Death of a Chancellor Read online

  The noise was muffled by the dust sheets. The blocks of masonry smashed on to the stone floor of the crossing. Bits of broken stone ricocheted across the transept and down the nave. The dust of ages rose from beneath the cathedral stones and flowed outwards like a whirlwind. The Pillar of Smoke has come to Compton Minster, Powerscourt thought groggily and we shall all be consumed. Shards of stone flew off and cracked the wooden seats at the top of the nave. Then the lights went out.

  As he rose, very unsteadily, to his feet, Powerscourt could feel the blood flowing freely down his temple where he had hit the carving. His brain told him that he had stopped beside the stall of Chisenbury and Chute. Grantham Australis was next door. His leg must have been twisted in the fall. He limped off very slowly towards the high altar. The great gold crucifix beckoned him on towards the place of sanctuary. Then he heard the doors close. He was locked in, shortly after five thirty in the afternoon. There must be fourteen hours to go before they would open again to greet another day. Lord Francis Powerscourt sat down in front of the altar and tried to collect his thoughts.

  12

  As he sat there by the altar Powerscourt tried to remember his own actions just before the fall of stone. Had he touched anything by accident? Had he inadvertently pulled on some mechanism that could have caused the avalanche? No, he decided, he had not. There was only one conclusion. Somebody had just tried to kill him. That didn’t bother him very much. People of one sort or another had been trying to kill him for years. He wondered suddenly if the killer was even now heaping the coal high on to the fire in the kitchen of the Vicars Hall. Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we have another treat for you. After the earlier delicacy of the vicar choral, we now present another dish, Roasted Powerscourt. He shuddered and massaged his injured leg once more.

  He staggered to his feet. He began to make his way slowly down the north ambulatory away from the altar. His hands felt the outline of the tomb of Abbot Parker, the last abbot but one before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The Abbot felt very cold. His long thin face was wet. Powerscourt realized that he was leaving a trail of blood wherever he went. He looked back at the altar cloth, hanging stiffly in its place. No, that would never do. He took off his coat and jacket and ripped off one sleeve of his shirt. He folded it into a makeshift bandage and wrapped it round his head. With dust all over my clothes and a bloody shirt on my forehead, I must look like a tramp now, he said to himself, one of those lost souls who haunt the lonely services in the cathedral looking for salvation, or warmth. He abandoned the Abbot to his fate and moved across to the opposite wall. His fingers felt for the extraordinary memorial to the Walton family from the year 1614. There were two semicircular niches inside a marble frame. On the left was a little statue of the father, with a red cloak over a black robe, Powerscourt remembered from the hours of daylight, kneeling before a marble plaque, hands clasped in prayer. Facing him, also kneeling, also praying, was his wife, clad entirely in black, more pious perhaps than her husband. Beneath them, aligned according to age and height, were their eleven children, also kneeling in prayer, the boys beneath their father, the girls beneath their mother. The smallest was only a couple of inches high. Powerscourt wondered what terrible disaster had carried off the entire family. Maybe it had been the plague. Maybe Chief Inspector Yates would know.

  Powerscourt paused beside the chantry chapel of Robert, Lord of Compton, passed away sometime in the fourteenth century, he remembered. The light from the great windows was very faint now. The stained glass didn’t seem to let very much of it in. Powerscourt’s hand felt the dust from the falling masonry already lying thickly on the stone. Half the monuments in the cathedral must be covered with it already. He wondered if the murderer was coming back to make sure he was dead. Or had the murderer watched the explosion from some high place up there on the scaffolding? Powerscourt didn’t think he could have seen anything through the storm of dust that poured out of the broken floor. Had the murderer rushed off to close all the doors? Did he believe that Powerscourt was dead, one unfortunate victim of the accident to be discovered by the verger in the morning? Or was he intending to come back and finish Powerscourt off?

  Powerscourt looked around for a means of defending himself. If he had the power, he reflected, he could raise a formidable host of warriors from inside the building itself. Those stone knights, facing east to meet their maker, could come clanking out of their tombs, stone swords in stone hands to terrify their enemies. There was a whole window partly filled with soldiery who had fought with Edward the Third in France in the Crécy campaigns in the fourteenth century. Powerscourt couldn’t see the detail in the darkness, but he thought there was a good selection of cavalry, some infantry and some archers, sharpshooters he could deploy to cover all the doors. Across the choir from where he now stood was the Soldiers Chapel, with flags and banners from the past two centuries hanging proudly from the stonework. Fierce sergeant majors with enormous moustaches could come back from their earlier campaigns to lead the standards into the thick of battle. There was a stained glass window there too, Powerscourt remembered, filled with the bloodied infantry of Britannia’s wars.

  His shirt was not proving very effective as a bandage. Blood was dripping through it and trickling slowly down his cheek. Extremely gingerly, Powerscourt reached up and twisted it through ninety degrees so a drier part was now in place to stem his wound. His leg was throbbing fiercely. What, he wondered, had caused this attack by masonry? It couldn’t be for what he knew about the deaths of John Eustace or Arthur Rudd, unless the murderers were appraised of Johnny’s inquiries into the Eustace coffin. In truth he knew very little. It had to be for what he might find out, what he might discover in the future rather than what he knew in the present. Was the assault linked to his forthcoming interview with Organist Wyndham? Did somebody not want him to speak to the organist? Perhaps the organist knew too much. There must be some terrible secret at the heart of Compton Minster. To preserve this secret Arthur Rudd had been strangled, his body roasted on the flames, his journals stolen and almost certainly burnt. He must have known the secret. Had John Eustace known it too?

  Powerscourt thought of Patrick Butler and what the Grafton Mercury might make of the attack. Murder by Masonry in the Minster? Investigator Inches From Death? He couldn’t think clearly any more but he felt certain that he wanted no publicity for the events of this night. He thought of Lady Lucy, back in Fairfield Park by now, no doubt. She would think he had gone to talk to Johnny Fitzgerald and would be late home. He thought of the Chief Inspector, back home with his family, maybe looking through another of his architectural volumes. He tried to imagine the Bishop or the Dean or the Archdeacon or the Dean’s enormous servant, two hundred feet above their transept, preparing to pull the rope that would pour all those stone slabs down on to their cathedral floor, killing somebody in the process. He thought of Thomas and Olivia, getting ready for bed, being spoilt by their grandmother, entirely ignorant of what had happened to their Papa. Maybe Compton is a more dangerous place than South Africa, he said to himself, for I went through a year and more of the Boer War without a scratch.

  The bells made him jump. They were terribly loud in this empty building as they struck the hour of seven. Powerscourt felt sure that the dust moved again, swirling off the surfaces where it had settled before to find new resting places on chantry chapel or choir stall. Powerscourt knew he could not fall asleep in case his enemies found him in the dark. He looked at the choir, all dark outlines in the gloom. He needed to sit down, he decided. A sudden inspiration lightened his mood. I may be going to bleed to death in this bloody cathedral, he said to himself, but I shall go out with style. He hobbled slowly to the other side of the choir. He settled himself into the great chair. His fingers felt for the inscription on the back. This would be a good way to go. Episcopus, Beatus Vir. The Bishop, a holy man. Powerscourt, a holy man.

  The real Bishop was hosting an important conference in the study of his Palace. The front of the bu
ilding looked out over the Cathedral Green but the study was at the back. In daylight there was a peaceful view over the Bishop’s garden, said to be one of the largest and finest of its kind in the country. On the desk, large enough to intimidate any passing prebendary, sat the wooden box found behind the coffin during the excavations in the crypt. Two gentlemen sat across from the Bishop, inspecting the documents contained inside. To Moreton’s right was Octavius Parslow, senior keeper of documents at the British Museum, a man with a reputation for scholarship that stretched across the great museums and universities of Europe. To his left, Theodore Crawford, Professor of History at the University of Oxford and one of the leading scholars of the sixteenth century in Britain. They both wore fine gloves as they passed the document from hand to hand. From time to time Crawford, a thin man in his early forties with a goatee beard, would snort rather loudly and make a jotting in his dark red notebook. Parslow had placed a large magnifying glass in front of him and would raise it to peer earnestly at the writing. The Bishop had an enormous volume by his side, bound in fading brown leather, which contained the early records of the cathedral.

  The Bishop coughed slightly and smiled at his guests. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you have now had over an hour and a half to peruse these documents. Would you be so kind as to give me your preliminary thoughts on them?’

  The two scholars looked at each other, both reluctant to speak first.

  ‘Could I ask you, if I may, Bishop, as to your own view on the matter?’ Octavius Parslow was playing for time.

  ‘Well,’ said the Bishop, ‘I am a mere country bishop, as you both know. My speciality is in the early textual analysis of the Gospels. But I have consulted widely in the district. It is surprising how much expertise you can find in these rural parts if you know where to look for it.’

  Four eyebrows shot up in unison across the desk. Surely the man wasn’t going to suggest that Compton was a centre of learning to rival Berlin or Bologna. The Bishop noted the look of disdain on his visitors’ faces and reminded himself of the obligations of Christian charity.

  ‘It is my belief,’ he went on earnestly, ‘though I would never dare to lay claim to the wisdom you two scholars have brought to my Palace this evening, that the document is a diary, a record, kept by one of the monks when the present cathedral was still a monastery in 1530 or 1540, I am not at all sure of the dates. It would be a most magnificent find if it were true, for we celebrate one thousand years in the life of abbey and cathedral at Easter.’

  Even Parslow and Crawford were impressed by the thousand years of history.

  ‘Professor Crawford?’ said the Bishop hesitantly. ‘Perhaps you would like to give us your opinion.’

  The Professor snorted slightly once again. He took off his spectacles and laid them on the desk. ‘Interesting though your speculations are, my dear Bishop,’ he just about managed a smile for Gervase Bentley Moreton, ‘I feel it far too soon to pass any kind of authoritative judgement. There are a number of problems in my view. Even by the standard of Church Latin of the time, the language is very poor. I do not say that renders it inauthentic, but it raises the possibility the strong possibility in my judgement, that it may be either a forgery, or a joke document written to impersonate what the author thought would be the grammar and vocabulary of a country bumpkin.’

  Bishop Moreton had rather more respect for country bumpkins that either of his visitors. ‘And what is your view, Mr Parslow?’ He turned to face the man from the British Museum.

  ‘I would have to say first of all, Bishop,’ Octavius Parslow was tapping his fingers slowly on the desk, ‘that I would wish to take issue with my colleague here about the Latin.’ He bestowed a condescending smile on his fellow scholar. ‘Crude, yes, ungrammatical, yes, but not, I would suggest, the work of a country bumpkin. There are records from one or two of the northern abbeys, Bolton, I believe, and perhaps Fountains, where the phraseology, while obviously not from the senior common rooms of Oxford, is not dissimilar. My reservations centre rather more on the sequence of legislation described in the documents. Surely the Act of Annates was passed before the Act of Succession? Yet here it would appear to be the other way round. There may be some perfectly innocent explanation as to why history seems to have been running in reverse order here in Compton, but for the moment I cannot see it.’

  ‘I am not at all sure,’ Professor Crawford returned to the fray, ‘that the precise order of the various acts is significant. The fellow is not writing an academic thesis, merely giving his reactions to contemporary events. He could have made a mistake.’

  This time it was Octavius Parslow who snorted. ‘I don’t think you will find that statement to be borne out by the historical records at all,’ he said, turning slightly red.

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen.’ Bishop Moreton tried to restore some kind of order. ‘Could I ask you a more specific question about the document. What date would you say it was?’

  ‘Speaking for myself,’ said Professor Crawford, ‘I could not hazard my academic record or my professional reputation on that question at this juncture.’

  ‘Mr Parslow?’ said the Bishop.

  ‘In my view, Bishop, it would be premature to attempt any precision at this stage.’

  The Bishop felt himself growing drowsy. He had had a very busy day, with a diocesan meeting that had lasted for a full three hours. He lowered his head as if in concentration, but his eyes were closing. Various phrases penetrated his brain as the battle raged on across his desk. ‘Need to see the whole question in its proper historical context,’ ‘further documentation to be consulted in the Bodleian,’ ‘a question not merely of the Dissolution of the Monasteries but of the wider evolution of Tudor religious policy in its entirety,’ and this from the Oxford Professor Crawford, ‘need to consult widely with colleagues, possibly even in Cambridge,’ ‘detailed textual analysis vital before any proper historical comparisons can be made at all.’

  The bells of Isaiah and Ezekiel woke the Bishop at eight o’clock precisely. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this has been most illuminating. Perhaps we could continue our discussions over dinner.’ As the Bishop led Professor Crawford and Octavius Parslow towards his dining room, he reflected on the idea of time in Compton running backwards. You could leave these two here, he said to himself as he beamed happily at his guests, discussing this document and they’d keep going all the way back to the Dissolution of the Monasteries themselves in 1539. They might be able to keep the academic argument going right back to the foundation of the abbey in 901.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt enjoyed being a Bishop to begin with. He wasn’t quite sure precisely what a Bishop of Compton would do when he sat here. Maybe his job was simply to preside over the services, to give his seal of approval to all those Te Deums and Cantate Dominos that would have echoed round the choir down the centuries. Then the pain got worse. He was on the second sleeve of his shirt now and was seriously worried that he would be on his trousers or his waistcoat next. He limped painfully round the cathedral, checking all the doors. He passed the treasury, filled with ancient crosses and chalices and Communion cups. One of the past glories of the minster was in there, a small box said to contain relics of Thomas à Becket. This piece of treasure had brought great wealth to the cathedral in years gone by as pilgrims came from all over England to pay tribute. The money they left had been enough to repair the great crossing when the tower fell down in the fourteenth century. Above him, as he passed the mighty pillars, the jokes of the medieval stone workers were still there, a cobbler mending shoes, someone removing a thorn from his foot, a fox stealing a goose, a spoonbill eating a frog. The circuit of the doors took him over forty minutes. Normally it would have taken less than ten. His leg was still painful. He wasn’t quite sure how much blood he had lost, spots of it marking his progress round the building.

  By eleven o’clock Powerscourt was back in the sanctuary, sitting on the steps in front of the high altar. He wondered if he could last through the night with
out falling asleep. He was, he knew, on the edge of delirium. The pipes on the great organ seemed to dance in front of him. He heard over and over again the muffled thud of the falling masonry. He could see himself diving again and again through the entrance to the choir. The faint noises he had heard from outside earlier on, horses’ hooves on the road, people talking to each other as they walked across Cathedral Green, had died out as Compton retired for the night. Sometimes he thought he detected scurrying noises at the back of the choir as if the cathedral mice had come out to play and sing some anthems of their own.

  At twenty past eleven he thought he heard a creak coming from the west front. It was a prolonged creak, followed by a second one. Powerscourt remembered that there were two great locks on the door. The door opened very slowly. The murderer is coming back, Powerscourt said to himself. He’s coming back to finish me off. When he finds no corpse underneath those masonry blocks in the transept he’ll search the entire cathedral. He saw, or thought he saw – he wasn’t very sure what was real and what was delirium any more – a lantern moving slowly up the nave about a hundred and fifty yards away from his position in the sanctuary. Powerscourt was dazzled by the unexpected light after his hours in the darkness. He couldn’t see who was behind it. He looked around desperately at the high altar. He might have declined to remove the cloth to quench his wound but he felt the two heavy silver candlesticks might help to keep him alive. He didn’t think God would object to that. He realized suddenly that while he could see the lantern, the person behind it couldn’t see him. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach all that distance. The footsteps were very loud. Powerscourt was planning an ambush. If he could reach the back of the chantry chapel of Sir Algernon Carew on the far side of the choir, he might be able to knock the murderer out with one great blow from his candlestick. He tiptoed off across the presbytery.