David Dickinson: Goodnight Sweet Prince

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.’