‘After the artillery bombardment,’ Powerscourt puffed bravely on at his cigar, enveloping the battlefield with smoke, ‘the next thing is the attack on the farm at Hougoumont. Four regiments of veterans,’ he pointed to a small cluster of models, ‘began to advance towards the farm. Beat the drum.’
As William moved his troops forward through the smoke Patrick beat out the pas de charge: boom boom, boom boom, boom a boom, boom a boom, boom boom.
‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now, Alexander,’ he brought in the youngest, ‘you are standing beside the Duke of Wellington, here, on his horse Copenhagen. Your job is to sound the bugle call that sends out his orders. Look! He has seen the French advancing towards the chateau. Reinforcements are needed. Now! Blow!’
It could not be said that Alexander was master of the full repertoire of bugle calls from the reveille to the retreat. But he did make a great deal of noise.
‘Alors,’ cried Powerscourt, ‘some of the French did manage to get inside the building. And I’ll show you what happened then. Pretend that this door is the main entrance to Hougoumont. You three go outside, with your drums and bugles, and push as hard as you can to try to get in. You’re going to be French just for once, and I’m going to be Colonel Macdonnell who closed the gate.’
The three boys pushed as hard as they could. ‘Make more noise! Shout in French!’ Powerscourt was getting carried away. Cries of ‘Allez! Allez! Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur!’ – Powerscourt himself had taught them that one – sounded out across the upper levels of the house and floated down to the drawing-room two floors below. With a mighty heave Powerscourt at last closed the door. Three small boys fell backwards on the floor in a tumbling melange of arms and legs.
‘Powerscourt! Powerscourt!’ shouted Rosebery. He burst into the room, taking in the battlefield at a glance. ‘I think you’ll find that you have put the British cavalry a bit too far to the left,’ he said absent-mindedly, surveying the order of battle. ‘But come, Powerscourt, come, we must go at once! Reasons on the way!’
Rosebery led a swift charge down three flights of stairs, pausing only to give apologies to Powerscourt’s sister at the bottom. ‘A thousand pardons for this invasion, Lady Rosalind! We shall return to fight another day!’
With that Rosebery bounded down the flight of steps, pulling a bemused Powerscourt behind him into the night, and hurried his friend into a waiting brougham.
‘Liverpool Street! As quick as you can. I have a train waiting!’
‘A train?’ said Powerscourt feebly, wondering if this was all another dream.
‘Yes, yes, yes. If you want to get anywhere in a hurry in this country you have to order yourself a special train. I’ve done it before.’
Even at this moment of crisis Powerscourt found time to reflect on his friend. Most people in a hurry would consult timetables, seek out alternative routes, fret over possible delays on the line. Rosebery simply hired a train, and the best that money could buy, thought Powerscourt, as the engine pulled them slowly out of the station, real smoke billowing out over London’s suburbs.
‘Where are we going? What is the rush?’
‘Rush? Rush? Wild horses couldn’t get us there fast enough. We are going, my dear Powerscourt, to Sandringham. Something terrible has happened. Some disaster we don’t yet know about.’
He thrust a cable into his friend’s hand.: ‘Come immediately. Most urgent. Bring Powerscourt. Brook no delay. Suter.’
‘Death closes all,’ Powerscourt muttered to himself, ‘but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods . . . sorry, I have been reading Tennyson again last thing at night.’
‘What makes you think of death, Francis?’
‘Think of it, my friend,’ Powerscourt went on, who had thought of little else since they fled the battlefield of Waterloo. ‘If there was some natural act, like a fire or the roof falling in, they would send for the fire brigade or the builders. If it were the death of an aged uncle or aunt, the family would not be summoning you in the middle of a January night. They would not be sending for me. They would be sending for the tribes of relations and a couple of parsons. Bishops, more likely. Maybe Archbishops.’
‘Are you possessed of second sight as well as a photographic memory, Francis?’ Rosebery was peering closely at his friend as if another telegram was about to appear, etched across his forehead.
‘Certainly not,’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But it seems to me the most likely explanation is that there has been some dirty work afoot in Norfolk. Death not by natural causes is usually called murder. But we must wait for some hard intelligence before our speculations run away with us.’
The two men sat silently, lost in their thoughts. Rosebery was wondering about the political implications of a royal death. Powerscourt looked troubled.
‘I am sure that it is impossible to underestimate the effect a strange death could have on the Royal Family,’ he said, watching Rosebery’s cigar smoke drift down the carriage. ‘I have been thinking about this a lot lately,’ he went on, looking out at the occasional ringlets of light that gleamed faintly against the East Anglian sky. ‘Somewhere at the back of all the royal minds there must be a fear, maybe not a fear, an anxiety, a tremor in their dreams. On the surface, of course, all is serene, the palaces, the pomp, the pageantry. But underneath?
‘Think of it,’ he continued, in what for him was a most animated fashion, ‘like a painting by Claude. There’s a huge mythological landscape, elegant classical buildings, assorted Greeks and Romans like Dido and Cleopatra up to no good. You know the sort of thing.’
Powerscourt drew a large frame in the condensation of the window between them. ‘All the normal Claude tricks are here, the fantastic buildings, the intense sunlight, the faint sense of being in another world. I expect you’ve got a Claude or two, Rosebery, lying about the place?’
‘I’ve got three, actually,’ admitted Rosebery, ‘maybe four. I can’t remember. But what’s going on in this one here?’ He pointed to the Old Master taking dim shape on the railway carriage window.
‘Here,’ said Powerscourt, drawing an ill-defined blob at the bottom of the frame, ‘is the fantastic palace, the grand pillars, the colonnades, the battlements, flags waving in the sunshine. And here, on an elaborate and bejewelled royal throne, we find the little Queen, resplendent not in a bonnet as so often, but in a proper crown. Around her are disported the usual crew, the courtiers, the secretaries, the equerries, the waiting servants – a mass of uniforms and all the decorations in the kingdom. I think Claude would have fun with that.
‘But here, behind them, in the park,’ Powerscourt’s finger added a series of semicircular blobs to the window of the Great Eastern, ‘we have a series of statues. Some of them lurk invisible at the end of a terrace until you turn the corner, some of them are in semicircles, standing rigidly to attention waiting for time’s last roll call. Right at the back we find some of Royalty’s distant predecessors, Henry VII, Richard II, two small princes in the Tower, a reminder to their successors in the big house down here at the bottom of the picture, that their ancestors waded through rivers of blood to sit upon a throne. And threw a previous monarch out to get there.
‘At the back of the semicircle, here, Charles I on execution day. Kings of England can lose their heads, even on a balcony above Whitehall. Then, slightly closer to the house we find Robespierre, the man who struck Terror not just into the hearts of the French, but into the hearts of every crowned head in Europe. In his left hand he holds a model guillotine and at his feet, a tumbril, with the powdered heads of the aristocrats already overflowing. Do you not like the tumbril, Rosebery?’