David Dickinson - Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

‘Why ever not?’ her mama had said. ‘You carry on. I’ll back you all the way.’

Robert, Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, was now First Lieutenant of a frigate on patrol in the cold grey waters of the North Sea, playing war games against Tirpitz’s Dreadnoughts.

Powerscourt took the greatest care of his second child, Olivia. Caught between the precocious Thomas and the talking twins, she sometimes felt left out.

He asked Lucy to take Olivia shopping for some fashionable clothes. Although Olivia was young and coltish, Lady Lucy was correct in believing that Olivia would be the fairest of them all.

So here they were, Powerscourt and Olivia, drinking blanc-cassis in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly, only open for six years, but already the place to be seen for the young and the fashionable. Olivia shared her father’s intense dislike of champagne. Powerscourt suddenly thought back to when this about-to-be-very-beautiful young woman was small. Sometimes he would take a tiny Olivia out of the bath and wrap her in an enormous towel. Then he would write an imaginary address on her back with much tickling and thumps and bangs as the parcel progressed through the postal system. This process was usually punctuated by squeals and laughter. The whole event was characterized by a continuous running commentary by Olivia’s papa. The parcel was always addressed to Olivia’s grandmother. There, he was told later, she always behaved beautifully. As the only child in the house, she was fussed over at great length. She spent a lot of time talking to the animals. She had talked of a career with horses for as long as anybody could remember.

She still had not taken a sip of her blanc-cassis. There was a great sadness in her demeanour, as if she had been recently bereaved.

‘What’s the matter, my love?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s you, Papa. We’re all so worried about you. You don’t look well. You haven’t looked well since you came back. And those doctors keep coming and they all leave looking like sick owls.’

Powerscourt saw at once that this was a crucial moment in his relations with his — as it were — adult children. Tell the truth? Procrastinate? Try to muddle through? In the end he knew he had no choice.

‘I should have told you before,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his blanc-cassis. ‘It’s the gas, you see, the poison gas. I had to breathe in too much of it. The doctors have told me I should be dead by now.’

‘Gas? Poison gas?’ said Olivia. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘If there’s another war, my love, both sides are developing different forms of nerve gases which they say they would only use if the other side starts using theirs. They could kill people in enormous numbers. There you are, sitting in your trench or your tent. There’s a slight breeze. Your enemies have shells and other forms of ammunition filled with this poisonous stuff. The Germans — let’s not beat about the bush — the Germans are the best chemists in Europe and they are believed to have the most dangerous forms of gas. It can kill you. It can send you blind. It can destroy your mind but leave your body intact, or the other way round. It’s terrible stuff, my love. I just happened to inhale rather too much of it in my last investigation. I got caught up by accident in the British nerve-gas experiments. I sometimes feel as if I’m choking, as if the gas is going to pull my lungs out. It is getting better. It’s just very slow.’

‘And the scar on your arm, Papa, that terrible scar?’

Powerscourt told her of the death struggle in the nerve centre of the gas research establishment, hidden next to a hotel on the banks of the Thames so the toxic wastes could be carried away, and the Russian spy holding on to Powerscourt’s foot and his arm as he was sucked into the terrible mixture in the middle of that vast laboratory.

‘That’s it,’ said Powerscourt finally, ‘but there’s one thing above all else that is very important.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m still here,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘I’m bloody well still here!’

‘So you are, Papa, so you are.’ The girl’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘Thank God you’re still here.’

‘Don’t be upset, Olivia, please,’ said Powerscourt, noting that Olivia had still not touched a drop of her blanc-cassis. ‘I give you a toast, my love. Raise your glass, please.’

Two glasses clinked together under one of César Ritz’s more extravagant chandeliers.

‘Your future, Olivia.’

The girl’s eyes were brighter now.

‘And yours, Papa. I love you so much. We all do, you see.’

This special birthday celebration was taking place at Powerscourt House in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. When Lady Lucy realized that it was also twenty-five years since Powerscourt sold the family home in Ireland, she wrote to the new owners, a branch of the Guinness brewing dynasty, still there after all these years. Lady Lucy asked if the old owner and his friends could come back for a special anniversary and birthday combined. They replied that they would be delighted to welcome the Powerscourt family and friends back on this special day. Most of the invitations were carried out by telephone in case her husband became suspicious.

It was a beautiful summer’s day, the sea sparkling in the distance, the mountains keeping watch over the great house. A couple of kestrels circled overhead and the seagulls seemed to be flying in relays from the sand dunes to the great fountain at the bottom of the steps.

There was only one person who held the threads or the skeins of Powerscourt’s life in his hands, and that was Johnny Fitzgerald, a descendant of the famous rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had died of his wounds in the 1798 rebellion led by the United Irishmen. Johnny promised to bring one or two or three others who also claimed an affinity with the United Irishmen, a group composed of men of all religions who believed in the ideals of the French Revolution and freedom for Ireland. Their leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone, an unsuccessful Dublin barrister who had persuaded thousands and thousands of his illiterate fellow countrymen to sign the Oath of the United Irishmen.

Johnny was due in the early evening, bringing a man whose ancestors had betrayed the patriots for English gold, and another who said he was a direct descendant of Wolfe Tone himself. Then there was Lucy, love of his life, the only person who knew the complete guest list. After the party, Powerscourt was taking Lady Lucy back to the deep south of America they had seen on their honeymoon, to Charleston and Savannah and the antebellum mansions of the slave owners. Powerscourt himself wanted to see Atlanta, burnt to the ground by General William Tecumseh Sherman as his men went marching through Georgia. Powerscourt had secured a day pass for two trips related to the American Civil War, to Appomattox Court House where General Robert E. Lee had ridden through the cheering lines of the Confederate forces to surrender his flag and his country to Ulysses S. Grant. Powerscourt was also taking Lady Lucy to Gettysburg, where he proposed to find a forgotten corner of the battlefield and read the words that were among the many things that made Lincoln immortal, the Gettysburg Address. He thought they might both cry: for Lincoln; for the country he was never able to create because he was shot; for the arbitrary cruelty of history.

And hidden in the opening pages of his first edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were two tickets to cross Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. They would go through the Rockies and end their journey in San Francisco.

Some of the key players in Powerscourt’s previous cases had made the journey across the Irish Sea to join the celebrations. M. Fokine was temporarily confined to the ballroom in the big house, where he was teaching some of the girls the rudiments of ballet. Powerscourt hoped he wasn’t going to shout at them too much.