Death and the Jubilee by David Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

corruption in the East, rather like Warren Hastings. There were huge lawyers’ bills.
Hodge had to go up to Westminster for months on end to answer questions from sanctimonious MPs and watch the value of his shares in the East India Company falling like a stone. At one point, I
believe, they dropped fifty thousand in a week.’
    Powerscourt could see the appeal of such a house, its fortunes so closely linked to the City of London.
    ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that some of the uncertainty might rub off on to your own affairs, William? Daily appearances before some Commons committee? Radical
lawyer MPs quizzing you about your affairs?’
    ‘No,’ said William Burke emphatically. He laughed.
    As they sat in the little church, pews filled with tenants and family, Powerscourt was wondering about his sisters. They loved each other dearly, of course, but there was always an element of
competition between them. Eleanor, the youngest, had certainly married the most handsome husband, but he had very little money. Mary, the middle sister, had made a very prudent marriage to William
Burke. Rosalind, the eldest, seemed to have won the marriage stakes by her alliance with Lord Pembridge, an aristocrat with a great deal of money and fine houses in St James’s Square and in
Hampshire. But over the weekend he had noticed a certain smugness, an air of quiet but unmistakable triumph about Mary. It showed in the way she almost patronized her elder sister, showing off the
glories of her new house, wondering aloud about how many servants and gardeners they would need to employ. And Rosalind, for once, looked as though she felt her position as the most successful of
the sisters, the Queen Bee of her own little hive, was under threat.
    As he rose to read his lesson Powerscourt cast a careful glance at his family to make sure the children were behaving.
    ‘The First Lesson,’ he began in his clear tenor voice, ‘is taken from the twenty-first Chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew.
    ‘“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold
doves.”’
    The new vicar, a red-headed man in his middle thirties, was looking serious. The Bishop, splendid in his purple robes, looked as if he was falling sleep. Powerscourt wondered, for the sixth or
seventh time since he had entered the church, how the Bishop could have almost brought his diocese to bankruptcy. Had he fallen asleep in those apparently tedious meetings of the diocesan finance
sub-committees? Had he invested the church collections unwisely on the Exchange?
    ‘“And he said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”’
    There was a very faint creak as the door opened and a late arrival slipped quietly into a pew at the back and opened his prayer book. The newcomer winked at Powerscourt. It was Johnny
Fitzgerald.
    ‘“And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple: and he healed them.”
    ‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’
    Powerscourt had grown up with Lord Johnny Fitzgerald in Ireland. They had served together in Army Intelligence in India. On a number of occasions they had saved each
other’s lives. Johnny had been Powerscourt’s best man at both his weddings.
    ‘I have come to make my report, Francis.’ Fitzgerald gave a mock salute to his former superior officer as they walked through William Burke’s woods towards the Thames below.
‘You remember you said I had to approach the matter very carefully and very slowly? Well, I did, I just hope I didn’t exceed my powers at the end.’
    ‘You’re not suggesting you might have disobeyed orders, Johnny?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.
    ‘I was thinking of it more like Nelson with his blind eye. Copenhagen, was it, or the Nile? A temporary lapse for the greater good of the