With that Powerscourt left his drawing room and went to the upper floors in search of a twin or two to calm him down.
‘Bloody man, bloody man,’ Powerscourt said later to Lady Lucy. ‘He practically accused me of being a coward. I tell you what though, Lucy. He is never to be admitted to this house again. And will you please tell your relations that if he is invited to any social function, wedding, funeral, christening, death of the first-born, ritual character assassination, afternoon tea, we shall not be attending.’
The following morning Powerscourt had gone to look up some information in the London Library in St James’s Square. Just after eleven o’clock a very grand carriage drew up outside the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. Lord Rosebery, former Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister, was ushered respectfully into the drawing room. Lady Lucy was not sure her hair was what it should have been, nor was she certain of her dress, but Rosebery, apart from his public functions, was a very old friend of her family’s in Scotland. As a boy he had attended her christening, as a man he had attended both her weddings, he was one of the three people allowed to call her Lucy. Because of his great position as a former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister she had never been able to call him anything other than Lord Rosebery.
‘Please forgive me, Lucy,’ Rosebery began, ‘for calling on you out of the blue like this. I will be perfectly honest with you, my dear. I am here at the special request of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office about this Russian business. I feel I am better placed talking to you than I would be talking to Francis. That Foreign Office fellow thinks I can change Francis’s mind. I am not so sure. Only you, I believe, can do that.’
Lady Lucy remembered that Rosebery, whatever his weaknesses as Prime Minister, was a famous orator. Even in conversation, she felt, you could imagine him on some lofty platform haranguing the faithful by the thousands. This fastidious aristocrat, she remembered, was the man who had attended a Democratic Party Convention in New York with its cheering and its fireworks and its torch-lit processions and its pre-planned spontaneous demonstrations of enthusiasm for particular candidates, and had brought some of those techniques back to Britain when he organized Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign.
‘I want to put a theory to you, Lucy. It’s only a theory, you understand.’ Rosebery smiled and Lady Lucy suddenly felt afraid. ‘After Francis was shot you went abroad a couple of years ago, just the two of you, to Italy, if my memory serves me. My theory is that on that holiday, or shortly after you returned, you persuaded Francis to give up investigating. You did it for perfectly understandable reasons, of course, four children, two of them tiny, a long history of danger and attempts on his life of one sort of another. I have known Francis for a very long time. I remember when he began investigating even while he was still in the army with a terrible murder case in Simla. I know how he thought of it as a form of public service, making sure the world was rid of some wicked murderers who might kill again. I do not think he would ever have volunteered to give it up of his own accord. It would be like asking W.G. Grace to abandon cricket or Mr Wells to stop writing his stories. Only you could have done it, Lucy. Am I right?’
Feeling guilty and defiant at the same time, Lady Lucy nodded her head. Rosebery held up his hand as if to forbid her from speaking.
‘Please let me continue, Lucy. So. That skeletal person from the Foreign Office thinks I am now going to persuade you to change your mind. I am not going to do anything of the sort. But I would just like you to think of certain things, if I may.’
And then, to the immense satisfaction of Lady Lucy, he rose from his chair and began pacing up and down her drawing room in exactly the same manner as her husband. Maybe all men, she reflected, have a built-in urge to walk an imaginary quarterdeck like Nelson in pursuit of some elusive French fleet or Spanish galleon, laden with treasure and the spoils of war.
‘I should like you to think about courage, Lucy. Not just courage in battle by land or sea, though there are some awesome examples of that in our recent history. The courage of those with mortal illnesses and of those looking after them. The courage to go on living and caring for children after the death of a husband or wife. The courage to carry on when overwhelmed by melancholy or despair. And then think of what happens, not if courage is taken away, but if the opportunity to display courage is taken away. I spoke a moment ago of W.G. Grace being asked to give up cricket. Let us perhaps think of Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury being asked to give up politics in their time. That, in a way, is what Francis has had to do in giving up investigating. He has had to show as much courage in renouncing it as you have shown in asking him to do so. But think of what it must have cost him. That fool of a junior minister virtually accused him of being a coward the other day. Francis is not just being denied the opportunity to show what he can do, he is being denied the opportunity to display his courage once again. I do not know what effect that will have. Some men could rise above it. With others it could eat away at their very souls.’
Rosebery stopped pacing suddenly to peer into Markham Square. Then he returned to his quarterdeck.
‘I want you to think about patriotism, Lucy, about the love of country. Maybe I should say the chance to serve one’s country, to show how much you care by offering to lay down your life for her. In the Funeral Speech in Book Two of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, Pericles tells his fellow citizens to fix their eyes on the glory that is Athens and to fall in love with her. Then they can show their true courage on the battlefield or at the oars of their triremes. Francis has shown a very great deal of that courage during his life. Now he is being denied the opportunity to display it once again. When your first husband went off to rescue General Gordon at Khartoum, Lucy, you did not ask him to stay at home in case he was killed. When Francis went off to the Boer War you did not plead with him to change his mind. You went to the railway station and waved him off, even though you must have known he might never come back.
‘And finally, Lucy, I want you to think about peace and about your children. When I was Foreign Secretary all those years ago, it looked as if the long peace would go on for ever. War, a European war, seemed inconceivable. Now I am not so sure. The diplomats scurry round from capital to capital thinking up alliances, leagues, defensive groupings, pacts of co-operation if attacked by a third party. The shipyards of the major powers are racing against time and each other to produce deadlier and deadlier vessels, laden with the most lethal armaments man can invent. I recently bought a book of photographs from the American Civil War, Lucy, the most recent example of prolonged industrialized warfare. The injuries are horrendous, limbs ripped off, intestines blown away, heads cut off at the neck, bodies literally split in two. In the years after the conflict there were more cripples in Alabama than able-bodied men. And what has this to do with St Petersburg? Simply this, Lucy, simply this. I do not know the nature of the dead man’s mission but I believe the Prime Minister when he says it could make peace more likely. Peace means there will be no war. I met your Robert, your lovely son from your first marriage, at a dinner at his Oxford college a couple of weeks ago. It happens to be my college too. I do not want to think of that young man in uniform risking his life on some wretched battlefield in France. I do not like to think of all those young men at his college marching off to war. Nor do I like to think of my godson Master Thomas Powerscourt in the same position. Maybe they would all come back safely. Maybe nobody would. Peace means the young men can stay alive. War means many of them will die. If the St Petersburg project brings peace a little closer, we have to think of it very seriously indeed.’