Death of a Chancellor Page 27
The little town of Ledbury St John was right at the outer limit of Johnny Fitzgerald’s collection of Roman Catholic churches. The church itself, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, stood at the very edge of the place as if the local council were slightly ashamed at having to give it house room. Johnny himself, feeling rather hungry after his long ride, was lurking at the edge of the graveyard. He could see two out of the three directions that potential worshippers might come from. A few locals passed, probably on their way to work in some of the outlying farms. Dawn was breaking over the town, a pale light seeping in over the rooftops. At twenty past seven two figures, dressed in black, he thought, made their way in through a side door. They seemed to have their own key, as there was a lot of rustling before the right implement was found. By twenty-five past the lights were lit inside the church, but no worshippers had yet appeared. At seven twenty-eight Johnny slipped in through the main door and took his seat at the very rear of the church. There was only one other member of the congregation, kneeling at the front, his face fixed on a painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary above the altar where the Blessed Sacrament was already in position.
The priest, not more than thirty years old, Johnny thought, kissed the altar. The worshipper at the front genuflected, Johnny following uncertainly behind.
‘In nomine Patris et Filli et Spiritus Sanctl,’ said the priest, making the sign of the Cross. In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit.
‘Gratia domini nostri Iesu Christi, et caritas Dei, et communicatio Sancti Spiritus sit cum omnibus vobis.’ The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Johnny Fitzgerald was staring very closely at the man celebrating Mass. He tiptoed further up the aisle to a place with a better and a closer view of the altar. The service carried on.
‘Confiteor Deo omnipotente et vobis, fratres, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et ommissione.’ I confess to you, Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault in thought, word and deed, in the things I have done and the things I have failed to do.’
The little congregation struck their breasts, lightly in the case of the priest, severely in the case of the lone worshipper, vigorously in the case of Johnny Fitzgerald. If only the man would turn round once or twice so he could get a proper look at him.
‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’ The fault is with me, the fault is with me, the fault is greatly with me.
Then Johnny knew. There was something in the profile of the man at the altar that made him certain. For he had seen him before. This priest celebrating Mass in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the parish of Ledbury St John was the same man who had been conducting the service of Evensong in the Cathedral of Compton five days before.
Sir Roderick Lewis, former Ambassador from the Court of St James to the Court of Umberto, King of Italy, was wearing a smock and had a paintbrush in his hand when Powerscourt was shown into his study. There were, Powerscourt discovered, a number of surprising facets to Sir Roderick’s character. The first was that he loathed Italy. And, especially, he loathed Rome. Its inhabitants did not rate much higher in his estimation.
‘Frightful place, Powerscourt. Perfectly acceptable if you’re a tourist and only there for a couple of days. But to live there! All that terrible food! All that dreadful olive oil! And those vulgar wines they’re so proud of that no proper Englishman would ever let into his cellar! I was never surprised the place killed Keats, you know. The bastards have even got Shelley’s heart. Killed one of my predecessors, Lord Vivian, too. And the Romans! God only knows how they acquired an empire all that time ago, Powerscourt. Couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag now, if you ask me. Intrigue, double dealing, treachery – diplomacy became a process of accommodation with a collection of particularly slippery eels.’
Powerscourt wondered if it was official Foreign Office policy to despatch the representatives of His Majesty to the places they loathed the most. Russia haters to St Petersburg, Ireland haters to Dublin, Americaphobes to Washington. Perhaps he could ask Rosebery
‘What’s more,’ Sir Roderick went on, staring balefully at the watercolour of Hampton Court taking uncertain form on his easel, ‘Rosebery tells me you want to know about Civitas Dei. Civitas Dei means the Vatican. The Vatican means the Pope. The Pope means the Curia and the self-serving collection of the sycophantic, the devious and the ambitious who make up the Papal bureaucracy.’
With that he placed a blob of blue paint in the place where the sky should have been. It did not look right.
‘Damn!’ said Sir Roderick. ‘Look what the bloody Vatican has made me do now. I’ll have to wipe that off.’
‘What do we know about Civitas Dei?’ asked Powerscourt as the former Ambassador dabbed ineffectually at his watercolour with a piece of cloth. ‘I mean know for certain.’
‘We know nothing for certain about them, Powerscourt. If the affairs of the Vatican are shrouded in mist, the affairs of Civitas Dei are surrounded by impenetrable fog, much worse than we get in London.’ He tried another splash of blue right above the roof of Hampton Court. Powerscourt was sure the roof was crooked but felt it might be better not to point this out. This time it worked. Sir Roderick’s temper improved briefly.
‘Very rich backers,’ he went on, fiddling with his brushes as he spoke. ‘Aim the improvement in fortunes if not the supremacy of the Catholic Church. Number of priests believed to be members. Very shadowy inner group based in Rome itself.’
‘You make them sound a bit like Freemasons, Sir Roderick,’ said Powerscourt.
‘Don’t think these characters have much time for aprons and funny handshakes, if you ask me,’ Sir Roderick replied, ‘much more like the thumbscrew alternating with the crucifix. What is amazing are the variety and the improbability of the rumours that circulate about them.’
The former Ambassador raised another brush full of blue. His hand hovered over where the river ought to be. Powerscourt hoped the Thames wasn’t going to be the same shade as the sky.
‘Rumour flows around Rome like the water supply, Powerscourt. There are pipes sunk into the ground to hasten its passage from place to place, aqueducts old and new to ferry it over the difficult terrain. Turn on the tap, ask a Roman to speak, and out it flows, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, more often, with their useless engineers, tepid if you want to take a bath. But the rumours flow, just like the water.’
Sir Roderick paused and raised his brush high above his canvas, as if poised to strike.
‘In the last two years, Powerscourt, we have had to listen to the following fantastic accounts of the power of the Civitas Dei. They were responsible for the recent change of government in Brazil. Any sane person would have told you it was their disastrous economic policies that brought that about. They have recently, if we are to believe the rumours, been responsible for the appointment of a new Minister of Finance in Madrid. Previous fellow was caught with his hand in the till. Two out of three cardinals appointed this past year are said to be leading members of the organization. There was even a rumour that they had a great work afoot in England itself which would cause a sensation when it happened. Rumours, all rumours, not a word of truth in any of it.’
Powerscourt watched as the brush finally made up its mind and placed a perfectly formed strip of river at the bottom of the painting.
‘I know they’re all ridiculous,’ he said, ‘but sometimes even rumours can be useful in my profession, Sir Roderick. Was there any more detail about the English operation?’
Sir Roderick, emboldened by his previous success, tried to extend the passage of his river. The paint escaped into the lower sections of the building instead, rendering some of it extremely wet, if not uninhabitable.
‘God damn and blast!’ said the former Ambassador. ‘I shall have to redo that whole section. All the fault of those bloody Romans, if you ask me. The only other thing they said about
the English business, Powerscourt, was that it was controlled from Rome. Of course, you don’t have to be Caesar Borgia or Niccolo Machiavelli to work that one out. Whole bloody business is controlled from Rome.’
As Powerscourt left the artist to his labours he found himself thinking about Hampton Court. Built by Cardinal Wolsey at the height of his power, he remembered. Appropriated by the King who could not bear a mere commoner to have a grander house than he did. So had Sir Thomas More, victim of the King, walked with him in counsel in the gardens and the corridors? And, as more of his recent history lessons came back to him, had Thomas Cromwell whispered his advice into his sovereign’s ear inside that fantastic building? Was the Dissolution of the Monasteries conceived and planned inside Hampton Court Palace?
William McKenzie settled nervously into his first class carriage at Victoria station, feeling rather out of place. McKenzie was not used to travelling first class. Three compartments further down Father Dominic Barberi was also travelling first class. He had not required the services of a porter to bring his luggage on to the train. One black valise was all he had. McKenzie also felt rather nervous about the very large sum of money Powerscourt had stuffed into his pocket before he left.
‘You never know who you might need to bribe when you get there, William. And I’ve hired a guide and interpreter to meet you at the further end. A former Ambassador gave me his name. The fellow is a retired journalist by the name of Bailey Richard Bailey. He’s married to an Italian and knows the place like the back of his hand.’
McKenzie hoped his old mother did not where he was going. For she belonged to an extreme Presbyterian sect which believed that the Catholic Church was the kingdom of the Devil and the Pope the permanent reincarnation of Satan. The minister in their local church was a man who prided himself on his physical resemblance to John Knox, the great Calvinist divine of sixteenth-century Edinburgh. Indeed, the minister had bought every single book ever published about Knox so he could imitate his mannerisms and recreate the patterns of his speech. How often had McKenzie sat there in his pew beside his mother, his mind miles away, while the man preached on and on about the Anti-Christ in the Vatican and the evils of the Church of Rome, its coffers bloated by the sale of indulgences and pardons, its members denied the basic rights of the study of the Bible and damned to all eternity by their idolatry and the worship of graven images. McKenzie had told Powerscourt in India once that he had learned patience by sitting through these terrible sermons, so filled with hate in the name of the love of God.
He remembered Powerscourt’s last words to him in the drawing room at Markham Square. ‘William, it is important that you find out as much as you can. But it is even more important that you do not get caught. I dread to think what might happen if these people suspect they are being followed, their affairs investigated. I cannot emphasize that enough.’
Outside, McKenzie saw that the great clock on the station platform had almost reached eleven o’clock. The last trunks and hatboxes were being loaded into the goods van, the porters throwing the late ones in before the train departed. McKenzie checked his ticket once more. London, Calais, Paris, Lyon, Mont Cenis, Turin, Pisa, Rome. The whistles blew, the green flags came down and the train moved slowly out of the station, a few relatives and friends waving at the carriages as they passed. William McKenzie was on his way to the Eternal City.
After his journey back to the West Country Powerscourt suspected he might be on the verge of solving one of the riddles of Compton. It was the one where he had started all those weeks before. If he had to, he could now arrange for the exhumation of the body of John Eustace, interred with such speed and secrecy in the graveyard behind his house. But, if he was lucky, that might not be necessary. His first port of call the following day was with Chief Inspector Yates. He showed him the papers he had brought from London.
‘Chief Inspector, thank you for the papers about the exhumation order on John Eustace. I have the Home Secretary’s signature here. I think I am going to have one last attempt on Dr Blackstaff. But I need some ammunition. If the coffin is lifted and opened up, and we discover that Eustace did not die of natural causes, where does that leave the doctor?’
‘Well,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘we could charge him with murder straight away, if you like. He did stand to make a great deal of money out of the will after all.’
‘I’m not sure that it would be easy to secure a conviction on those grounds. And a local jury would certainly be very reluctant to convict him. He’s a very good doctor, I believe. Is there anything else you could charge him with?’
Chief Inspector Yates scratched his head. ‘Obstruction of justice,’ he said, ‘concealing the manner of death, lying to the police forces? We could certainly rustle up something along those lines.’
Powerscourt found Lady Lucy sitting in the garden of Fairfield Park, watching the children throwing a ball to each other. He kissed her and smiled as she ran her fingers through his hair.
‘I think we’re making progress, Lucy,’ he said. ‘But the answers I am finding are so incredible I wonder if I am going out of my mind. I don’t want to tell anybody yet, in case I’m completely wrong.’
‘Surely you can tell me, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy. A pair of sad blue eyes looked up at him. ‘We’ve been married for years and years now, after all.’
Powerscourt kissed her again. ‘I think this knowledge is very dangerous, my love. Believe me, I will tell you as soon as I can. Now, what has been happening down here?’
Lady Lucy told him about her strange encounter with the choirmaster, his comments about the amount of work the choir had to do for the Messiah and the commemoration service. She told him about Johnny Fitzgerald’s discovery of one of the canons of the cathedral celebrating Mass at seven thirty in the morning in the little church at Ledbury St John. Two of them Catholic for certain, Powerscourt said to himself, Archdeacon and Canon, maybe two more. At that point Powerscourt rose from his garden chair and walked round the garden three times, collecting his children in his arms as he went so that three Powerscourts returned to join Lady Lucy on her chair.
‘I must go now, or I shall be late,’ he said, kissing all three of them in turn.
‘Where are you going, Papa?’ said Thomas and Olivia in unison, worried that he might disappear abroad again.
‘I have to go and see Dr Blackstaff,’ he said. ‘I’m rather worried about my health.’ As Lady Lucy watched him go out of the garden gate, she didn’t think for one moment that it was his own health he was going to discuss, but the death that had brought them to Compton all those weeks before.
On his short journey to the Blackstaff residence Powerscourt thought about many things. He thought of the two dead bodies, one roasted all night on the spit in Vicars Hall, the other cut into pieces and distributed around the countryside. He thought about the extra music the choir were learning for the service commemorating one thousand years of the minster. He thought of the Archdeacon, travelling every Thursday to celebrate Mass at Melbury Clinton, his other religious identity concealed inside his bag. He thought of the dinner at Trinity College Oxford all those years before, the candles burning brightly along the tables, the dons resplendent in their gowns of scarlet and black, the long shadows of the servants on the walls as they moved up and down to serve the different courses, the red wine gleaming in front of Newman, his white hair shimmering like a beacon in the centre of High Table.
The daffodils in Dr Blackstaff’s garden were swaying slightly in the early evening breeze as Powerscourt rang the bell at precisely six o’clock. He had sent word to the doctor from London that he proposed to call on him at this time. He was shown into the drawing room lined with medical prints where he had talked to the doctor about the death of John Eustace in January. He greeted the grisly portrait of an eighteenth-century tooth extraction like an old friend. He was, after all, he reflected, about to embark on a different kind of extraction. The truth might be more painful than an infected upper molar.
Dr Blackstaff looked slightly irritated. ‘I have already told you, Lord Powerscourt, all that I know about the death of my friend.’
‘But have you?’ said Powerscourt. ‘That is the question, Dr Blackstaff. You see, I’m afraid I didn’t believe the story you related about the manner of John Eustace’s death the first time you told me, here in this room, all those weeks ago. I still don’t believe it today. There are too many discrepancies in the account you gave me and what the butler said. You said, if I recall, that he was wearing a pale blue shirt. Andrew McKenna said it was grey. Maybe people could confuse one with the other. Perhaps. You said he was wearing black boots. McKenna said they were brown. But, you see, it wasn’t just those variations that made me doubt you were telling me the whole truth. The demeanour of the two of you was most unsatisfactory. Not to put too fine a point on it, you sounded as though you were lying some of the time, the unfortunate butler, one of the worst liars I have ever come across, sounded as though he was lying almost all of the time.’
Powerscourt paused. The doctor was silent, staring at his fire. A couple of blackbirds were singing lustily in the fruit trees outside. Maybe even the birds, Powerscourt said to himself, had to learn new tunes for the celebrations of the thousandth anniversary of Compton Minster as a site of Christian worship.
‘There was little I could do about the lack of truthful information, short of digging the body out of the grave. And then there were other murders which took my attention. But now the situation is different.’
Powerscourt took out the papers relating to the exhumation order and placed them carefully on the table between them.