floor.

Powerscourt couldn’t help smiling at the intensity of his son’s passion. Men had presented Bills or Budgets in the House of Commons with less feeling than this.

‘Now then, Thomas, let me tell you something.’ He picked up the angry bundle and pressed him tight against his shoulder. ‘Everybody goes to bed. I go to bed. Mama goes to bed.
Your grandparents go to bed. The Prime Minister goes to bed. Queen Victoria goes to bed. I expect God goes to bed.’

He suddenly realized he might have made a mistake. He could be involved for hours in discussion about what kind of bed the Almighty slept in, whether God wore pyjamas, what time he retired, who
read him a bedtime story. He took a quick look at Thomas. The waves of wrath seemed to be subsiding. Thomas looked as if he was about to ask a question.

Powerscourt thought rapidly about a diversion. He searched desperately in his pockets. Help was at hand.

‘Look, I’ve got you some more coins. For your collection. French ones. I don’t think you’ve got any of those, have you?’

He produced two gold French coins from his pocket. The little boy was fascinated by coins and had amassed a large collection, kept in remarkably tidy piles on a shelf in his room. Lady Lucy was
already convinced he was going to be the foremost banker in London when he grew up. Powerscourt would tell her gloomily that the coin obsession could just as easily lead to an alternative career as
London’s most successful burglar.

Thomas inspected them carefully. The crisis seemed to have passed.

‘Can I go and look at them in my room, Papa?’

‘Of course you can. Nurse Mary Muriel will see you into bed,’ said Powerscourt in what he hoped was his most authoritative voice. It worked.

‘I’d better see to Olivia,’ said Mary Muriel, looking anxiously at her employer. ‘I think she’s still in the bath.’

‘Don’t worry about her,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘I’ll look in on her now.’

Olivia Eleanor Hamilton Powerscourt was sitting happily in a few inches of water. Even at the age of two and a half she seemed to have the smile of satisfaction children sometimes wear when
their elder brothers or sisters are in trouble with the authorities.

‘Hello, Olivia,’ said Powerscourt, sitting on a wet chair at the side of the bath.

‘Thomas naughty,’ said his daughter, pointing out of the door. ‘Thomas naughty boy.’

‘Never mind about Thomas,’ replied her father, anxious to change the subject. ‘We’d better get you out of the bath.’

He reached down and let the plug out. ‘Watch the way the water goes out. It’ll go round and round in circles in a minute.’

The little girl looked at him with disapproval. Then she watched, fascinated, as the water did indeed go round in circles.

‘Olivia,’ said her father, ‘I’m going to turn you into a parcel.’

Little Olivia’s favourite person in the whole world was her grandmother. Powerscourt’s parents were dead, but Lady Lucy’s had two houses, an eighteenth-century mansion in
Oxfordshire and a huge castle in Scotland, full of dark corridors and Jacobite ghosts.

‘I simply don’t understand it, Francis,’ Lucy had often said of her mother. ‘When we were little, there was no affection at all. If you were lucky you got an occasional
peck on the cheek, that was it. The horses and the dogs seemed to get much more love than the children. Just look at the difference now.’

Maybe it was because Olivia Eleanor Hamilton Powerscourt was Lady Macleod’s first granddaughter after a large collection of boys. The old lady would take Olivia round the garden, showing
her the flowers. She would take her to the stables and promise her a pony of her own when she was a little bit bigger. Biscuits would appear at regular intervals. At bedtime she would read stories
to the little girl as if she wanted to do nothing else for the rest of the evening. Perhaps she didn’t. But the last time the family had been there Powerscourt had seen a very special event.
The butler had walked into the room in the middle of the morning with a very large parcel for Olivia’s grandmother. Her name was written on it in large letters. There was an impressive
collection of stamps. It was wrapped in thick brown paper with copious amounts of string. Olivia had been fascinated. She had been enrolled as her grandmother’s principal assistant in the
unwrapping of the parcel. This, Powerscourt remembered, had taken almost an hour. Knots had to be undone. The string had to be carefully rolled up in little bundles. The brown paper had to be taken
off very carefully. It too had to be folded. There was another layer of paper inside which required similar treatment. The final contents, a jumper of a sensible brown colour, had proved of little
interest after all the previous excitement.

Powerscourt had an enormous white towel in his arms. He picked Olivia up. A pair of blue eyes, rather like her mother’s, peered up at him, trusting, clear, unfathomable. Powerscourt often
thought she had been here before. He wrapped her very tightly in the towel.

‘First of all,’ he said to Olivia, ‘we have to make sure the parcel is wrapped up very tight.’ He made a number of folds in the towel and tucked the ends very firmly in
position. Olivia had disappeared completely. She looked like a small white mummy, awaiting final incarceration in some dead Pharaoh’s tomb.

‘All right in there, parcel?’ asked Powerscourt, suddenly worried that she might suffocate.

‘Parcel all right,’ reported the small package.

‘Now we’ve got to put some string round it.’ Powerscourt’s fingers made a series of loops round the package, pausing occasionally to fasten imaginary knots.

‘Address now,’ he said. He began to write heavily with his finger on Olivia’s back. ‘Lady Cynthia Macleod, Beauclerc House, Thame, Oxfordshire. I think we’d better
write it on the front of the parcel as well.’ He turned the towel over. There was a yelp from within.

‘Tickles,’ said Olivia Powerscourt with great delight, ‘tickles.’

‘Now we have to put the stamps on,’ said her father. He stamped his fist all around the package, finishing with a final triumphant flourish on the top of her head. ‘Now you
have to be handed over to the postman. Please Mr Postman, could you take this parcel for Oxfordshire. It’s got all the stamps on. “Yes, sir,” says the postal gentleman,
“we’ll take care of it for you.”’

Powerscourt now threw Olivia around, explaining that she had joined all the other parcels in London at a great sorting office.

‘Warwickshire, Devon, Dorset, Norfolk.’ He threw various imaginary missives round the bathroom. ‘Ah,’ he put on another voice, ‘this one’s for Oxfordshire.
Put it in the train up there.’

‘Twain, twain, am I on a twain, Papa?’ said the little girl. Like her brother she was very excited by railway travel.

‘Chuff . . . Chuff . . . Chuff . . . Chuff.Chuff.Chuff.’ Powerscourt did his best to reproduce the noise of the mail train on the London to Warwick line. He made screeching
sounds.

‘The parcel’s reached the station now, Olivia.’ He threw her on to an imaginary platform. ‘Now Grandmother’s postman gets the parcel. Clip-clop. Clip-clop.’
Those horse noises again. Powerscourt was glad he didn’t have Thomas on his back this time. ‘Knock knock.’ Powerscourt beat his fist hard on the panels of the bath. ‘The
postman is knocking at Grandmother’s front door. There’s no answer. Knock knock. Where can the butler be? Ah, here he comes. “Parcel for Lady Macleod,” says the postman.
“Thank you so much,” says the butler. But where is Grandmother? The butler cannot find her.’

Powerscourt walked up and down the bathroom searching for an imaginary Lady Macleod.

‘“Did I hear someone at the door?” says Grandmother. “Parcel for you, Lady Macleod,” says the butler.’

Powerscourt handed the package over. He sat down again with his little daughter on his lap.

‘“Who could be sending me a parcel like this?” says Grandmother. “I suppose I’d better open it. What a pity Olivia isn’t here to help me – she does like
parcels so.”’

Powerscourt began to unwrap the towel.

‘It’s so well wrapped,’ he said, in his best grandmother voice, ‘whatever can it be? Not another jumper surely.’ There was a squeal of delight from inside.
‘What was that noise? I must unwrap the rest of this quickly. My goodness me, I think it might be a person in here. I hope they’re all right after all that journey in the trains and
things.’

With a final flourish and a roll of imaginary drums on the side of the bath, Powerscourt opened up the towel.

‘What a nice surprise! It’s Olivia! How wonderful to see you!’

All that travelling had left the little girl completely dry. Her father looked around for a nightdress. She was still snuggling up to him very tight. Olivia looked at him with her most
entrancing look. She’s practising on me, thought Powerscourt. She’s been practising on me since she was four days old. Olivia, he felt absolutely sure, wanted something, something she
felt sure a devoted father would provide.

‘Papa,’ she said, ‘again. Again. Do it again.’

 
24

By half-past six on the Monday evening after the cricket match Richard Martin had still not come home. His tea was on the table. Richard always liked to have his tea once he
came in, hungry from a long day in the City. Sometimes they had to work late at the bank, but Richard always knew well in advance. Only that morning he had said he would be home at the usual
time.

His mother made another pot. He’s gone too far this time, she said to herself he really has. If he thinks that Sophie Williams is more important than his own mother, then he’d better
think again. Rufus, the dog next door that Richard used to take for walks, was barking loudly. You could hear it through the walls. Mrs Martin tried to think of who could help her in the chastising
of her wayward son. His grandfather would never do it, he had always been soft on the boy, especially since he lost his father. One of her sisters might be pretty fierce but she didn’t think
Richard would take any notice.

Sophie Williams was worried too. Richard usually met her at seven o’clock by St Michael’s church with the dog. Tonight he was not there. Always in the past he had kept his word,
always he had been reliable. By eight o’clock she knew he was not coming. She wondered if she should call on his mother. Perhaps Richard was ill. Sophie knew what Richard’s mother
thought of her. She knew she might not receive a warm welcome at Number 67 if she rang the bell. Suffragists must have courage above everything else, she said to herself, courage in the rightness of their cause, courage in the prosecution of the battle against the monstrous regiment of men.
Richard’s mother was just another poor woman, brainwashed by male propaganda.

At half-past eight she rang Richard’s doorbell. Mrs Martin was wondering if Richard had lost his key.

‘Miss Williams!’ said Richard’s mother. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about Richard,’ said Sophie, still standing on the doorstep.

‘He’s not come home for his tea,’ Mrs Martin explained. ‘I thought he was with you.’

‘I sometimes see him when he goes to walk the dog, Mrs Martin. But I didn’t see him tonight. I was worried.’

Mrs Martin wondered if she should pursue these evening meetings with the dog. But it was obvious that the girl was as worried as she was.

‘Come in, Miss Williams. Come in. We’d better have a cup of tea.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down his drawing room. Lucy was sitting by the fire with the letters from the Blackwater strong box beside her. She was making notes
in a little book, a German dictionary by her side.

‘Can you do them all at once, Lucy, and then tell me what they say? I don’t think I could bear hearing them one by one and then waiting for the next translation.’

He paced on, hoping that at last he might have the key to the mystery, the riddle that linked a death by drowning, a death by fire, death under a tube train and a headless corpse in the
Thames.

‘Do sit down, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, smiling at her husband. ‘All this walking up and down is making me nervous.’

Powerscourt sat down. He got up again. He walked rapidly to the other end of the room, his hand running through his hair. Then he sat down again.

‘Right, Francis. I’m going to take them two at a time – you’re so impatient. I shouldn’t get over-excited about the first couple if I were you.

‘This one here,’ she held up a letter written on plain white paper, ‘comes from an old friend in Frankfurt. It says that some distant cousin has just died at the age of
ninety-three. She must have been older than Queen Victoria.’

‘That’s all it says?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘It is,’ replied Lady Lucy, ‘unless there’s a message written in invisible ink. This one,’ she held out another letter, written on pale blue writing paper,
‘comes from Berlin. I think the writer must have known the Harrisons when they were in Frankfurt. He says that there are a number of secret societies in Berlin, mostly centred on the
university. Everyone is joining secret societies these days, he says, societies to do with the Navy, societies to do with the Army. But the writer doesn’t know very much about
them.’

Lady Lucy’s clock struck the hour of ten. Powerscourt began walking up and down again.

‘If you give me a couple of minutes, Francis, I can tell you what the other two say. They’re both from Berlin. But please, stop walking up and down.’

Mrs Martin and Sophie Williams had drunk three cups of tea. They had talked about Sophie’s work at the school, about Richard and his work at the bank.

‘I must go home now, Mrs Martin. Perhaps he has had to work late at the bank after all.’

‘Do you think so, Miss Williams, do you really think so? I would be so relieved if he has.’

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