There was a strong wind blowing straight into their faces as they set off along the beach that led to Mablethorpe. A couple of ships were beating their way southward towards Norfolk. Mr Drake at the hotel had told Lady Lucy that boats ran in high summer from Skegness to Hunstanton and back, with the passengers often going to inspect the royal residence at Sandringham on the other side of the water. Lady Lucy suddenly remembered that it was during his investigation into a scandal in the royal family at Sandringham that she had first met Francis all those years before. He had proposed to her, she recalled with a smile, during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall, the actual proposal inscribed on newspaper in the middle of an advertisement for Colman’s mustard. Lady Lucy thought she still had that newspaper filed away somewhere at home. When the investigation finished they had been married at the Powerscourt church in Northamptonshire with a wounded Johnny Fitzgerald as best man. She felt intensely happy for a moment. Then she looked at her husband’s face. He was handing her a rather different letter from the one she had been reading earlier. Her heart sank as she saw that it came from the War Office. ‘His Majesty’s Secretary of State requests the pleasure of Lord Powerscourt’s company as soon as his present investigation is over, Yours sincerely, Sir Arthur Jensen, Permanent Under Secretary.’
‘Oh, Francis,’ she said and tucked her arm into his.
‘It’s the devil, Lucy, the very devil.’
With that Powerscourt began walking away from Skegness. He stared out into the North Sea, moderate breakers pounding on to the beach. In his mind’s eye he could see the great dockyards of Britain from Portsmouth to Glasgow filled with thousands and thousands of men building dreadnoughts, the new super battleships that rendered almost all previous warships redundant. Across the North Sea from where he was standing, in Kiel and Hamburg, in Danzig and Bremen, their German counterparts also had their giant cranes and the enormous guns that made up the German dreadnought fleet. Sometime soon they must meet in the dark waters of the North Sea in an engagement that could decide the course of the war in a single afternoon. He thought of the terrible photographs of the dead and the wounded after the critical battles of the American Civil War like Antietam and Gettysburg, long lines of men with one leg shuffling around the inadequate hospitals. Across the plains of Europe Powerscourt saw whole armies rising out of the earth like dragon’s teeth, men clad for battle in grey and khaki and dark blue carrying rifles, Germans and French, English and Dutch, Russians and Italians. Rumbling behind them he could hear the thunder of the artillery and the crash of the exploding shells, the screams of the wounded and the dying, the rumble of innumerable trolleys along the corridors of innumerable hospitals that tended the innumerable victims.
He turned to face his wife. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Sorry, Lucy,’ he said, ‘my mind was just taken over by a vision of war. I think it was worse than any of those horrific visions of hell in Hieronymus Bosch with the tortures and the torments.’
‘Don’t worry, my love.’ Lady Lucy was keen to change her husband’s mood as quickly as she could. ‘It may be nothing. The War Office people, the authorities, as you refer to them, may only want to clear up some details from work you did before. There could be nothing in it.’
‘If that was the case,’ said her husband, a terrible land battle still pounding away in his brain, ‘they’d have asked for the details in the letter.’
‘Well, it can’t be urgent,’ Lady Lucy pressed on, ‘or they’d have ordered you to come straight away.’
‘I don’t think that’s necessarily true either,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves by pulling me off this case.’
‘Francis,’ said Lucy sternly, sounding as if she was talking to a naughty twin back in Markham Square, ‘I don’t like it when you go all negative like this. It isn’t good for you. I know you aren’t looking forward to going back, as it were, but you’ve got to finish this case first. And you aren’t going to do that by moping about on the beach thinking about battleships or whatever it was you were thinking about just now. Let’s be practical. I think we should go and see this Melville man right now. It won’t matter if we’re a bit early. One of my ladies said he is drunk all the time anyway. And you’re not to make yourself depressed thinking about things you don’t know anything about like this latest message from the War Office.’
Lady Lucy stared at her husband, hoping she hadn’t overdone the criticism. But he was smiling at her.
‘You’re quite right, of course, Lucy; you usually are. How fortunate I am to be married to such a sensible person. I shall concentrate on the matter in hand.’ He kissed her gently on the top of her head. But when she looked at him surreptitiously a few moments later, she could see that he was still staring out to sea, looking, she thought, like some shipwrecked mariner scanning the horizon for the sails of rescue.
Sir Arthur Melville’s Elizabethan house had been there for so long now that it looked as if it had been folded into the landscape. There was a small ornamental fountain at the front with a couple of peacocks on parade. Sir Arthur, the butler announced, would receive them in the library. Powerscourt expected some grand linenfold room with ancient bookshelves groaning with leatherbound volumes from centuries past. In fact the shelves looked as if they had only been put up the week before and they were filled with the great novels from the previous century: Dickens and Trollope and George Eliot and Conrad from Britain, Stendhal and Balzac and Flaubert from France, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from Russia.
‘Sold the other library, don’t you know,’ Sir Arthur said after the introductions. ‘Old one, full of old books. Unhappy memories, you see. Late wife used to like reading and writing her letters in there next to some damned history of the Roman Revolution.’
Powerscourt and Lady Lucy nodded as if selling old libraries was an everyday practice.
‘Got a damned good price for them, mind you. Some American fellow bought the lot. Think they’re somewhere in New York by now, Manhattan I think he said.’
One of the peacocks had drawn up very close to the window as if it wanted to join in the conversation, inspecting them in a most superior fashion.
‘Look here, I know why you’ve come. You said so in your letter.’ Sir Arthur scrabbled about among the papers on his desk but failed to find the relevant correspondence. ‘Never mind. I say, you do know what happened here, don’t you, Flavia killing herself and so on? I don’t have to tell you about that all over again, do I?’
Powerscourt noticed that at the mention of his late wife’s name he looked like a man being whipped in the face.
‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There’s no need to drag all that up again. We’re more interested in how you’ve been coping since.’
‘It must have been terrible for you, Sir Arthur,’ put in Lady Lucy with a sympathetic smile.
‘Well, I don’t know. You see, I’ve never been very bright, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. All those sums and translating bits of Greek at school, I couldn’t cope with any of that. Once you realize you can’t do it, that it’s not for you, there’s no point worrying about it. So I joined the army. I wouldn’t be the first person to tell you that you don’t have to be very bright to follow the colours. But I quite enjoyed army life. My first commanding officer warned me that I wouldn’t rise up very far there either, never make Major, let alone Colonel, that sort of thing. He said they wouldn’t trust me in command of a flock of sheep – those were his very words.’
Sir Arthur laughed. ‘I told the fellow I didn’t mind. So I had years and years in the army. When I saw how difficult it was to command troops in battle, my goodness, what a strain, I felt quite happy where I was.’