Death Called to the Bar

by David Dickinson

  If he went round the building anti-clockwise he would be in the Great Gallery, where most of the finest paintings were hung, almost at once. If he went in the other direction he would go right round the first floor before he reached it from the other end. He decided on the long route and glided off through another roomful of Dutch paintings. Dimly on the walls he could just make out a loaf of bread being brought into a house, the interior of a church, a woman making lace, a girl reading a love letter. Any dark paintings, some of the most celebrated Rembrandts, would soon be almost invisible as the daylight began to fade. He checked his watch. A long time to go before the arrival of the nightwatchman. Then it was past the Canalettos, the blue-green water and the blue cloud-speckled skies and the public buildings of Venice rendered immortal under the artist’s brush. Powerscourt paused again. The footsteps were still marching up and down in the Great Gallery, almost as if the man was on sentry duty. Perhaps he knew that Powerscourt was bound to arrive there sooner or later. All he had to do was to wait for his prey. He glanced quickly at the Canaletto by his side. For no reason at all he suddenly remembered recently seeing a painting of Eton College done by Canaletto during his years in London. Even that most English of buildings under Canaletto’s hand looked as if it really belonged in Venice, somewhere behind San Zaccaria in the sestiere of San Marco, or floating improbably on its very own island like San Giorgio Maggiore. He pressed hard up against the wall by the door and made a rapid inspection of the landing. It was empty.

  Powerscourt crossed the landing at a run, bent almost double. He was now trespassing in the improbable world of Boucher, naked gods floating in the skies without visible means of support, pagan heroes living out the myths of ancient Greece in a naked innocence charged with considerable erotic force. Still he could hear the footsteps, slightly closer now. He wished he had the same means of upward propulsion as Boucher’s characters and could float right through the ceiling and the roof and alight in Number 8 Manchester Square. Then a room full of Greuzes, rather sickly portraits of young girls’ faces that looked as if they were designed to appeal to women and middle-aged and elderly men rather than to the young of either sex. He listened for the footsteps again. They seemed to have stopped. He stood absolutely still for two minutes to see if they started again. They did not.

  Powerscourt was now in a kind of magic kingdom, the creations of Antoine Watteau making music and love in the open air in some enchanted fête champêtre. He remembered reading somewhere that with Watteau, as with Mozart, one could learn that sincerity in art does not have to be uncouth and that perfection of form need not imply poverty of content. Then there was Fragonard, a painter of such sensuous indulgence, such glorious decadence that the French Revolution might have been created in order to abolish him. Why, Powerscourt said to himself, did his brain wander off into artistic thoughts when death might be just a corridor away? He listened again. Still no noise.

  When he reached the Great Gallery that ran right across one side of the house he lay down on the floor. He inched his way forward until his head just poked round the corner. At least I’m a smaller target this way, he said to himself. Nothing stirred. On the walls the Van Dycks and the Rembrandts, the Hals and the Gainsboroughs kept to their frames. Powerscourt watched the far door with great care. Maybe his opponent was hiding behind there, biding his time before an exploratory shot down the room. Suddenly Powerscourt wondered if the man might not have taken his boots off and crept round to take him from the rear. He looked behind. Only Watteau on guard there, though Powerscourt doubted if those effete-looking lovers and musicians would have been much good in a fight. He wondered what to do. Charge straight down the Great Gallery? Wait? Go back he way he had come? To his left an austere Spanish lady with a fan and a rosary, painted by Velasquez, was taking the register of his sins. Still there was silence at the far end. Suddenly Powerscourt decided to take the initiative. He rose to his feet, took his pistol in his right hand and ran as fast as he could down the gallery. Fifteen feet from the end he fired two shots just past the door. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could and peered round. There was nobody there. Only some Dutch peasants, too preoccupied with their own world to have any time for his, lounged about on the walls. Powerscourt stood still and locked the Great Gallery door behind him. He was worried about being outflanked to his rear. So where was the man? Had he given up and gone home? Had the nightwatchman arrived? Powerscourt rather doubted it. He feared he had somehow lost the initiative, that his enemy had the upper hand. Even the views of gloomy Dutch churches, peopled with sombre worshippers dressed in black, would not be enough to save him now. There were only two players left in the Wallace Collection game of hide and seek, and death might be the prize for the loser.

  Carefully, cautiously, he made his way along the East Galleries. Powerscourt was concentrating so hard on his opponent’s whereabouts that he scarcely looked at the paintings at all. He had his gun ready to fire in his right hand. He feared that if he left it in his pocket he might be wounded before he had time to reach it. Maybe his last stand was to be on the landing above the ornamental staircase that led to the ground floor. Maybe he needed some armour. He checked his watch again. If the nightwatchman came at seven he would be here in less than fifteen minutes. You could, he realized, go round and round the Wallace Collection just as easily as you could go round and round the mulberry bush.

  As he rushed out – slow progress affording the enemy too much time and too much target – he saw his opponent at last halfway down the stairs, but facing upwards. He too had his pistol in his right hand. Both men fired at almost exactly the same time. Powerscourt’s bullet caught the man at the top of the stomach. He turned round and fell down the stairs, rolling slowly down until he came to rest under an ornate fireplace in the hall. A trail of blood followed him down the steps. Powerscourt was hit in the chest and collapsed on the floor, knocking his head against the marble floor with a mighty crack. Neither man made a sound.

  Albert Forrest, nightwatchman to the Wallace Collection, liked to reach work a little early. That way he could feel he was ahead of his timetable. He wouldn’t be rushed. He was at an age now, Albert, when he liked to take things at his own pace and in his own time. So it was about five minutes to seven when he opened the great door that led into the Wallace Collection from Manchester Square. The blood had continued to flow from the man by the fireplace. It had now spread all over the floor. Albert Forrest took one look and hurried to his tiny office at the back of the Armouries. He did something he had wanted to do ever since they had installed the thing just before the house was opened to the public in 1900. He pulled the alarm. Then he pulled it again. The noise, meant to warn of fire or flood, of Armageddon or the Second Coming, sounded as if it might wake the dead. Even as Albert was making his way back to the front door – that fellow looked pretty dead to Albert, no point in hurrying – Johnny Fitzgerald was coming down the stairs of Number 8 Manchester Square four at a time. He exchanged alarmed looks with Lady Lucy, who was already concerned that Francis had not come home, and rushed across the square. A small crowd was beginning to form outside the front door. The hotel behind seemed to be emptying all its guests out on to the street. Drinkers from the pub across the road were peering in through the doors, glasses in hand. Johnny took one look at the villain in the hall and shot up the stairs, pausing only to apprehend his pistol.

  Johnny sprinted to his friend and knelt by his side. Powerscourt was unconscious and he seemed to Johnny to have a most unhealthy colour. Johnny ripped off his own shirt, the finest silk that Jermyn Street could provide, and did what he could to staunch the flow of blood. He put his jacket over Powerscourt to keep him warm and dashed off to Number 8. Lady Lucy was pacing nervously up and down the hall.

  ‘Lady Lucy,’ Johnny Fitzgerald panted, ‘Francis has been shot. It looks bad. He’s at the top of the staircase on the first floor. Can you get Rhys and the footman to improvise a stretcher? I’m going to get a doctor, man we both knew in South
Africa, lives round the corner. He’s wonderful with wounded people. Don’t move Francis, for God’s sake, don’t move him at all till I get back with the doctor.’

  Lady Lucy felt numb, icy cold on receipt of the news. He had come through so much, her Francis, so many campaigns, so many battles, so many dangerous investigations. Now she might lose him. She could not believe it. She refused to believe it. She tried, briefly, to imagine a future without Francis and she knew she could not bear it. Even with all these children, she thought, she would find it intolerable. She pulled her coat tight around her and waited for the doctor.

  Johnny Fitzgerald set off at full speed across Manchester Square, over Marylebone High Street and a hundred yards or so up Marylebone Lane before turning left into Bulstrode Street. In his mind’s eye he saw not the great hulk of the side of the Wallace Collection or the fashionable hotel opposite, or the shadowy buildings with the lights being lit in their windows. He saw his greatest friend bleeding to death, surrounded not by his friends but by the Old Masters of centuries long past. Even Francis, he thought, with his great love of art, wouldn’t want to go like that. Number 16 had the nameplate. Dr Anthony Fraser, it said, universally known during his time in the Army as Dr Tony.

  The scene on the landing now resembled one of those melancholy religious paintings showing Christ being taken down from the Cross that might have lined its walls. A bloodied Powerscourt lying unconscious on the ground. Lady Lucy, representing the weeping women, not actually weeping but gazing at her husband and praying with all her strength for his safe recovery. Rhys the butler and Jones the footman, hovering with the stretcher, might have been Roman soldiers perhaps, come for a last look at the one they had called the King of the Jews.

  Dr Fraser knelt down by the side of his new patient. He felt Powerscourt’s pulse and grimaced slightly. Then he stood up.

  ‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Fraser, usually known as Dr Tony. I knew Lord Powerscourt in South Africa. You must be his wife,’ he bowed to Lady Lucy, ‘and you must be his staff. We must get your husband on to the stretcher you have managed to bring. Your house is across the square? That will be best for now. I have sent for some nurses.’

  They manoeuvred Powerscourt on to the stretcher and the four men took him, rather like a coffin going to its last resting place, Lady Lucy felt, to the big bedroom on the second floor of Number 8 Manchester Square. There was now a fire in the grate. The sheets on the bed had been changed. Extra chairs had been brought in for those on attendant and nursing duty. The doctor examined Powerscourt very closely.

  ‘There is an exit wound here on his back – the bullet must have gone straight through him. And it has narrowly avoided both his heart and his lungs. I shall wait for the nurses before we clean it all up and put on the dressings. In the meantime I will give your husband an injection against the pain.’

  Dr Fraser sat with Powerscourt for over an hour, Lady Lucy on the other side of the bed. The doctor, Lady Lucy observed, was a short slim man in his middle thirties whose hair was beginning to recede. He had a prominent nose and very bright eyes. When the nurses arrived, she left them to it and went to order some tea in the drawing room.

  ‘Lady Powerscourt,’ the doctor began about a quarter of an hour later, ‘we have done what we can to clean the wound. We could have done more but there is always a slight danger to the patient in carrying out over-vigorous measures at this stage. I shall be going back to keep watch for a little while longer when I have finished my tea.’

  Lady Lucy looked at him with pleading eyes. Already, she felt reassured by his presence. ‘What is your judgement, doctor? Will Francis…’ she paused for a moment to fight back the tears, ‘pull through?’

  ‘Your husband has received a most serious wound, Lady Powerscourt,’ said the doctor. ‘I would not hide that from you for a second. I have seen far too many people with similar wounds to his in South Africa. In the case of your husband it’s simple. We must keep the wound clean. In time we can give some assistance for it to heal. The room where he lies must be kept clean. No infection can be allowed to get anywhere near him. But he has also sustained a serious blow to the head. I have no idea when he will wake up from his coma, Lady Powerscourt. So much depends on the will, his will to live. If he despairs, he will die. I have seen men die from wounds that are less serious than his and I have seen men recover from wounds that were worse.’

  ‘What can we do, Dr Tony? Everybody in this house wants Francis alive.’ The thought of the twins with no father struck Lady Lucy yet again and she had to turn away for a moment.

  ‘I believe there is a great deal you can do, Lady Powerscourt, believe me. Many of my colleagues would have taken your husband to hospital. I thought of that and rejected it. If he had gone to hospital he would have been placed in a ward full of people as seriously injured as he is, or worse. Death would call every day if not every hour and constantly reduce the numbers. Here your husband is surrounded by love and his loved ones. I think we should keep him quiet tomorrow and the next day but after that your children should go and talk to him, whether he is awake or not. Maybe they could read to him. Other people could read to him, talk to him. The more activity, the better I believe it will be for your husband. If all is quiet people could think they have gone to that eternal silence before their time is due.’

  ‘So there is hope, doctor?’ Lady Lucy was looking at him very closely.

  ‘Oh yes, Lady Powerscourt. Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’

  Lady Lucy felt a small, but definite, onset not of hope but of resolve, of determination. Maybe it was courage. She thought of her love for Francis, she thought of all her ancestors who had marched and sailed and fought and died for their country across the centuries. Maybe some small portion of their bravery would come to help her in her ordeal. If she was not brave, she knew, Francis would surely die.

  Those first two days seemed to most of the inhabitants of 8 Manchester Square to be like a dream. Thomas and Olivia refused to believe their father was seriously ill until Lady Lucy took them in to see him. Thomas turned white and stared at his father for a very long time. Olivia rushed off to her room to pray for her Papa’s recovery. Dr Tony came at regular intervals. The nurses changed over every eight hours, keeping endless watch over their patient, making him comfortable, washing his face, taking his pulse, entering their findings into a large black notebook. Lady Lucy kept vigil when she could. She had made a private arrangement with Johnny that one of them should be awake when the other was asleep and vice versa. The staff tiptoed about, popping in every now and then to look at Powerscourt. The flowers began arriving late the first morning. William Burke sent an enormous bunch. Lady Lucy thought how amused Francis would have been as the bouquets began arriving from her relations, dozens and dozens of them, enough to open a bloody flower shop, she could hear him saying. Soon a whole wall in the Powerscourt bedroom was lined with flowers. Only the twins were immune to the change of lifestyle, Lady Lucy convinced that it would take the Second Coming to make the slightest dent in Nurse Mary Muriel’s routine.

  On the third day the atmosphere in the sick room was very different. Gone was the silence that had held the sick bay in its grip, broken only by the whispered conclaves between the nurses and Dr Tony. For a good section of the morning the twins were now placed on chairs close to the bed in their Moses baskets. Occasional wails punctuated the morning conversations between Dr Tony and the nurses. They took great interest in the twins, the nurses, peering into their faces and talking a great variety of nonsense to them. Thomas came in his most grown-up mode and read to Powerscourt from the sports section of the newspapers. Olivia tried to make up stories of her own for him. As these were largely based on stories her father had invented for her, it was, as Lady Lucy said, rather like hearing the brain of Francis come back in the voice of Olivia. When they got tired of stories, the children would talk to him, saying whatever came into their heads usually, an
d the nurses found that even more captivating than looking into the faces of the twins.

  Just before lunch Detective Chief Inspector Beecham arrived. He had felt he would be intruding if he called on the Powerscourt household. Only after he had met Edward and Sarah in front of Queen’s Inn and learned that they were going to call at 8 Manchester Square very soon, did he change his mind.

  ‘Lady Powerscourt, Johnny Fitzgerald, how is Lord Powerscourt? Is he making good progress?’

  Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy looked at each other.

  ‘He’s not getting any better, Chief Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘but he’s not getting any worse.’

  ‘I would like to see him and pay my respects, before I leave, if I may, Lady Powerscourt. This has been truly terrible for you all. I do have some fresh intelligence which fills in some of the final details of the case your husband so ably solved, Lady Powerscourt. But I would not want to keep you from your duties here.’

  Lady Lucy smiled. ‘It sounds to me, Chief Inspector, as though Francis would want to hear your news at some point quite soon after he recovers consciousness.’ Beecham thought he could hear a repressed ‘if’ in that last sentence.

  ‘I shall be brief,’ he said. ‘Let me begin with the villain who shot your husband.’

  ‘The fellow at the bottom of the stairs?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘The same, Johnny. Lord Powerscourt is an excellent shot but his bullet landed a couple of inches too low. Had it been a fraction higher, the bullet would have killed him. It nearly did for him, the rogue is still in hospital. But he is alive.’