‘Lord P-p-powerscourt, how kind of you to call,’ he began. ‘The others have all gone out, frightening what little wildlife there is in these p-p-parts on their horses. I much p-p-prefer the horses when they’re in their stalls and you can have a decent conversation with them, don’t you?’
‘Is this one your favourite?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘This is Gladiator,’ said Charles. ‘Actually he’s the sixth or seventh Gladiator we’ve had here. The first one won a lot of famous races over a hundred years ago, the Oaks, the St Leger, that sort of thing. There’s a p-p-painting of him by that fellow Stubbs in the library. One of my ancestors almost b-b-bankrupted the estate dealing in horseflesh. But come, Lord P-powerscourt, I have things to tell you. And I can show you the house as my b-b-brothers are away.’
They set off up the path towards the great house. Charles pointed a long slim finger out across the lake. ‘That’s the death vault, the mausoleum thing over there,’ he said. ‘All the dead are locked up in there. Do you know, they’ve each got a sort of shelf to lie on in their coffin. It’s like one of those very organized libraries, like the B-b-bodleian in Oxford. P-p-pull out a shelf and there’s a load of b-b-books. P-p-pull out a shelf here and there’s a corpse in its coffin.’
The young man looked wistful suddenly. Powerscourt wondered if he was thinking of his own parents lying in their allotted position in Hawksmoor’s marble, waiting for the Last Trump.
‘I thought of going into the Church once, you know, Lord P-p-powerscourt. I thought about it quite seriously. I always thought I’d have liked the Communion Service. Raising the host high above the altar. That sense of expectation you get at Communion. Loads of incense. Richly coloured vestments, p-p-purple if I ever got as far as b-b-bishop.’
‘What made you change your mind?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘I was never quite sure I b-b-believed it enough, if you know what I mean. I used to have this dream of finishing a theology exam in Oxford one hot day in the summer term and a very old cleric with a vast b-b-beard collecting my p-p-papers and saying, “You don’t really b-b-believe any of this nonsense, do you?” I always woke up b-b-before I could give an answer.’
They were now in the entrance to the Hall, a rather dark place in the basement lined with animal heads that had once grazed in the Candlesby grounds. ‘There used to be a p-p-proper way in,’ Charles told him, ‘p-p-pillars, a hall with high ceilings, family p-p-portraits, usually on horses, lining the walls. This entrance looks as though it was designed for the coal merchant or the man who comes to clean the chimneys. It’s too common for words.’
‘Why was it changed?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘If your ancestors were as mad as mine,’ said Charles sadly, ‘anything was p-p-possible. They could have put the kitchen on the roof or turned the house into a zoo. Small stuffed animals, b-b-birds in glass boxes, antlers, the whole cornucopia of dead creatures has always had a great appeal to my family. They must all have b-b-been deer or red kites or tawny eagles in a p-p-previous existence.’
Charles led him round the house, pausing every now and again to point out some truly monumental piece of taxidermy or a picture where one of Gladiator’s ancestors could just be glimpsed through the accumulated grime on the surface of the painting.
Powerscourt found himself in a strange world he would never forget. In his youth he had seen houses in Ireland where decay was taking over as the family income grew less and less and was eaten up by mortgages and jointures. But he had never encountered anything as bad as this. Here the paint was flaking off the ceilings, long strips of wallpaper hung off the walls. There was dry rot in the floorboards. Sections of rotting plaster had dropped from ceiling to floor and disintegrated into yet more dust. Lady Lucy was to point out when he went back to the hotel that his hair was turning white in places. There were antlers on the walls whose heads were falling off, one-eyed owls, foxes with no tails. One of the previous Earls had collected animals of all descriptions and these were rotting away in glass cases that lay about in most of the downstairs rooms. And Charles told Powerscourt about the Wicked Earl, who had gone on the Grand Tour and collected some of the bloodier and more sadistic Caravaggios.
Time had stopped a long time before in Candlesby Hall. There was no electricity, no telephone, no motor car, no central heating, none of the conveniences associated with the modernity of 1909. If the Industrial Revolution had never touched great swathes of Lincolnshire, it had never even whispered its name in Candlesby Hall. Powerscourt thought the range in the kitchen might have been in use at the time of the French Revolution. The vicar in the next parish, an amateur historian of the medieval period, told him that the late Earl and his family were living in the seventeenth, or possibly the eighteenth century.
It was a week before Powerscourt realized one of the strangest things of all about this strange house. All the servants, with four exceptions, were male. And the only women on the staff were all over fifty.
PART TWO
THE SPECIAL TRAIN
An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady … If among your clients you know such a lady who is willing to purchase the rank of a peeress for ?65,000 sterling, paid in cash to her future husband and who has sufficient wealth besides to keep up the rank of a peeress, I should be pleased if you would communicate with me.
8
Johnny Fitzgerald stared at his full glass of beer for a long time. Lady Lucy had gone off to write to her children and would join him later. Johnny had spent a lot of time in his career with Powerscourt looking for people who had gone missing. Quite often they turned out to be dead. On at least two occasions they had turned out to be murderers. Only once, to the best of his knowledge, had he failed and he had always consoled himself with the thought that the individual concerned had gone missing on a ship and had probably fallen or been pushed over the side.
Still he did not try his beer. Reviewing the little he knew about the disappearance of Jack Hayward, Johnny tried to work out the circumstances of his departure. The reason was clear enough. Either the Candlesbys wanted him out of the way or he had decided to take himself out of trouble for a while. And he had decided not to leave his wife or his children behind as possible hostages. But which was it? Surely he would not have taken his wife and children into the unknown, some destination with no house for them to live in and no job for him to keep the family going. Would a man like Jack Hayward have contacts of his own he could mobilize to provide hearth and home at a moment’s notice? Would his relations, not to put too fine a point on it, have the spare room or rooms to accommodate the Hayward menage? And not just for a day, but for a week or a month or even longer? Johnny toyed with the idea of advertising for knowledge of Hayward’s whereabouts in The Field or Horse and Hound or Country Life, maybe all three. He could pretend to be a solicitor looking for Hayward to hand over an inheritance, maybe even a bequest from the late Earl though Johnny wasn’t sure the late Earl would have been in the business of leaving small bequests to his servants, however valuable they were.
What about the other option, that the new Earl had persuaded or bribed him to leave? How much would it cost to keep and to house a family of four for an indefinite period of time? Or had there been a job he could go to? Had some friend or relation said to the late Earl that if he ever wanted to get rid of that groom of his, he, the friend or relation, would happily give him a job? Maybe one of the late Earl’s racing contacts would be happy to take in Hayward. Such people, Johnny said to himself, often have spare cottages at their disposal for extra stable staff or visiting jockeys. Or maybe it was a relation. Powerscourt hadn’t said anything about relations, probably because he didn’t know.