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  Death Called to the Bar

  ( Lord Francis Powerscourt - 5 )

  David Dickinson

  David Dickinson

  Death Called to the Bar

  1

  There was a tremendous crash right up against the wall. One carriage, maybe two, had turned on its side and fallen to the ground. Horses were screaming in pain as they too were pulled down by the harness to street level. Then came the swearing. Lord Francis Powerscourt did not think it would be possible for one man’s voice to penetrate through the thick walls of Chelsea Old Church, but it was. The words the coachman was speaking were not suitable for any morning of the week, let alone a morning of such importance in the Powerscourt family calendar. And there was worse. A different voice, presumably that of the other coachman, rang out in the midday air in language that was if anything even riper than the cursing of the first fellow. Powerscourt realized that he would not be able to give precise meanings to many of these words. They were new to him. He looked down at his two children, hoping they would not ask him what the words meant afterwards. He looked round at the congregation and saw one or two of the men smiling quietly to themselves and one or two of the maiden aunts covering their ears with their hands, scandalized expressions on their faces. The fog had claimed another victim, one more road accident to add to all the others earlier that day. All morning it had swirled round London, filling in the gaps between the people and the buildings, enveloping them in its clammy embrace. There had been accidents like the one outside the church all over the capital. In the West End the omnibuses had given up the unequal struggle and waited in their depots for the air to clear. On the Thames and in the docks the captains steered their boats very slowly, making frequent use of their hooters and sirens to warn oncoming traffic of their passage. The noises echoed round the city like trumpet notes, reports and instructions to soldiers in battles fought far away.

  Still the shouting went on. The canon of the church, who had at first been overwhelmed by the racket outside his walls, suddenly inserted another hymn into the service.

  ‘Hymn three hundred and sixty-five,’ he said in his loudest voice, sending a meaningful glance to his organist to take note of the change in plan. ‘The Old Hundredth. All people that on earth do dwell.’ There were five verses of that, the canon thought to himself; with any luck the noise outside would have finished by the end.

  ‘The Lord ye know is God indeed,

  Without our aid he did us make. . .’

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was an investigator. He had made his reputation in Army Intelligence in India and consolidated it by solving a number of murders in England. He was a little short of six feet tall with unruly black curls and bright blue eyes that inspected the world with detachment and irony.

  Powerscourt turned round for another surreptitious inspection of the congregation. He had already conducted his own audit of those present. Anything less than fifty of his wife Lady Lucy’s relations on parade and her family would regard the event as a catastrophic failure. Seventy-five might be regarded as a break-even point, a pretty poor show really, but not a total disgrace to the family name. Score a century and the event could be described in future histories of Lady Lucy’s tribe as a modest success. A hundred and thirty-one, which was Powerscourt’s estimate of the turn-out today, would be a matter for mild congratulation. A hundred and fifty, mind you, would have been better. The hymn was drawing to a close.

  ‘From men and from the angel host

  Be praise and glory evermore.’

  It was with something of a shock that Powerscourt realized as the canon was leading them back past the congregation towards the font near the entrance to the church that his numbers were wrong. Not a hundred and thirty-one at all, but a hundred and thirty-three. He had momentarily forgotten why they had all braved the fog this February morning. For they were all there for the christening of the two newest additions to the tribe, the twins, his twins, the latest and youngest members of the Powerscourt family. Lady Lucy had given birth before Christmas, and, as Powerscourt said to himself, if her own children, however tiny, weren’t to be counted as members of the tribe, then who the hell was?

  Just over a mile away, the fog, distributing its favours equally across various sectors of the city, had nearly made Queen’s Inn disappear. It was right on the River Thames between Westminster and the City of London – both as rich in legal pickings over the centuries as they were now – and the water seemed to give the swirling white-grey mist an extra depth. A determined student of architecture might have been able to discern a handsome set of eighteenth-century buildings with tall sash windows, and, presumably, grass growing in the courtyards, though any such growth would have been hard to spot unless you were virtually on top of it.

  Queen’s Inn was the smallest and youngest of London’s Inns of Court, training ground and stomping ground for the city’s barristers and High Court judges and Masters of the Rolls. It did not have the fabulous history of the Inner and Middle Temple with Knights Templar adorning their pedigree way back in the mists of legal history. Nor did it have the splendour of the Temple Gardens, frequently celebrated in verse, truly one of the most delightful places in London on a summer’s day with the grass and the flowers running down to the Thames. Queen’s could almost match the austere elegance of Lincoln’s Inn’s New Square or the gardens of Gray’s Inn. It did not claim superiority over the other four Inns. It just claimed to be slightly different. Slightly more worldly, with close links to some of the richer and grander colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Slightly richer than the others through a complicated system of internal finance. Slightly more likely to tolerate eccentrics, Queen’s people would say, proud of the strange dress and sometimes stranger methods of transport adopted by some of its more flamboyant barristers.

  And on this day Queen’s Inn was preparing for a feast. A feast in memory of one of its more distinguished sons, one Theophilus Grattan Whitelock, one-time bencher, or senior member, of Queen’s, a man twice passed over for the post of Lord Chancellor, a distinguished judge who sentenced so many people to be transported to the colonies that the cynics said he should have a ship on the route named after him. HMS Whitelock, direct to Botany Bay. He had been born, the man Whitelock, on this day, 28th February, so he missed a leap year birthday by a single day. The feast he endowed in his memory took place on this day, irrespective of which day of the week the 28th happened to fall on. Whitelock had consulted three expert legal draftsmen before finalizing the clause which stipulated that if, at any point in the future, carping clergymen or interfering bishops should prevent his feast taking place on the Sabbath, then the bequest would be cancelled in perpetuity. So generous was the bequest and so splendid the food and wine the Inn was able to provide that the members of Queen’s Inn would have defied the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, or both, if they dared to protest.

  Even as early as midday the preparations were well under way. Queen’s had been blessed for many years with a Senior Steward known to all and sundry as Joseph. Few, if any, knew his surname. Some of the younger students claimed Joseph himself had forgotten it. But he had a genius for efficient organization and over the years had developed a remarkable system of alliances and understandings with some of London’s finest grocers and butchers and wine merchants so that he could always command the best at very modest prices. Cynics, and what community of lawyers does not have a good supply of those, claimed that the whole edifice was based on back-handers and would, one day, collapse to general disgrace and a long prison sentence for Joseph. Or, the most cynical would add at this point, transportation for him in memory of Theophilus Grattan Whitelock. One more for Botany Bay
. Direct.

  Where on earth did this lot come from, Joseph said to himself, as he inspected his waiters for the day in the Great Hall. The Inn’s normal complement was insufficient for the numbers and complexity of the feast. Recruitment of these worthies was not his responsibility, but that of the Head Porter, a man with whom Joseph did not share the most cordial of relations. Desperately he tried to remember how he might have offended the Head Porter. It came to him in a flash. Three nights before there had been a drinks party for the benchers, an elaborate occasion graced with some of the finest wines of the Queen’s cellars. Custom and practice dictated that two or three bottles from this occasion should have found their way to the Head Porter’s cupboard. Joseph had genuinely forgotten. So here was the Head Porter’s revenge. Four boys who looked as though they were sixteen or so, an age which found it, as Joseph knew only too well, extraordinarily difficult to stand still for more than two minutes at a time. Four old men, hovering, Joseph thought, somewhere between sixty and seventy. They might have been waiting at table long before the Congress of Berlin, but they would need regular and repeated trips to the lavatories to see them through the evening. One of the old men, Joseph noticed to his horror, seemed to be nodding off on his feet, asleep where he stood. If he could do that in the middle of the day, what, in God’s name, would the greybeard be like in the closing stages of the feast way after ten or even eleven o’clock in the evening? Comatose in the buttery? Passed out, maybe even passed on, in the pantry?

  Good generals know how much depends on their relations with their troops. Joseph would have liked to shout at this ludicrous collection of humanity but he knew it wouldn’t work. Charm, kindness, that’s what’s needed here, he said to himself, I’ve only got to keep them on their toes for ten hours or so.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Joseph addressed his little army, his perfect teeth gleaming at the heart of his smile. ‘Tell me this, have you all waited at table for a feast like this one before?’

  There was a general chorus of affirmatives.

  ‘You,’ said Joseph, pointing dramatically to his eldest recruit, ‘you are serving vegetables that accompany the main course. Which side do you serve from?’

  A pair of sleepy eyes gazed at Joseph, as if reproaching him for daring to ask such a question. ‘The left, sir.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Joseph, flashing a smile at Methesulah, ‘and you, young sir,’ he pointed to a youth with huge sad eyes and curly hair, ‘which wine would we serve with the fish course, Chablis or Chateauneuf-du-Pape?’

  ‘Chablis, sir,’ said the youth, and for a brief second his eyes looked happy before returning to sad.

  ‘Very good,’ said Joseph. ‘I can see we are all going to get along fine. If you suddenly find that you have forgotten something about the distinguished art of waiting, just ask me and I will tell you the answer. Now, let me tell you the programme for the rest of the afternoon. All around you you can see these canteens of cutlery, with two large cloths and a bottle of polish beside them. That is the first task for you, to polish these knives and forks and spoons until you could shave in them. Then we will do the same for the glasses, the two wine glasses and the glass for the liqueur or port. Then we lay the table, under my supervision. Then we all have a rest before the final briefing after supper. Let us show honour today and this evening to the memory of Theophilus Whitelock, gentlemen. He may not have mentioned us waiters in his bequest, but without us it could not be fulfilled.’

  There were nine of them gathered round the font, the cold water very calm inside the marble. The boy twin had two godfathers, Powerscourt’s particular friend and companion in arms, Johnny Fitzgerald, and his brother-in-law, William Burke the financier. Burke had recently astonished the family by pulling off the roof of his enormous villa in Antibes and adding a further two storeys to the property. Powerscourt had inquired if he intended accommodating the entire family under this roof at the same time. Powerscourt’s eldest sister was godmother to the male and various members of Lady Lucy’s tribe did duty for the girl. The canon held his prayer book well away from his face as he read the Exhortation, as if he was losing his sight.

  ‘Doubt ye not, therefore, but earnestly believe that Christ will likewise favourably receive these present infants; that he will embrace them with the arms of his mercy; that he will give unto them the blessing of eternal life, and make them partakers of his everlasting kingdom.’

  Powerscourt looked down at the tiny bundle in his arms. The little boy was fast asleep with a blond curl lying on the top of his head. His elder brother and sister had been most eager to attend this part of the service and had been bitterly disappointed when told it was impossible. In vain had they said they had every right to be there. Olivia, the younger child, had pointed out that she already had more practice in holding the two babies than her father and that she would, obviously, be closer to the ground to catch her infant brother or sister if their father or the vicar dropped them. Thomas, the elder, had announced that it was sure to bring bad luck on all of them if he and his sister were not allowed to attend the christening. Lady Lucy had to resort to bribery to buy them off in the end.

  Now the canon was conducting the interrogation of the godparents.

  ‘Do you, in the name of these children, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow nor be led by them?’

  There was a general murmuring of ‘I renounce them all.’ Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald and William Burke were not too emphatic on that one. Burke was not an avaricious fellow but he did make his living out of the covetous desires for money of his fellow men. Powerscourt felt Lucy’s foot tapping lightly on his shin. She nodded to the pew behind him which had been empty as they came down the aisle. Kneeling happily on it, their faces wreathed in smiles, Thomas and Olivia had left their place to find the closest spot to the action they could find. Powerscourt grinned at them and made a further inspection of his infant.

  Then the preliminaries were over. Very gently the canon leant over and took Powerscourt’s bundle from him. Powerscourt felt a sudden, irrational spurt of alarm when he remembered how far away the prayer book had been. Would Olivia’s worst fears be recognized as the canon dropped his charge on the hard floor? Looking slowly round the assembled godparents the canon said, ‘Name this child.’

  ‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt,’ they chorused. Very gently and very slowly the canon dipped the head into the font. A mighty wail of protest followed. Powerscourt wondered if the child would be able to make more noise later in life than the two coachmen outside.

  ‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

  The wailing bundle was handed back to the earthly father. Then it was the turn of the other twin. Elizabeth Juliet Macleod was added to the Powerscourt family in total silence. Powerscourt could hear Olivia whispering to Thomas that girls were much braver than boys as her sister hadn’t made a single squawk during the ordeal.

  Six weeks or so after the end of one of Powerscourt’s cases the year before, a dramatic and dangerous affair in a West Country cathedral, he had taken Lady Lucy to St Petersburg. It was there, in their beautiful hotel bedroom overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, that Lucy believed the twins had been conceived. She was absolutely certain of it. Johnny Fitzgerald had suggested calling them Nicholas and Alexandra after the Tsar and his wife but Powerscourt had demurred, pointing out that at some point in the future Britain might be at war with Russia and two children wandering about the country lumbered with the Christian names of the Russian royal house might not be a good idea.

  By the end of the first course of the Whitelock Feast Joseph, the steward of Queen’s Inn, was reasonably pleased with the evening so far. The Hall looked magnificent. The candles were glittering in their places on the tables and the walls. The portraits of the great lawyers
of the past looked down on their successors. Along the bulk of the great room were trestle tables of oak, supposed to be as old as the foundation itself. On the raised area at the north end was the High Table reserved for the benchers of the Inn. On the walls behind them two full-length Gainsboroughs of previous Lord Chancellors, sombre and forbidding in their dark robes, presided over the proceedings. And above them hung one of the treasures of the Inn, Rubens’ The Judgement of Paris, where a bucolic-looking Paris, son of the King of Troy, held up a ruddy apple in front of three scantily clad goddesses. So popular was this painting with the citizens of the capital, its great appeal possibly residing in the nakedness of the ladies, that the Hall was opened to the public once a week during term-time so the pilgrims could pay tribute in person. American visitors sometimes expressed surprise that it was not a courtroom scene they were seeing, with learned friends appearing before some frosty judge, but they seemed to recover quite quickly. A plaque beneath it announced that the painting was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors.

  The first course had been a terrine, a rather intricate terrine principally composed of glazed cured salmon and Beaufort cheese. That had been easy for Joseph’s motley army of waiters to serve. The more active service of bringing the plates with the food already in place from the kitchen to the Hall was shared between his regular forces and the young auxiliaries. Joseph had been more impressed by the old than the young. They shuffled about their tasks very slowly but they didn’t speak too loudly or nearly drop the plates like the young.

  It was the soup that really worried Joseph. It was one of the new chef’s special favourites which he claimed to have devised for the members of the Imperial Family in St Petersburg, Borscht Romanov, a beetroot-based broth laced with herbs and a Russian vodka whose name even the chef could not pronounce and lashings of sour cream. Joseph watched with dread as his waiters began the long march with a soup bowl in each hand from the kitchens, over a wet floor, into the Hall and onwards for what was, at its longest, a journey of over a hundred and fifty yards. One hundred and sixty-two guests, eighty-one voyages of the Borscht Romanov. One man tripped in the kitchen and had to be removed from duty altogether as he had pink stains right down his shirt front. Two of Joseph’s young men had watched the regular waiters and imitated them, gliding rather than walking with the elbows tucked in tight to the body. The other two held the bowls too far away and were in permanent danger of tipping forward.