Death in a Scarlet Coat

by David Dickinson

  ‘Of course.’

  They found Barnabas Thorpe polishing a beautiful pair of Georgian candlesticks. ‘Don’t suppose we’ll see these on the table again in my lifetime,’ he said sadly by way of introduction. ‘Keys, my lord, which keys would those be?’

  Powerscourt wondered if deafness was going to be added to the many and varied difficulties of life in Candlesby Hall, but he merely repeated his wish to see the Caravaggio room.

  Barnabas Thorpe shuddered slightly. He stared at Powerscourt for some time. ‘Nobody’s been in that room for well over a hundred years, my lord. Earl Edward, he was a right cruel man, they say, he brought those pictures back here in the 1760s or the 1770s and he died the week before Trafalgar. When the nation was celebrating that victory with feasts and bonfires, the people here were thanking God for deliverance from Earl Edward. They weren’t too bothered about Bonaparte, apparently. One man said a French invasion would be a blessing in disguise – at least the people of Candlesby would get rid of their Earl, the Earl from hell some of them called him.’

  Thorpe shuffled off into private quarters of his own behind a curtain and could be heard muttering to himself for some considerable time.

  ‘Here we are,’ he announced finally, and put a large black ring with three huge keys on it on his table. ‘I assume, my lord, that if I don’t agree to open up the room – I’ve no intention of asking this one who calls himself Earl now for any sort of permission – then you will be off to the police station and back inside the hour with a search warrant?’

  ‘I’m afraid you might be right there, Mr Thorpe.’

  ‘Very well, on your own head be it, my lord. I am not responsible for your going to this place. I will take you there. I will open the door for you. But I will not go in. When you are finished, you may call for me and I shall lock the room up again.’

  With that Barnabas Thorpe led the way very slowly up the back stairs. The banisters were loose and the few windows into the inner courtyard of the Hall were thick with dust. Looking at the back in front of him, Powerscourt thought suddenly of the other aged retainer close to the heart of Candlesby Hall, the steward Walter Savage, with his tales of financial disaster. He remembered Savage’s words about Jack Hayward.

  ‘This has all been absolutely too terrible for words,’ Jack Hayward had said. ‘I can’t tell you anything about it. One day, please God, I will tell you, but not now.’ And then he had left, with one last word: ‘Goodbye, Walter, and God bless you. Pray for us all. Pray for us every day as long as you live.’

  That was it. Surely that was sufficient bait to lure Jack Hayward back across the Irish Sea. All he had to do was to arrest the steward, or rather have the Inspector arrest the steward, and tell Johnny Fitzgerald to do his worst. It might be underhand but Powerscourt thought the subterfuge would be justified if it enabled them to solve the mystery. If Hayward thought he had information that could save his old friend of twenty years or more from jail or even the gallows, he would come back. Surely he would come back. He remembered Johnny Fitzgerald’s last telegram which had arrived that morning. ‘Am now in very expensive hotel near Limerick. Will await instructions. Hotel filled with fish and fishermen. Cellar filled with Château d’Yquem. Rather sweet but needs must. Johnny.’

  Powerscourt wondered if he should not abandon his crazy mission and reach the Inspector at once. Behind him Charles Candlesby was whistling ‘I do like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea’. Powerscourt wondered what strange memories had put that song in his mind. But Powerscourt felt, tramping up the final flight of steps, a grimy mirror reflecting a grimy investigator as he passed, that he had raised so much dust already that it would be folly to go into reverse now.

  There was a dull clanking of keys. Barnabas Thorpe selected the largest one he could find and fitted it in the lock. When he tried to turn it, nothing happened. It was as if there was a vice on the other side refusing to let it move.

  ‘Damn!’ said Thorpe. ‘I’m sure they told me it was that one.’

  Powerscourt wondered how long ago the handover of keys had taken place. And who handed them over? Surely not Earl Edward in person. He wondered again what terrible things must have gone on in this room, or what terrible rumours had flown from it that they could still cause tremors nearly a hundred and fifty years later.

  Charles Candlesby had stopped whistling now. The seaside seemed very far away. The old butler was breathing heavily. There was no other sound to be heard up here at the top of Candlesby Hall.

  ‘How about you, then?’ Thorpe was holding conversations with the keys now, as if they might tell him which one would open the door. Powerscourt had a distant memory of nursery rhymes, or was it children’s stories involving locked doors and unsolved mysteries or imprisoned princesses on the other side. In went the other key. It too refused to move.

  ‘If this next one don’t serve, my lord, we’ll have to beat the retreat for now.’ He put the third one into the lock and turned it. There was a faint sign of movement. ‘Maybe you should try, my lord.’

  Powerscourt turned the key with all his strength. Very slowly, with a rasping, creaking sound, the key moved in the lock. Powerscourt looked at the door. To his right Charles Candlesby had turned very pale and was beginning to inch away.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, my lord.’ Barnabas Thorpe was feeling some strain. The sweat was pouring down his face and Powerscourt didn’t think it came from the effort of turning the key. It was fear, or something worse. ‘I think I’ll leave you now. I have things to do. If you’ll excuse me, my lord.’

  The clattering of boot on board told him that both his companions had fled the field. Powerscourt pushed the door hard with his shoulder and he was in. In with the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi, more commonly known by the name of the village where he was born. Caravaggio.

  16

  Powerscourt felt like some underground explorer deep below the earth’s crust who rolls away a vast boulder to find himself in an enormous chamber, the walls adorned with cave paintings of strange creatures who no longer roam the earth. The air was filled with dust and a horrid smell, a compound of heaven knew how many dead insects and rotting objects and the passing of time itself. The dust was so thick that when his foot touched what was left of the dingy carpet small clouds billowed out over his shoe.

  Powerscourt coughed harshly and tried to find some fresh air. The room was on the top corner of the house with a pair of windows looking out over the garden towards the lake and another pair on the adjacent wall looking out over a dark courtyard. Powerscourt pulled out his penknife and inserted it between the edge of the surround and the wood holding the glass of the window. His blade got stuck every now and then but it did eventually manage to run up and down the sash. He spent a few minutes heaving and shoving at the catch in the middle of the window and pulled as hard as he could. For a moment his coughing grew worse. Then the window shot upwards and fresh air flowed into the room. Powerscourt turned his attention to the other windows. After a quarter of an hour he managed to open two of them. You could, he decided, almost feel the bad air rushing past. A couple of rooks, who could never have seen the windows open in their lifetime, flew past twice as if to make sure their eyes were not deceiving them.

  The room was very large. To the right of the door were a couple of tall cupboards. Another two were on the left of the door, with a bed in the corner, the pillows limp and flaccid to the touch, the bedcover, which might once have been a bright yellow, now a dingy brown. In front of the long windows looking over the garden stood a couple of easels, one considerably higher than the other, both festooned in dust and cobwebs. A large mirror was wedged between them. In the corner, still standing to attention, stood a grandfather clock whose face announced the time as twenty minutes past three. Time had not moved in here for over a century. There was an alcove to one side of the bed with the remains of a curtain drawn across the space.

  But where, Powerscourt said to himself, were the Caravagg
ios? They certainly weren’t on the walls. This earlier Candlesby had collected the paintings all over Italy and brought them back to his old house and stored them up here on the top floor. The people who lived here now were so frightened of the paintings or what had been done with the paintings that they were too scared to come in. He looked at the cupboards suspiciously. When he opened one of them he found on the top shelf a strange collection of clothes, what looked like a loincloth, a dark cloak, a sort of chemise with no collar that could have been worn by male or female, a strange circular headdress, various lengths and dimensions of scarlet and blue cloth that could have been used for anything. On the second shelf he found a skull, the vast open jawbone still yawning horribly at those who came to see it, a selection of twigs, a limp bamboo cane with split ends and a couple of berets, one in dark blue and one in pale green. There was a filthy candlestick and a mirror that had seen better days. Quite what these objects were doing there, Powerscourt had, for the moment, no idea.

  He tried to remember the little he knew about Caravaggio. Born in the north of Italy and brought up in Milan. Moved south to Rome where he was employed by a courtier at the Vatican, then to Naples and various other cities round the Mediterranean. There had, Powerscourt’s contact at the National Gallery once told him on the telephone, been rumours of fighting and drunkenness. He was believed to have fled Rome after killing a man. He had died young after a turbulent life. The National Gallery, Powerscourt’s man told him, had three or four of his paintings stored in the basement, that final resting place for unfashionable artists. He had fallen from popularity, Caravaggio, very soon after he died. Few galleries, if any, had his paintings on display, except for a rather obscure one in Naples. Maybe the artistic world was anxious to forget such a controversial figure. One day, Powerscourt’s curator contact had prophesied, Caravaggio would return to fame and glory once again. It happened all the time, he said. Just as some obscure share or bond which seems to do nothing for decades will suddenly spring into life when fresh seams of gold or silver are discovered, his works would come back into fashion. The swagger and the display and the mastery of light and drama that had entranced his contemporaries in his lifetime would be on display again in the great galleries of Europe. How odd, Powerscourt thought, if the fortunes of the Candlesbys and their estates could be restored by the paintings that had been left to rot up here since the time of the loss of the American colonies.

  He had a violent coughing fit. The dust seemed to be making its way down to his lungs. He tiptoed over to the alcove with the curtain. Very gently he pulled it to one side. On the right-hand side was a great pile of paintings, about a dozen, he thought, maybe more. Another heap was against the opposite wall. The dust was lying in layers on the frames. Spiders had created gossamer Old Master drawings against the back wall. Powerscourt picked the right-hand paintings up one by one and carried them back to the bed. He leant them against the sides with a few on top of the covers. The dust twirled and swirled and whirled around his face until he had to go and put his head out of the window. He wondered suddenly if the Edward Candlesby who had purchased these pictures had leant out of this window and stared at his English estates stretching out to the lake and beyond into the Lincolnshire countryside, remembering the days he bought his Caravaggios amid the heat and the different dust of Naples and Rome. He wondered about the purchases on the Grand Tour. Had Candlesby fallen victim to the usual honey trap? You went to an art dealer, usually in Rome, some of whom sold only to British visitors. The dealer would inquire politely in reasonable English which of the Old Masters appealed to you the most. Raphael, you might hazard, or Titian perhaps. What a pity you have come today, the dealer would say. I have some very fine Raphaels and some wonderful Titians, but they are at my house in the country. I like them so much, signor, that I keep them at home for my own enjoyment. But for you, I will bring them back here to the Via Veneto. If you come back in three days’ time, they will be here, waiting for you. What could be better! Maybe the dealer already has some fake Titians and Raphaels in store somewhere. If not, his forger goes to work and the fakes are ready for inspection on the third day. Some excuse about the need for final glazing would be made to give the works time to dry out properly. Perhaps milord would care to look at some other paintings in the meantime? Powerscourt suspected that Caravaggio might not fit into that particular mould. He was relatively unknown. High-class forgers might not take the time and trouble to learn how to reproduce him. The dealer might not keep any in stock in case he could never shift them. Maybe these were originals after all.

  Two things struck Powerscourt as he looked through the paintings. The first was the artist’s total mastery of light, spectacular even after a century and a half of dust and damp. It was as if he had a whole battery of searchlights of different power. Some of the faces and some of the bodies would have the most powerful light shone on them. The skin would gleam and glisten as if the subject were sweating slightly. Other, less important, characters received much less power. The contrast between the brilliance of the light shining on the body of St Jerome, for example, and the skull, half in shadow on his work table, gave the picture a power and intensity that held the viewer in its spell. Mastery of light heightened the drama. Even through the dust and the grime the light shone through. The other thing to strike Powerscourt was the faces. These were not the faces of aristocrats or warriors or great kings or ancient philosophers from the distant past. They were not the idealized beauties that graced the canvases of Botticelli or Bellini. Caravaggio was an unlikely foot soldier in the Counter Reformation launched at the Council of Trent towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church’s fight back against the Protestants. The heretics of Geneva or Wittenberg might ban paintings from the walls of their churches. The true believers in the Pope and the Mass were given large paintings on the walls and in the little chapels of the churches of Rome that were morality stories, but morality stories of a power and force that could not but impress. The faces in Caravaggio’s pictures were taken from the streets, lifted from tavern or alleyway or choir to grace an artist’s vision. This, Powerscourt remembered his man at the National Gallery telling him, was what gave them their contemporary feel. This was what enabled the poor and the destitute to identify with Caravaggio’s characters. Titian’s kings and doges inhabited a world far from the ordinary citizens. Caravaggio’s people were real boys and real men and women, spotted by the painter perhaps and paid a pittance to pose for his brushes.

  There were one or two charming paintings, probably executed for some prince of the Church, of Bacchus with leaves in his hair, of cardsharps plying their trade, a boy with a basket of fruit. Caravaggio was drawn to drama as the dust was drawn to this high room that served as a sepulchre for his art. Here was the calling of St Matthew, here was the raising of Lazarus, the death of the Virgin. A number of the works, Powerscourt thought, verged on the sado-masochistic, or seemed to come from the pornography of religious violence. Death, blood and beheading were commonplace, painted with appalling realism. Judith with the head of Holofernes, for example, showed the progress of the knife against the warrior’s throat. The beheading of John the Baptist showed the saint lying on the floor with the executioner poised above him in a well of light, knife at the ready. Christ was tied to a tree, flayed, scourged, and had the crown of thorns put on his head. Saints were crucified upside down or right way up, their agony and their faith earning a place in heaven.

  Even through the dust and the grime the power of the artist illuminated this room at the top of Candlesby Hall. For the poor and the peasants of early seventeenth-century Italy, they must have seemed more wondrous than the modern cinema pictures. These were in colour rather than black and white with an intensity the camera did not possess.

  But what of the other pictures, the ones on the opposite side of the alcove? Powerscourt moved some of the real Caravaggios to rest against the wall behind the easel. Out they came, the others, two or three at a time. When he inspecte
d them, he was amazed. This, he thought, was the most unusual thing he had seen since the start of his investigation. These paintings were as grimy as the others. Dust and dark lines defaced the surface of the pictures as it did the ones by the window. But the subject matter was the same. These were copies, very imperfect copies, of the Caravaggios behind the easels. Here again was the boy with the basket of fruit, Bacchus with a crown on his head, the flayings, the decapitations, the crucifixions, the whole bloody agony from Gethsemane to Golgotha. But they were copies with a difference. This boy with a fruit basket did not come from the streets of Naples. He looked as though he might have come from the farms of Candlesby. There was something terribly English about his face.

  As he rattled through the paintings, Powerscourt saw a host of people who must have been locals, summoned to this room to pose for their master. Rubbing lightly with his handkerchief and blowing at the corner of one painting, Powerscourt found a sort of signature. ‘Candlesby’, the writing said in the bottom right-hand corner, ‘after Caravaggio’.

  Inspector Blunden was not a happy man. He was on his way to interview Oliver Bell near Old Bolingbroke Castle west of Candlesby. Bell’s father had been shot in a duel by the late Lord Candlesby many years before, and Bell had served in the British Army as an expert marksman. He was, the Inspector thought, far too obvious a suspect but his Chief Constable had been making suggestions so here he was.

  Blunden had always had a feeling about murder inquiries. Some of them, he felt, you just knew were going to turn out well. It was only a question of waiting for the key facts to fall into place or a witness to come forward with the vital piece of evidence. The Candlesby murders were not like that. There was his interfering Chief Constable for a start. Then there were those posh people up at Candlesby Hall. Blunden would never have admitted it but he felt uncomfortable with these aristocrats. Part of him really believed that they were superior to him and his like. Another part of him told him that this was nonsense. Nevertheless, he found interviewing them difficult. With most of the population of Lincolnshire Blunden could have told you who was lying and who was telling the truth and been right almost all the time. This detection compass deserted him completely in Candlesby Hall.