‘Shuffle, Francis, shuffle. Imagine you’re one of the galley slaves, your back aching, your heart despondent as you realize how slow progress is. By the end of the first day they had come about fifty yards down the Via de Calzaioli to the junction with the Via del Tosinghi here. There are about another two hundred and fifty yards to go. I imagine the forty workers must have enjoyed their glass of Chianti or whatever it was at the end of the day. Keep shuffling, Francis.’
Lady Lucy shuffled her way down the street very slowly, holding firmly on to her husband’s arm.
‘We don’t know if the Giant shook or nearly fell over on its journey. Imagine Michelangelo at that moment. Here is his masterpiece – and he is very sure it is a masterpiece – en route to its final resting place. The beams hit a rock perhaps. The men pull the wrong way. The Giant topples inside its wooden frame. It is about to disappear from history for ever, smashed into hundreds of pieces of marble on the hard streets of Florence. It would have broken his heart. He might never have been the same again.’
‘But it didn’t fall, Lucy, did it?’ Powerscourt had shuffled his way to the edge of the Piazza della Signoria.
‘No, it didn’t.’ Lady Lucy laughed. ‘It took four days, imagine the four days of pulling that huge weight for the galley slaves, to reach here. And there it is. Or rather its replica is.’
A recent copy of Michelangelo’s David looked down on them proudly from its great height. There was nobody left in the square. Behind the Neptune Fountain other statues kept a night watch over the Piazza.
Powerscourt held Lady Lucy very tight.
‘Please may I kiss you just here?’ he asked very quietly. ‘It’s always appealed to me. It’s the spot where they burnt Savonarola at the stake.’
‘Francis, you are quite incorrigible. I despair of you, I really do.’
Lady Lucy raised her face and the moon came out behind Brunelleschi’s dome.
Powerscourt had an enjoyable but fruitless visit to the National Gallery. The Claudes and the Poussins had been elegant, they had been charming, they had been enigmatic. But although he had seen the shapes of most of the buildings at Blackwater in their canvases, an Aeneas at Delos here, a Landscape with the marriage of Isaac and Rebeccah there, he was no further forward. Maybe I’ll have to read the whole of the bloody Aeneid, he said to himself as he returned to Markham Square.
He found Lady Lucy, weeping in the drawing room as though her heart would break.
‘Lucy, Lucy, my love.’ He took her in his arms and held her tight. ‘What’s the matter, my love? Are the children all right? They’re not ill, are they?’
Lady Lucy shook her head through her tears. ‘They’re fine, Francis. They’re absolutely fine.’ She wept on.
‘Has somebody died, Lucy? Someone in your family?’
‘No, Francis, it’s not that.’
Powerscourt waited for the tears to cease. He caressed her hair and whispered into her ear that he loved her very much.
She began to calm down. She dried her eyes and sat down on the sofa, tearstained eyes and cheeks gazing up at Powerscourt.
‘It’s just that we’re so lucky, Francis. We’ve got money, we’ve got nice houses, we’ve got lovely healthy children.’
Powerscourt held her hand. He waited. Lady Lucy tried to straighten her hair.
‘It’s this family, Francis. They’re having such a terrible time. Sorry, I’m not making myself very clear.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. Powerscourt waited.
‘You know our church organizes visits to the poor in Fulham and Hammersmith, just a couple of miles away from here?’
Powerscourt nodded.
‘You know there are all these terrible books nowadays about the condition of the poor and the labouring classes, Francis. Well, I have tried to read them. My mind goes blank with all those statistics, those huge numbers rolling out across the pages. I keep telling myself I should finish them but I can’t. But I have been going to see one particular family, Francis. I do what I can for them, clothes, food, money.’
Lady Lucy stopped as if her mind had left Chelsea and gone back to some tenement in Fulham.
‘They’re called Farrell, Francis. They have five children. The last one died in childbirth. Now the baby is ill, so very ill they think he is going to die too. He’s got this terrible fever, little Peter, he’s so small and so hot all the time, they can’t get him cool at all.’
‘Where do they live, Lucy?’ asked Powerscourt quietly.
‘Their flat is fine, Francis. It’s at World’s End in one of those blocks the charities have put up to house the respectable poor so they don’t have to live in squalor. The other children are thin, terribly thin. I don’t think the husband earns very much money. But think how dreadful it would be if little Peter died. It would break the mother’s heart.’
Powerscourt knew she was thinking of Robert and Thomas and little Olivia, Robert at school, the two younger ones having their afternoon rest upstairs.
‘You must go again tomorrow, Lucy, and bring them money for the doctor,’ said Powerscourt.
‘I must,’ Lady Lucy replied, more cheertul now at the prospect of useful activity. ‘I shall go tomorrow. You don’t mind, Francis, do you?’
‘Mind?’ said her husband gently. ‘The only thing I would mind, Lucy, after all you’ve told me, is if you didn’t go tomorrow.’
Part Two
12
Lord Francis Powerscourt was tossing in his bed in Markham Square. Beside him Lady Lucy slept peacefully, one arm thrown lightly across her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt was in Blackwater again, inside the little temple by the lake, the Pantheon. The light was fading fast. Suddenly he heard the iron gates shut with a terrible clang. Outside them the two great wooden doors closed as well. Powerscourt did not have the keys. The only light came from the top of the cupola. He was looking at the statues who were now his companions, Hercules and Diana, Isis and Ceres.
Then the whole temple began to fall, with ever-increasing speed. It fell as though there was a special shaft to carry it down to the hidden bowels of the earth. Procul, o procul este, profani. He remembered the inscription on the Temple of Flora, the Sibyl’s warning to the unsanctified in the Aeneid to keep clear of the entrance to the underworld. The temple was still shooting down, the flicker of light now reduced to a pinprick far far above.
As suddenly as it had fallen, the temple stopped. The iron gates swung open. The wooden doors followed. A ghostly light shone through the dead trees and the withered bushes that made up the new landscape. Wisps of fog floated by in the gloom. I’m in the underworld, Powerscourt said to himself. Soon I shall meet the boatman Charon, his eyes alive with flame, who ferries the bodies across the river of the dead. Here in the shadows I shall meet pallid disease, dejected age, fear, the terrible spectres Death and Decline, War and Lunatic Discord with the bloodstained ribbons in her snaky hair.
There was a loud and persistent knocking. Powerscourt wondered if the bodies of the unburied, doomed for all eternity to wait on the wrong side of Charon’s river, were beating on the side of his boat. The knocking grew louder. Powerscourt now felt sure that the noise was not caused by the unburied, but was a message from one of the other monsters of the underworld, the flaming Chimaera with her terrifying hiss, Briareus with a hundred arms.
Lady Lucy was shaking him violently on the shoulder.
‘Francis, Francis darling, you’re not dead, are you?’
‘I’m not dead, Lucy. I was in a dream. I was in the underworld.’
‘Well, you’re not in the underworld now, Francis. There’s somebody knocking at the front door. They’ve been at it for about five minutes while you were down below.’
‘What time is it?’ whispered Powerscourt, fastening his dressing gown and looking in vain for his slippers.