Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  ‘My mother, Edward,’ Sarah hesitated. Two enormous cows had plodded over to the side of the river and were inspecting them both.

  ‘Are these cows bothering you?’ said Edward suddenly, ‘We could move on if you like.’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘Cows don’t bother me,’ she said. ‘Anyway my mother will want to ask you a whole lot of questions about yourself and your parents and where you went to school and what you want to become later on.’

  ‘Will she indeed?’ said Edward. Sarah noticed he was growing rather tense. ‘Will you be there all the time, Sarah? You won’t go off to bake some scones or make the tea or something and leave me at your mother’s mercy?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to, Edward. Do you think you will be able to cope?’

  ‘Do you mean will I be able to speak, Sarah? God knows. I got so worried about ordering those tickets at Paddington this morning, I’d been practising for days. I’ll get worried about meeting your mother too.’

  ‘What will you say about your parents, Edward?’ Sarah had been dying to ask this question herself for a long time now. She hoped Edward wouldn’t mind, not here on the River Cherwell with a couple of cows for company and the spires of Oxford dreaming behind them.

  There was a pause. Sarah didn’t know if Edward had been struck dumb at the prospect of her mother or if he didn’t know what to say. He flung the core of his apple angrily into the field and picked out another one.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, moodily. Sarah kept silent. She felt sure that whatever Edward’s answer was going to be, assuming one ever came, it would tell her a lot about the nature of his character and, perhaps, about his problems with speaking.

  Edward drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. Sarah wondered if he was going to meditate.

  ‘My p-p-parents are dead,’ he said finally. ‘They were killed in an accident along with my elder sister and my little b-b-brother.’ There was no attempt to keep the anger out of his voice.

  ‘How did it happen, Edward?’ said Sarah. ‘I’m so sorry, it’s so terrible losing parents.’ So very terrible, she realized, that even the thought of it had brought on the stammer which Edward struggled so hard to keep to at bay.

  ‘Train crash,’ he said. ‘We were all going to Bristol on a train. There was something wrong with the points. The carriages came off the line at about fifty miles an hour and rolled down a slope. I was buried beneath my parents and the remains of the carriage for hours. When the police pulled everyone out of the rubble I was unconscious beneath them. They say I didn’t speak for a week after that.’

  ‘My God,’ said Sarah, almost wishing she hadn’t been told this ghastly news. Perhaps she should ask her mother not to speak to Edward about his parents at all. ‘How frightful, Edward, how absolutely frightful. Your poor family, just wiped out in front of you.’

  Edward began munching on his apple. The cows wandered off to another part of their field. A couple of rowing boats, going quite fast, sped past them on their return journey to Oxford.

  ‘So where do you live now, Edward?’ Sarah had a vision of Edward living on his own in some squalid boarding house where the food was terrible and he never tidied his room.

  ‘I live with my grandparents,’ he said with a smile. ‘They’re very good to me. Maybe you should come and meet them, Sarah. I’m sure they’d love to see you.’ Even in his sixties Edward knew his grandfather had an eye for a pretty girl. Sarah would enchant him. The thought seemed to cheer him up.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’d better think about getting back or we won’t have any time to look at Oxford at all.’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to review his knowledge of the Queen’s Inn investigation as his train carried him down to Calne and the beautiful Mrs Dauntsey. Murder Number One, her husband, poisoned at a feast, the poison probably administered at a drinks party in the rooms of the Treasurer of the Inn, the unpleasant Barton Somerville. Murder Number Two, Woodford Stewart, shot twice in the chest. Connections between the two? Both were retained for the prosecution in what would be one of the great fraud trials of the decade, that of Jeremiah Puncknowle and his associates. And both were benchers of their Inn of Court, though why that should make them liable to sudden and violent death Powerscourt didn’t know. He did know that Woodford Stewart had been elected two months before Dauntsey so they must have been the most junior members of the Inn’s governing body. And what of the missing Maxfield? Had he resurfaced to murder Dauntsey for his twenty thousand pounds? Then there was Porchester Newton, Dauntsey’s great rival in the election to the bench. He had disappeared shortly after Dauntsey’s death but was due to return the following week.

  Had he, perhaps, returned in time to shoot Woodford Stewart and dump his body by the Temple Church? Powerscourt could think of lots of reasons why somebody might want to kill Dauntsey and Stewart individually. It was the connection that worried him, assuming the two deaths were linked. Surely it had to be professional, he said to himself, as the train rattled through a tunnel. He still didn’t know what to say to Mrs Dauntsey, how to bring up the very delicate subject he was travelling to Calne to raise.

  As his cab rattled past the grey stone walls of the great house, Powerscourt remembered the covered furniture, the sofas under wraps, the floors covered with rough matting, the vast expanse of the great house that most people never saw, a forbidden kingdom for the dust and the shadows and the ghosts of Dauntseys past.

  She was waiting for him, Elizabeth Dauntsey, still dressed in black that showed off her creamy skin. She smiled as she offered her hand to him.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, how very pleasant to see you again. I trust you had a pleasant journey? Would you care for some tea, perhaps?’

  ‘A little later for the tea would be most agreeable, Mrs Dauntsey. My journey was fine. Your park is looking very well with all these early flowers.’

  ‘I think it likes the spring, our park. It always looks good about now. But come, Lord Powerscourt, before you disclose your business, I have something to tell you. I don’t know if it is important or not but you did ask in your letter if I could think of anything unusual Alex might have said in the month or so before he died.’

  Powerscourt nodded gravely. ‘Have you thought of something, Mrs Dauntsey?’

  She looked down at her hands briefly. ‘There was something, I hope it’s not too trivial. It must have been in the weeks after he was elected a bencher, you see, and there was quite a lot that was new to him about all that.’

  She paused and looked closely at Powerscourt as if he could help her. He gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

  ‘He said it more than once, I’m certain of that, Lord Powerscourt. He said he was very worried about the accounts.’

  ‘Whose accounts, Mrs Dauntsey? Your own personal accounts? The estate accounts perhaps? Some extra expenditure needed for improvement, maybe? His legal accounts? Or the Inn accounts, which I suppose he now had access to after his election?’

  ‘What a lot of accounts you can rattle off at a moment’s notice Lord Powerscourt! Do you think it’s because you’re a man?’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘I think it’s because of my brother-in-law. He’s a mighty financier in the City of London. When I called on him the other day he was surrounded by records of income and expenditure and ledgers and an enormous volume called the Book of Numbers which contained the secrets of all the other accounts.’

  Now it was Mrs Dauntsey’s turn to smile. ‘It must be very useful having a brother-in-law who’s good with money, Lord Powerscourt. Nearly as good as, maybe better than having one who’s a doctor. You don’t have one who’s a medical man, do you?’

  Powerscourt did a lightning audit of Lucy’s vast tribe of relations. Not one of them, he realized, had entered the medical profession.

  ‘No doctors,’ he said, ‘one or two naval men, plenty of soldiers, probably enough to form a small regiment. But to return to your husband, Mrs Dauntsey,
do you have an idea in your mind of which kind of account he was talking about?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that a lot,’ she said, ‘particularly as you were coming to see me today. I don’t think it was our personal accounts and I don’t think it was to do with the accounts of his chambers. That clerk they had ran those as if it was the Bank of England. That leaves us with the estate and Queen’s Inn. I’m honestly not sure which one it would have been, I’m afraid. Alex kept the estate accounts very close to his chest.’

  ‘Can you remember exactly what he said, the words he used, Mrs Dauntsey?’

  She frowned. Powerscourt thought she looked even more attractive when she frowned. ‘I can’t,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t decide if he said unusual, or strange, or worrying. It was something along those lines.’

  Powerscourt groaned mentally as he thought of the problem of asking Barton Somerville if he could cast an eye over the Inn accounts. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said hopefully, ‘that he brought any of the Inn accounts down here, to look at them over the weekend, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll have a look in his study and let you know, if that would be helpful. Perhaps we should move on to what you wanted to talk to me about, Lord Powerscourt. Then we could have some tea.’

  Powerscourt felt rather nervous all of a sudden. ‘The matter is exceedingly delicate, Mrs Dauntsey. It touches on the most delicate and intimate of subjects, one we discussed last time, if you recall, about children and heirs and all sort of thing. If you have any objection, please tell me now.’

  Elizabeth Dauntsey did not blush, or look down, or ask to be excused. ‘I am sure, Lord Powerscourt, that you would not be raising such a matter if you did not think it might be important.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Dauntsey, thank you. Sometimes, I must confess, I think this area may be of the utmost importance, at others I feel I may be wasting my time.’

  Outside the sun had gone in and a fierce wind was whipping through the trees. Rain was now lashing against the windows of the Dauntsey drawing room.

  ‘Perhaps I could put my concern to you in the form of a fairy story, Mrs Dauntsey. I hope you like fairy stories?’

  She smiled. ‘I have always been most devoted to fairy stories and plays about magic islands like Prospero’s in The Tempest or Illyria in Twelfth Night. Alex and I saw Twelfth Night a couple of months ago in Middle Temple Hall. It was the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance in 1602 in the very same building. It was extraordinary. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’m holding you up.’

  ‘I went to that performance too. Perhaps we passed one another, like ships in the night.’ Both The Tempest and Twelfth Night, he remembered, featured shipwrecks. The current fate of Mrs Dauntsey? Certainly she didn’t look very like one shipwrecked now, he thought, her beauty shining through the pain of bereavement.

  ‘A long long time ago,’ he began, ‘when the world was young, there was a small kingdom perched high up in the mountains. These mountains were much higher than any we have in this country. Snow sat on the highest of them for most of the year and only the bravest of the young men climbed to the very top. Their customs were very different from ours. This, after all, was long before the invention of the telegraph or the spinning jenny, the telephone or the motor car, of paved roads and of great steamships. The people of the Mountain Kingdom, for that was how its name translated into English, had never seen the sea. But their land was rich. There were fertile valleys as well as the great summits. Their horses were beautiful and very fast and could race most of the day without being tired. The seasons were beautiful, Mrs Dauntsey. In spring the slopes of the mountains would be covered with flowers. In summer the sun shone but the streams that came down from the hills were always cool. In autumn the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of colour, yellows and gold and black and hectic reds. And in the winter the snow sat on the turrets and the battlements of the Royal Palace until it looked like fairyland.

  ‘The people were ruled over by a King, who was getting old at the beginning of our story, but he had a son, a handsome Prince who would succeed him. As the Prince grew to manhood he looked about him for a beautiful girl he could marry. None of the daughters of the nobles pleased him very much. He began to despair until a wise old man told him about the child of a king two little countries away, who was said to be very beautiful indeed. So our Prince rode off to the Kingdom of the Plain and fell in love with the Princess. Eight months later they were married. Two weeks after that the old King died in his sleep and the Prince and Princess became the King and Queen.’

  You’d better get to the point, pretty soon, Powerscourt said to himself or you’ll be here all day.

  ‘For the first few years,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘everything seemed perfect in this highland Garden of Eden. The harvests were good, the people were contented, peace reigned inside and outside the little kingdom. There was only one shadow across perfection. The new King and Queen had no children. Now it was the custom in this land that each new King had to be the son of the previous one. Nephews, younger brothers, distant cousins just wouldn’t do. The custom dated back many centuries to a time when civil war had torn the country apart. On that occasion when the old King died, the courtiers tried to put his younger brother on the throne in his place. The nobles would have none of it, declaring him not to be the rightful sovereign and plunging the country into a civil war that lasted fifteen years.

  ‘Time went by, some more years passed and still the King had no heirs. The nobles became restless and began to plot among themselves as nobles always do. The citizens were fearful of the bloodshed that might follow his end. The King went on a journey, accompanied only a by a few faithful followers, to a temple in the mountains where the holy men lived. They listened to his story and told him to travel further on still, up into the high mountains. When he had lived among the snows for ten days, he was to return to the holy place for his answer.

  ‘On his return, the holy men gave the King their message. Now in this kingdom there were no laws about relations between the sexes, only customs. So it was the custom for husband and wife to be faithful, one to the other, but it was not a legal obligation. The Queen, they told the King, must lie with your brother, or any of your cousins, until she be with child. And you also must lie with her so nobody will know that you may not be the father. The peace of the kingdom demands this, they said to the King. For if you have no son and heir of your own blood, what will happen to the kingdom?’

  Powerscourt stopped. Elizabeth Dauntsey looked at him carefully.

  ‘Don’t tell me the story stops there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘with the King still up there in the mountains.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s where the manuscript runs out, Mrs Dauntsey, I’m truly sorry.’

  She rang the bell and ordered tea. ‘Well, let me see if I could help you out, Lord Powerscourt, with the story, I mean. I’m not a storyteller like yourself and I could only speak for the Queen, I think, not for any of the other characters.’

  She stopped and a faint twinkle came into her eyes. ‘How can I put this? I think my contribution to the story, speaking for the Queen of course, is that it is always very important for a wife, especially if she is a Queen and married to a King, to obey her husband at all times.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘How very well you put it, Mrs Dauntsey, and what an important moral to take from the story.’ By God, it’s true, he said to himself, those faint reports from Lucy’s relations must be true. Where does that leave my investigation, he asked himself. His brain was reeling.

  ‘Tea, Lord Powerscourt?’ she said as the butler departed once again to the wider realms of Calne. ‘You must be thirsty after telling all those stories.’ Powerscourt saw that the subject had been closed by the arrival of the Darjeeling. He felt oddly relieved. He wondered briefly which of the characters in Twelfth Night Elizabeth Dauntsey might have been. Cesario? Who certainly had been shipwrecked. Probably even in Powerscourt’s biased eye, she was t
oo old for that. Olivia perhaps, with her great household and unruly relations? Certainly, he thought, you could hide Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek well out of sight in the dusty recesses of Calne. She brought him back from his daydream.

  ‘Tell me, Lord Powerscourt, somebody informed me the other day that you have had additions to your own family. Is it true that you now have twins?’

  Edward had punted back to Folly Bridge very slowly. There was no sign of their previous adversaries and no more rude comments about Edward standing at the wrong end. Sarah leant back on the cushions, her hand trailing in the water, and peered at Edward through semi-closed eyes. Eventually the motion of the boat sent her off to sleep. Edward smiled down at his passenger, so innocent as she lay there, her head slightly to one side, her red hair bright on the cushion. Then they had walked through Christ Church, marvelling at the size of Tom Quad. London’s Inns of Court could hold their heads up against most Oxford colleges but this quadrangle had no equal near the Strand. Lots of politicians, Edward informed Sarah, had been at Christ Church, Canning and Peel and Gladstone and Lord Salisbury.

  ‘Would you like to have been to Oxford, Edward?’ asked Sarah, staring at a group of undergraduates about to go into Hall. She thought Edward would look nice in one of those gowns.

  ‘I don’t think so, Sarah. I’m not sure I would fit in. Most of these people are very rich.’

  It was only in the train back to Paddington that Sarah raised her fears about Queen’s Inn. They were alone in their compartment and Edward was polishing off the remains of the sandwiches and the apples from the picnic.

  ‘How long do you think it will be, Edward,’ she said rather sadly, ‘before they catch this murderer?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Edward, ‘I hoped a day in Oxford would take your mind off it all. I know it’s easy for me to say it, but you mustn’t worry. Nobody’s going to want to harm you. Lord Powerscourt is one of the best investigators in the country and that policeman is very sharp. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’