‘It must have been very peaceful for him here,’ he said, smiling gently at Samuel Parker.
‘It was, my lord, it certainly was. Now, there’s one last place he used to work and then we’ll have done the full circuit. It’s the Pantheon next, my lord.’
So that was what the temple reminded him of. Powerscourt knew he had seen it somewhere before. It had been on a trip to Rome with Lucy for a wedding anniversary. The Pantheon. The pagan gods of Rome had transplanted themselves from the banks of the Tiber to a new home in the depths of Oxfordshire.
‘Sometimes he would talk in German, sometimes in Yiddish.’ The old lady was concentrating hard, as if she knew her time was limited. Lady Lucy wondered if Francis would want her to take a crash course in Yiddish. She rather hoped not. She waited. She thought Miss Harrison’s mind was about to take off on one of its own private journeys once more.
‘Secret societies, secret societies,’ the old lady was whispering now. ‘Why do people want to have secret societies, my dear? Father used to complain about them at the universities. He said they were terrible organizations devoted to duelling and drinking and that sort of thing,’
She stopped, lost in thought. Lady Lucy tried to head her off before she disappeared.
‘Here, or in Germany?’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice.
‘He knew they were in Germany. Oh yes.’ The old lady was very definite suddenly. ‘He knew that. Do you know what they say about getting old, my dear?’
Lady Lucy shook her head.
‘They say that you can remember things that happened fifty years ago but you can’t remember what happened yesterday. He didn’t know if they were in England as well as in Germany. That’s what my brother said in his sleep. Father got so upset about these secret societies because his best friend’s son was left with a terrible duelling scar, right down one side of his face. Such a handsome boy he used to be before that.’
She drew a line from just below her ear to the side of her wrinkled mouth. Lady Lucy wondered if she had been in love with this handsome boy, all those years ago.
‘Did he ever say what the secret society was for? What its purpose was?’
‘No good will come of it, Father used to say,’ Miss Harrison went on, ‘no good at all. You don’t want to go round stirring up hatred. That boy with the scar, look what happened to him after all that fighting. The girls would never look at him after that. What a shame, Father used to say. Duelling finished his future, poor boy.’
Lady Lucy longed to ask if Miss Harrison had been in love with him before his terrible scar. But she pressed on. Francis would never forgive her if she encouraged the love stories of the old lady from sixty years before.
‘Did he ever say what the secret society was for?’ she asked, remembering Francis’ description of how he had wanted to shake Miss Harrison into sense as the interview went on.
‘It’s a secret brotherhood. It’s a secret bloody brotherhood. I remember him shouting that once, not so very long ago. We’d had goose for supper. We used to have goose sometimes for Christmas when I was a little girl. Sometimes there were so many of us that we had two or even three. I can remember the smell, you know, of those geese cooking in the oven. It used to spread all over the house. Father loved carving goose. I remember him saying once with the great carving knife in his hand that he should have been a surgeon rather than a banker. Then he could have carved away all day.’ Miss Harrison laughed a tinny laugh.
Lady Lucy smiled sympathetically. ‘Is there anything else you can remember, Miss Harrison? Anything else of what he used to say in his sleep?’ She tried another tack. ‘Just imagine that he’s sitting here now, in this chair, after supper, just the two of you. The fire is burning in the grate. It’s dark outside. The curtains are drawn. It’s very quiet. Gradually he falls asleep.’ Lady Lucy slowly closed her eyes. ‘Perhaps he begins to snore. Then suddenly he speaks. He mutters in his sleep, your brother. What is he saying?’ She let her head fall on to her shoulder.
The old lady puckered her face as if she was a small child confronted with a nasty piece of mental arithmetic. Then she too closed her eyes.
Lady Lucy waited, eyes closed. When she peeped out of them she saw that her device had failed. The old lady’s eyes had closed too. Her breathing grew slow and regular. Just at the point when she might have been about to tell the whole story, Miss Augusta Harrison had fallen asleep.
Six Corinthian columns flanked by a couple of ancient statues gazed out across the lake. This must have been the centrepiece of the whole place, thought Powerscourt, wondering not for the first time about the strange mind of the man who had designed these fabulous gardens, a mind where the ancient myths of Greece and Rome and the poetry of Virgil seemed to have been more important than the eighteenth-century world he actually inhabited. Powerscourt thought he would have liked to meet the mind, if it could be summoned forth from the springs and grottoes it had left behind.
The pony trotted happily down to the water’s edge to munch the grass. Samuel Parker was fiddling with his bunch of keys.
‘Did Mr Harrison rest under these columns in the summer? It must be nice and cool then.’ Powerscourt could see the little temple, with its columns, dome and assorted statuary, in some Roman landscape of the Campagna, providing welcome relief from the sweltering sun. In England, he reflected prosaically, you could always shelter from the showers.
‘He used to, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker. ‘Then I think he got worried about being overlooked, so he used to go inside. This was one of his favourite places to do his writing.’
Parker had opened the great doors and was wrestling with the key to an iron grille that protected the sculpture inside. Facing the lake was a marble statue of Hercules, flanked by Diana, goddess of hunting, Ceres, goddess of nature and harvest, and – more ominously – Isis, mistress of the dark mysteries of the underworld. Powerscourt inspected them carefully, trying and failing to remember all seven labours of Hercules.
‘He’d leave the doors open, my lord,’ Samuel Parker was placing himself exactly where he remembered the table being, ‘and then he could look out at the lake when he wanted. Sometimes I’d wait for an hour or more just outside while he was writing away in here.’
‘Did Hercules mean anything special to him?’ asked Powerscourt, rubbing his hand over the surface of the statue to see if it might be hollow, if there might be some pressure from the hand which might open up a hidden chamber inside the marble.
‘Hercules was very stupid, my lord,’ said Samuel Parker, gazing out at the lake like his master.
‘Was he? Why do you say that?’ replied a puzzled Powerscourt.
‘He could never do anything right. None of them beginning with H, Hannibal, Helen, Hercules, ever had any brains at all.’
Powerscourt could see that Helen might have been all beauty and no brains, but Hannibal? Surely the wily Carthaginian had destroyed a couple of Roman armies?
‘Are you sure?’ Powerscourt was inspecting Diana’s flanks now, running his hand around the marble curves of her hips.
‘Sorry, my lord. They were horses, Hercules and the others. I wasn’t talking about the statues.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘Tell me, Mr Parker, if your master wanted to hide some of his documents, do you think he could have left them in here?’
Samuel Parker scratched his head. He took some time to answer.
‘I suppose he could, my lord. But I have no idea at all where he might have hidden them. This would be a queer place to go hiding bits of paper.’
‘That’s just what might have appealed to him, the fact that nobody would expect it. But I have no more idea than you have of where it might be.’ Powerscourt was feeling his way round Ceres’ feet, in case some hidden spring might answer to his touch. The marble was cold to his fingers. It was smooth. But it had no message for him.