Nobody could have accused Johnny Fitzgerald of being a cautious chess player. He deployed his pieces with great vigour, forever seeking the advantage. ‘L’audace,’ he would mutter to himself from time to time, like some headstrong French cavalry commander, ‘toujours l’audace,’ as his forces rolled forward up the board.
Powerscourt was more cautious, more patient. He would trap the Fitzgerald advances in thickets of pawns, where they would be clinically captured by marauding knights. He always took great care to guard his King. When he finally advanced it would often only be after a prolonged siege where the Fitzgerald battalions had hurled themselves in vain against the castle walls.
But on this occasion it looked as if the rash were going to triumph over the cautious. The Fitzgerald squadrons, lubricated by regular canteens of Chateau de Beaucastel, were in the ascendant. Left under his command he had his Queen, two rooks, a knight and a solitary bishop to bless his endeavours. He had a couple of lonely pawns, one on each side of the board. Johnny never bothered much about his pawns, sacrificing them recklessly in his advances. Powerscourt had lost his Queen. He had two castles and one knight, and five foot soldier pawns remaining on the field of battle. He was always very careful about his pawns. Powerscourt’s King was under heavy attack on the right-hand side of the field.
‘How long is it since I beat you at chess, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald, preparing already for the sack of the beleaguered citadel, the feast following the victory.
‘I think it was about five years ago, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, staring with great concentration at his knight. ‘But I’m not finished yet. I shall fight till the last pawn has been slain.’
‘Check,’ said Fitzgerald, moving his Queen three ranks down the board. The set had been made in India and the Queen was a particularly terrifying figure, resembling, Powerscourt often said, what Queen Boadicea must have looked like when she rode into battle.
Powerscourt hid his King behind a couple of pawns. The threatened monarch was now half-way up the board on the right-hand side. Fitzgerald began moving his knight forward for the final attack. Lady Lucy came to watch the end of the battle, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt moved one of his castles two squares to the left.
‘You could resign now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald graciously. ‘Save you the trouble of playing on till the bloody end. Save your troops from the massacre.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. He moved his knight forward. The knight was protected by the castle.
‘Check,’ he said. It was completely unexpected. Was this a desperate move to gain time? Or had Powerscourt snatched victory from the jaws of defeat?
The full impact of Powerscourt’s knight’s move hit Fitzgerald at the very centre of his strength. It was a fork. The King was in check and had to move. Or the piece checking could be removed by one of the Fitzgerald forces. But none of them were in a position to do that. And the Queen, Fitzgerald’s gaudy caparisoned Queen, was on the other end of the fork, the audacious knight protected by Powerscourt’s castle. Any piece rash enough to take the knight, after the destruction of the Queen, would itself be blown to pieces by Powerscourt’s castle.
Johnny Fitzgerald laughed. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, ‘just when I thought I had you in the bag, you’ve escaped! Houdini comes to the chessboard!’
He could have fought on. But he knew that very soon Powerscourt would convert one of his pawns into a new Queen. Then it would only be a matter of time. In a single move the balance of advantage had switched.
‘I shall spare my men the humiliation of captivity and exile,’ said Fitzgerald, striking a pose like Brutus in one of his nobler moments, ‘I resign.’
The combatants shook hands. Lady Lucy patted them both in the back. ‘An excellent game,’ she said. ‘I think you should have won, Johnny. But the devious old Francis got you in the end!’
The footman knocked on the door and delivered a letter, addressed in a flowing hand, to Lord Francis Powerscourt, 25 Markham Square, Chelsea.
‘From the President of the Royal Academy’, it said on the letterhead. Powerscourt read it aloud. ‘“My dear Powerscourt, I promised to let you know anything I heard about the sad death of Christopher Montague. A piece of gossip reached me earlier today. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, nor would I wish to comment upon the morality of this intelligence. But my conscience would not let me rest if I did not inform you. At the time of his death Christopher Montague was said to be having an affair with a married woman in London. The husband is said not to be compliant. I do not have the name. I trust that the work of an investigator is not normally so sordid. Yours, Frederick Lambert.”’
Powerscourt passed the letter over to Johnny Fitzgerald who now knew all that Powerscourt did about the strange death of Christopher Montague.
‘This could be very important,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We are still in the dark about the dead man. We assume, from what they said in the London Library, that he was writing an article about forgery when he died. But we don’t know what sort of forgery. He could have been going to say that all the Florentine Old Masters in the National Gallery were fakes, or copies, or some other form of misattribution. He could have been intending to attack the curator of a museum somewhere. They’re like historians, these art people, nothing they like more than attacking each other.’
‘Killing each other?’ suggested Fitzgerald cheerfully. He was licking his wounds from the chess game with further draughts of Chateau de Beaucastel.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘Garrotting somebody might be more likely to come from an angry husband than an art historian.’
‘I tell you what, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’m going to enlist my auntie in this investigation. She’s got a lot of paintings.’
‘Is that the auntie who keeps the back copies of the Illustrated London News?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. He remembered a journey to Venice in search of a Lord Edward Gresham without a photo of his suspect. Fitzgerald had found him at the front of the train seconds before it left and pressed a copy of the Illustrated London News, complete with Gresham photograph, into his hand. Seven years later Powerscourt could still remember the words. ‘She collects all these magazines, my auntie. She’s got rooms full of them. She says they’ll be valuable in the years to come. She’s quite mad. She’s potty . . .’
‘The same auntie, Auntie Winifred,’ said Fitzgerald. He shook his head as he thought of the eccentricities of his relative. ‘She keeps all the paintings in the attic,’ he said. ‘God knows why she doesn’t keep them on the walls like any normal human being. She says they’ll be safer there, the burglars won’t be able to see them.’
Lady Lucy smiled. ‘Is she quite old, your aunt, Johnny?’
‘I think she’s about a hundred and three,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘well, not quite that. But she is undoubtedly very old.’ Fitzgerald finished his glass and peered out into the light fading over Markham Square. ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem here,’ he went on. ‘We don’t know what kind of people they are, these art dealers and art experts. Sir Frederick up at the Royal Academy has offered to help, I know. But if they were army people, or society people or even City people, we’d know what kind of persons we’re dealing with. We don’t with this lot. Don’t you agree, Francis?’
‘I do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But I’m not sure what good a hundred-and-three-year-old auntie is going to be. She doesn’t have telepathic powers, or anything like that, does she?’