David Dickinson - Death and the Jubilee

Powerscourt was looking at his fingertips, rubbing them slowly together. But it was Lady Lucy who spoke.

‘Could he not have gone somewhere else, William? The Italian Lakes, or somewhere on the Rhine, perhaps. It would be so dreadful if this corpse was that poor old man.’

‘I don’t think he was poor.’ Burke laughed cheerfully, a man reputed to be able to value the top men in the City to the nearest ten thousand pounds. ‘Certainly not poor.’

‘No matter how rich you are you shouldn’t have to end up like that. If it was Old Mr Harrison,’ said Lady Lucy, defending the rights of the dead.

‘I’m not sure how to proceed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s unlikely that further inquiries in the City will make any progress. Maybe somebody should scout around their house in the country – Oxfordshire, did you say it was, William?’

‘It is,’ said Burke, resuming the mantle of business. ‘But please be very careful, very discreet. The Harrisons may know that I was behind the inquiries made in Lombard Street. Word will surely reach them that I made further inquiries in Germany. We need to be very careful indeed.

’And I must be off home. Thank you so much for the lemonade. You won’t forget that you are coming to me for the weekend in the country, to be there at the installation of my new vicar? I never realized that when I bought the house and the land I bought an incumbency as well!’ William Burke laughed in the joy of his own prosperity. ‘You have to read a lesson, Francis, you will recall. And I’ve got the Bishop coming as well. Publish it not in the streets of Gath, as the parsons say,’ Burke smiled at his hosts, ‘but I saved his whole diocese from bankruptcy three years ago. But that’s another story.’

With that William Burke, financier and man of property, departed into the night. ‘Francis,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘come back, come back.’

Powerscourt had disappeared into his own thoughts. Lady Lucy was used to it by now. She smiled at her husband as he stared into the dying fire.

‘Sorry, Lucy. I was only wondering what to do. I think we need somebody to work their way in towards the Harrison house, the village, the neighbours, the postman, that sort of thing.’

‘I know who you are going to send.’ Lady Lucy leaned against his shoulder and put her arm round his waist. ‘You’re going to send Johnny Fitzgerald, aren’t you? Well, you just tell him to be careful. That other time he was nearly killed because of you, and that was in the depths of Northamptonshire. I don’t see why Oxfordshire should be any safer for him.’

Lady Lucy remembered the emaciated best man at their wedding, policemen guarding the doors, a wounded Fitzgerald strapped up like a mummy, almost fainting as he stood by the altar.

Powerscourt smiled at his wife, remembering Johnny Fitzgerald’s speech as best man at their wedding. ‘We’ll take care, Lucy. Very great care.’

‘Clarendon Park is a nabob’s seat, East India Company money,’ William Burke said to Powerscourt, pointing to his Palladian mansion not far from Marlow. They were waiting for their families as the women made last-minute adjustments to hats and children before the short walk to the small church for the installation of the new vicar. ‘It was built by a fellow called Francis Hodge who made a fortune in India and came home to retire in peace by the Thames. But things didn’t quite work out the way he thought.’

‘What went wrong?’ asked Powerscourt, slightly nervous, as ever, at the prospect of having to read the lesson.

‘The poor man – well, he was fairly poor by the end – got impeached for greed and corruption in the East, rather like Warren Hastings. There were huge lawyers’ bills. Hodge had to go up to Westminster for months on end to answer questions from sanctimonious MPs and watch the value of his shares in the East India Company falling like a stone. At one point, I believe, they dropped fifty thousand in a week.’

Powerscourt could see the appeal of such a house, its fortunes so closely linked to the City of London.

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that some of the uncertainty might rub off on to your own affairs, William? Daily appearances before some Commons committee? Radical lawyer MPs quizzing you about your affairs?’

‘No,’ said William Burke emphatically. He laughed.

As they sat in the little church, pews filled with tenants and family, Powerscourt was wondering about his sisters. They loved each other dearly, of course, but there was always an element of competition between them. Eleanor, the youngest, had certainly married the most handsome husband, but he had very little money. Mary, the middle sister, had made a very prudent marriage to William Burke. Rosalind, the eldest, seemed to have won the marriage stakes by her alliance with Lord Pembridge, an aristocrat with a great deal of money and fine houses in St James’s Square and in Hampshire. But over the weekend he had noticed a certain smugness, an air of quiet but unmistakable triumph about Mary. It showed in the way she almost patronized her elder sister, showing off the glories of her new house, wondering aloud about how many servants and gardeners they would need to employ. And Rosalind, for once, looked as though she felt her position as the most successful of the sisters, the Queen Bee of her own little hive, was under threat.

As he rose to read his lesson Powerscourt cast a careful glance at his family to make sure the children were behaving.

‘The First Lesson,’ he began in his clear tenor voice, ‘is taken from the twenty-first Chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew.

‘“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.”’

The new vicar, a red-headed man in his middle thirties, was looking serious. The Bishop, splendid in his purple robes, looked as if he was falling sleep. Powerscourt wondered, for the sixth or seventh time since he had entered the church, how the Bishop could have almost brought his diocese to bankruptcy. Had he fallen asleep in those apparently tedious meetings of the diocesan finance sub-committees? Had he invested the church collections unwisely on the Exchange?

‘“And he said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”’

There was a very faint creak as the door opened and a late arrival slipped quietly into a pew at the back and opened his prayer book. The newcomer winked at Powerscourt. It was Johnny Fitzgerald.

‘“And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple: and he healed them.”

‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’

Powerscourt had grown up with Lord Johnny Fitzgerald in Ireland. They had served together in Army Intelligence in India. On a number of occasions they had saved each other’s lives. Johnny had been Powerscourt’s best man at both his weddings.

‘I have come to make my report, Francis.’ Fitzgerald gave a mock salute to his former superior officer as they walked through William Burke’s woods towards the Thames below. ‘You remember you said I had to approach the matter very carefully and very slowly? Well, I did, I just hope I didn’t exceed my powers at the end.’

‘You’re not suggesting you might have disobeyed orders, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘I was thinking of it more like Nelson with his blind eye. Copenhagen, was it, or the Nile? A temporary lapse for the greater good of the cause.’

‘I’m sure I should hear your report before passing any judgement, Johnny.’

‘Right,’ Fitzgerald bent down and picked up a stout branch to serve as a walking stick. ‘My story begins in Wallingford, the King’s Arms in Wallingford to be precise. I booked myself in there for a couple of days. Fine beer they have there, Francis, very fine beer with a fruity sort of taste to it. My story was that I left England some years before to be a banker in Boston in America.’