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  Death of a Chancellor

  ( Lord Francis Powerscourt - 4 )

  David Dickinson

  David Dickinson

  Death of a Chancellor

  Part One

  Epiphany

  January 1901

  1

  There was just one figure on the deck of the ship at four o’clock in the morning. Surely only a madman would venture into the open on such a night, the sky above black as pitch, illuminated by neither moon nor stars, the fierce wind cutting across the decks, a relentless rain slanting down from the invisible sky, the spray from the prow of HMS Fearless, one of the Royal Navy’s newest destroyers, washing and swirling round the madman’s feet, sloshing its erratic way towards the gunwales where it returned to the foaming sea. On the bridge the Captain stared at his instruments and wondered whether he should decrease his speed in case his most eccentric passenger turned into a man overboard.

  But Captain William Rawnsley did not alter his course or his speed. One part of his mariner’s brain was permanently, subconsciously, attuned to the beat of the great engines beneath him, the finest and the most modern that the engineers of the Clyde could produce. As long as that heart beat strong and sure he was confident that his ship would do whatever he asked of her. And Captain Rawnsley had made a promise to the madman on the deck in Cape Town at the very start of their journey back to England. He would deliver his passenger on to dry land at Portsmouth at eight o’clock in the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of January in the year of Our Lord 1901. No earlier, no later. The Captain knew his passenger the madman was anxious to see his wife and family who had been informed of his time of delivery. The Captain himself, as he told the madman, was equally anxious to return to his home. He had a pair of twins waiting for him. And Captain Rawnsley had never seen them since they were born three long months before.

  The madman was clutching the rail of the ship very tightly in his lookout post some twenty yards from the prow where the sea crashed over the Glasgow steel in angry torrents. Sometimes he peered up at the empty sky as if willing some stars or some fragment of moon to come out and cast light on his journey. Sometimes he stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the relentless crashing of the waves or the white line of spray along the side of the vessel. Sometimes he stared out to his left as if he might spy land, a faint outline that would mark the coast of England.

  Always he thought of the people waiting for him at the other end. Lady Lucy, wife of his heart and love of his life, Thomas, his son, and little Olivia, his daughter. He had not seen any of them for over a year, four hundred and five days since he had waved goodbye at that melancholy railway station. For the madman was Lord Francis Powerscourt and he was going home. He wrapped his great sou’wester ever more tightly round his body and stared yet again at where he thought England must be. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, he muttered to himself, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters.

  Thirteen months before, the Prime Minister himself had despatched Powerscourt and his small private army to South Africa to improve the British Army’s intelligence in the war against the Boers. Even now Powerscourt could still remember the exact words of his orders: ‘The whole structure of military intelligence in South Africa is wrong. War Office can’t sort it out. Useless bloody generals can’t sort it out. They think the Boers are here. They’re not. They’re over there. The generals plod over there. By the time they arrive, Mr bloody Boer has disappeared again. Difficulties in the terrain, they keep telling me. Rubbish. Faulty intelligence, maybe no intelligence at all.’ It had taken Powerscourt and his companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald a year to sort out the problem, but he had left in place a whole new system of intelligence gathering, based on the speed and mobility of the African scouts he recruited, and the information gleaned from hundreds of black spies.

  Some thirty miles north-east of HMS Fearless another figure was peering out to sea. Lady Lucy Powerscourt was rubbing at the window of her hotel room on the sea front in Portsmouth. Surely, she thought, the hotel people could keep their glass cleaner than this. The visitors wanted a proper view of what was going on down below in the harbour. But all she could see were the lights on the shore and a dark, impenetrable blackness behind.

  When she married Lord Francis Powerscourt some eight years before, he had left his career in Army Intelligence and become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, solving mysteries and murders that once went right into the heart of the Royal Household itself. Neither she, nor indeed he, had ever imagined that he would be recalled to the colours and sent to the other side of the world to help in a grubby and difficult war. She had found his absence very hard to bear. Only the children rescued her from depression. Thomas sometimes had a way of flicking his hair off his forehead that replicated to the last detail the behaviour of his father. Then, for what seemed to Thomas to be completely unaccountable reasons, she would sweep him up into her arms and smother him with kisses.

  Lady Lucy was fully dressed. She turned from her lookout post and glanced at the sleeping children. She smiled. They had taken their father’s absence in totally different ways. Thomas had an enormous map of Southern Africa on the wall in his bedroom, covered with stars and dates for the places his father had been. The map itself was now scarcely visible. What the little boy did not know was that his father never put his real location in his letters in case they were captured by the enemy. When he was in Natal, he told Thomas he was in the Transvaal, and vice versa. So Thomas’s map was accurate in the sense that his father had been in all the places ringed with stars, but never at the time marked on his wall.

  Olivia had never seen the point of the map and the stars. Instead she had appropriated a photograph of her Papa from the drawing room and she drew dozens and dozens of pictures of him, scarcely recognizable to anybody else, but a constant record of her devotion. She made her Mama keep a list of all the things she had to tell her father about, her new shoes, the pony in her grandmother’s stable in the country, her new friend Isabella on the other side of their house in Markham Square in Chelsea.

  Lady Lucy checked the time once more. Half-past four. Not time yet to wake the children. She prayed that the ship would arrive on time. Perhaps they would be able to spot it better from the quayside. At six o’clock, she said to herself, I shall wake Thomas and Olivia and get them dressed. They will be so excited. She smiled again. After four hundred and five days, an hour or two was nothing, nothing at all.

  On board HMS Fearless the rain seemed to have grown still more powerful. Captain Rawnsley and his officers on the bridge could just see a second madman come to join the asylum on deck. Even through the roar of the elements they could hear him shouting to the first lunatic.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Francis, why do they have to put these bloody guns in the middle of the floor? You’d think they’d put them higher up somewhere.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had banged his knee on one of the Navy’s latest and most lethal weapons as he crossed the deck to join his friend. ‘It’s bloody inconsiderate of them, that’s what I say.’

  ‘Good morning to you, Johnny. Mind how you go now. You don’t want to fall overboard at this stage.’

  ‘One of those bloody officers up there,’ Johnny Fitzgerald gestured vaguely towards where he thought the bridge must be, ‘has just taken a bet with the Captain person that one of us will fall in.’

  The Fearless sank at that moment into a particularly deep trough. As she rose out the other side a wall of water flooded over Powerscourt and Fitzgerald.

  ‘That’s the other bloody thing,’ said Johnny bitterly, never a happy sailor. He was hanging on to the rail with both hands. ‘Ever since we left, this bloody boat has been either going up and down
like this,’ he ducked as another helping of ocean cascaded over them, ‘or rocking from side to side. It’s drunk all the time this boat, that’s what it is. Why can’t the damned thing move along on an even keel? They cost a fortune, these bloody boats, Francis. You’d think they could make them go along steadily, like a train. I mentioned the fact to the Captain the other day.’

  There was a temporary lull in the weather. Fitzgerald plunged his right hand deep inside his clothes and produced an enormous flask.

  ‘This is what you need on a night like this, Francis. Naval rum. Fellow in the catering department gave it to me. Said it’s the stuff they give the sailors before a battle. Makes them fighting drunk, he said. Seems to me you’d need to have the bloody stuff twenty hours a day, battle or no battle, to survive on these wretched vessels.’

  Powerscourt smiled. He suddenly remembered Johnny Fitzgerald turning green and being sick over the side on a yachting expedition years before when there was barely enough breeze to fill the sails. ‘I’m very curious, Johnny,’ he shouted into the wind, ‘to know what the Captain said.’

  ‘What the Captain said when?’ Fitzgerald yelled back.

  ‘When you complained about the ship not travelling like a train.’ Powerscourt had turned very close to his friend’s ear. Johnny Fitzgerald laughed.

  ‘He said to me, Francis, “You’re a hopeless case. Don’t think I could convert you to ships any more than I could convert the Hottentots to Christianity. Here, you’d better have another drink.’’’

  Fifty miles to the west of Lady Lucy’s hotel, Andrew Saul McKenna finally decided that he must get up, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. McKenna was butler in the great house of Fairfield Park, situated in the tiny village of Hawke’s Broughton in the county of Grafton in the west of England. He knew something was wrong. He had heard strange noises in the night. He thought, or had he imagined it, that he heard a muffled scream. Now there was no noise, just this overpowering sense that something was terribly amiss in his little kingdom. He lit a candle and climbed rapidly into his clothes for the day, left out in neat piles the night before.

  McKenna’s first thought was for the master he had served for the last fifteen years. Mr Eustace’s bedroom was one floor below. McKenna could still remember his master coming round the desk to shake him by the hand when offering him the job.

  ‘I do hope you’ll be able to stay with us for a long time,’ he had said with a smile. Eustace was Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, responsible for the archives and the famous cathedral library.

  Now McKenna was tiptoeing down the back stairs in the middle of the night, his stomach churning with worry and fear. A floorboard creaked as he made his way along the corridor. Outside he could see, very faintly, the trees shaking slowly in the wind. He passed an ancient statue of a Roman goddess, lost in thought. For a big man, he moved very quietly.

  Andrew McKenna paused before he opened the door to his master’s bedroom. There was a loud creak when you opened it, he remembered. He’d meant to have the door oiled for weeks now. He gripped the handle firmly and twisted it open as fast as he could. There was no noise this time.

  Nothing, he thought, nothing could have prepared anybody for what he found inside. As he moved slowly across the room towards the great four-poster bed, he found the long discarded habits of childhood had returned to take temporary occupation of his brain. His hands moved automatically into the folded position. He said two Our Fathers. He closed his eyes briefly to avert them from the horror. Hail Mary, full of grace, his lips muttered, his hands moving along the beads of an invisible rosary, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. As he took in the full horror lying across the bedclothes, he realized that the words in his brain suited his master much more than they suited him. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. Charles John Whitney Eustace, Master of Fairfield Park, Canon and Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, had died in the most terrible fashion. There were still two hours left before the dawn. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

  The rain on the deck of HMS Fearless had stopped. The spray and the waves were as powerful as ever. The night was still an impenetrable black. Powerscourt was wondering if this happy return might become an anticlimax. He had heard stories from men in the Army about upsetting reunions, so passionately desired over such a long time, so eagerly awaited on the long journey home, but where people found they had little to say to each other after the initial euphoria had worn off. Time had ensured that there was too little experience left in common after a long separation. After a fortnight, one man had told him, he realized he was living with a complete stranger he didn’t know at all. Powerscourt didn’t think that was going to happen to him. He groped about inside the folds of his sou’wester and produced a pair of binoculars. They were of the finest and the latest German make. The Kaiser had sent whatever he could to the Boers to confound perfidious Albion, guns to kill the British, ammunition to keep killing them, binoculars to find them. He peered despondently into the gloom.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ll see anything yet, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was peering into the water below. ‘How deep would you say this bloody water is?’ he went on, as if he saw himself being sucked overboard right down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there were no reviving bottles to console the living or the dead. ‘Very deep, I should think,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Half owre half owre to Aberdour

  It’s fifty fathoms deep

  And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens

  Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.’

  Lady Lucy checked her watch again. Time seemed to be moving very slowly this morning. Twenty to six. Still an hour and a half to go before the dawn as the helpful hotel people had told her the night before. Francis is coming, she said to herself, remembering the mantra she had used like a comfort blanket when she had been kidnapped by a gang of villains and locked up on the top floor of a Brighton hotel. He had found her then. She checked the children once more and returned to her vigil by the window. Francis is coming. She smiled again.

  Andrew McKenna was shaking slightly as he stood by his dead master’s bed. Part of it was shock. Part of it was anger that anybody human could have done such a brutal thing to his gentle master. Part of it was that he simply didn’t know what to do. He felt suddenly that he was the lone representative left on earth of Charles John Whitney Eustace, charged with special duties towards the dead. His master had been quite small in life. Now, lying on this bloody bed, with blood dripping on to the floor, he looked smaller still.

  McKenna knew that terrible scandal could follow the discovery of the body. The newspapers would invade this remote corner of rural England and titillate their readers with exaggerated stories of vicious and violent death before dawn. The rest of the staff would want to come to pay their last respects. The women would turn hysterical if they saw this bloodied corpse, the men would turn homicidal towards the unknown perpetrators. The only thing to do for now, he said to himself, is to fetch the doctor who lived but a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t leave the remains of his master where they were. Somebody else might come in and find him. So the only thing to do was to move him. To move him now. McKenna shuddered violently as he thought of carrying this corpse, of all corpses, anywhere at all. And where should he take it? To the doctor’s? Some early-rising farmhand might spot him walking along the village’s only street with blood and gore running from the package in his arms. Then he remembered the spare bedroom above the stables, recently refurbished and remote from the main part of the house.

  McKenna took a deep breath. He found that his hands were making the sign of the cross. He pulled out all the bedclothes and rolled them round his master till he looked like a wrapped-up sausage or an Egyptian mummy en route to the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid. He tried putting the body over his shoulder like a fireman rescuing somebody from a blazing building. That didn’t work. The body kept s
lipping. Between the bed and the door he found that the best way to carry his master was in his arms, like an overgrown baby wrapped – the biblical reference came to him again from Christmases past – in swaddling clothes. Going to a stable, he said, his mind on the edge of hysteria now, like they did all those years ago.

  The journey to the kitchen passed off without incident, apart from the fact that Andrew McKenna had started to weep and had no hands to wipe away his tears. Outside the back door they were hit by the force of the wind. McKenna reeled like a drunken man. The real disaster came on the way up the stairs to the bedroom above the stables. McKenna slipped and almost fell over. Desperately he reached out his left hand to steady himself against the wall. The body fell out of his grasp and began rolling down the stairs. It stuck four steps from the bottom. Summoning the last of his strength McKenna picked his master up once more and went up the stairs as fast as he could. He dumped John Eustace on the bed and went down the stairs two at time. Out in the fresh air he stood still for a moment, panting heavily tears still rolling slowly down his cheeks. He noticed that a spot of blood had escaped from the wrapping and fallen on to his hand. He set out to wake the doctor. His hands were out of his control by now. They were shaking violently from the strain of carrying a corpse a couple of hundred yards in the dark. Pray for us, his lips were moving as he swayed up the village street, pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

  Six o’clock at last. Just two hours to go now. Lady Lucy decided the time had come. The children would never forgive her if they missed the boat’s arrival. They could have breakfast downstairs in the great dining room that looked over the harbour. Just over four hundred days have passed, she said to herself happily as she woke Thomas and Olivia on the morning their father came home from the wars.