Death Called to the Bar

3

Over the next two days Powerscourt went through an intensive course in the professional life of Alexander Dauntsey. He made appointments to see everybody in his chambers and one or two more besides. He became a familiar figure to the porters as he flitted in and out of Queen’s Inn, shuffling the new information in his mind. From the Head of Chambers, a charming bencher called Maxwell Kirk, he learnt principally about Dauntsey as a member of chambers. ‘You’ve been in the Army, Lord Powerscourt, I can tell from the way you walk. Well, you know how some fellows fit very naturally into the military life, and some don’t. They never seem to get the hang of it at all. Killed first in battle, the ones that don’t fit in, I noticed. Nobody else prepared to put themselves out for them. Well, Dauntsey was one of those who fitted in. He belonged here as if he’d been born to it. I invited him to join us here seven years ago and I’ve never regretted it for a second.’

‘What was he like as a lawyer?’ Powerscourt asked, suspecting that he would not be told the whole truth. There was a slight pause as if Kirk wasn’t sure how much to give away.

‘I’m going to use a rather strange analogy, if I may, Lord Powerscourt. When I was at school I was very keen on cricket, still am when I can find the time. We had a chap there in the year above me called Morrison. On his day you would have said he was bound to play for England. He had beautiful style – a cover drive direct from heaven – he could cope with any kind of bowling, he could bat on any kind of wicket. People said he was bound to take the field for England later on. Only thing was, he was erratic, poor chap. Some days he could hardly hit the ball and certainly couldn’t score any runs. It was strange, very strange. Dauntsey was a bit like that.

Brilliant some of the time, absolutely brilliant, solicitors queuing up to instruct him, triumphs in court. Next day listless, just about able to get the words out, hopeless. Instructing solicitors tearing their hair out. Clerk to chambers in despair. It didn’t happen very often, mind you, maybe once in ten or twelve outings before the judges, but significant none the less.’

‘Did this mean that his income went down?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Fewer people prepared to employ him?’

‘I suppose it did,’ said Maxwell Kirk slowly, staring out of his window as if Dauntsey’s ghost might be hovering above the Thames. ‘I suppose he never made as much money as he could have done. But some of the solicitors were very loyal. They kept coming back.’

‘Was it possible,’ said Powerscourt, suspecting that Kirk would not know enough about Dauntsey’s private life to answer his question, ‘to work out why he lost his talent, as it were? Did it happen when he was depressed? Had he been drinking too much beforehand, anything like that?’

‘You’re not the first person to wonder about that. Our clerk here, the chap before the present one, used to make a note of Dauntsey’s moods every day. And, of course, he had records of Dauntsey’s cases and when he had his off days. Our clerk had his very own system of notation. C was cheerful. H was happy. VH was very happy. N was neutral, meant he couldn’t decide one way or the other. S was sad, B was black and VB was very black. He kept this going for a whole year. Then on New Year’s Eve, so he told me, God knows what his family must have made of this, he tried to match up the two lots of information. He could find absolutely no correlation between the two. He could be very black for three days in a row but very brilliant in court. He could be very happy first thing in the morning and completely tongue-tied at the Old Bailey in the afternoon. It was extraordinary.’

‘Did he,’ Powerscourt always kept this question till the end, ‘have any problems with money or women?’

‘If he did,’ Kirk replied, ‘he wouldn’t be telling me, unless he was in desperate trouble. I don’t believe he was in any money trouble. That place he had in Kent cost a lot to keep up, but in a good year he was making a very fine living here. As for the women, I simply don’t know. I should have said that he was a man who lived his life in tight little compartments, if you know what I mean. Right hand barely aware what the left hand was doing. He could have been involved with women – I think they found him attractive – but as to facts I haven’t a clue.’

As he wandered down the stairs Powerscourt wondered if Kirk would have told him anything about Dauntsey’s affairs with women if he had known about them. ‘Actually, Lord Powerscourt, he was a most frightful womanizer, he went through them at the rate of one every three months. . .’ No, he couldn’t imagine Kirk saying that. In fact Powerscourt couldn’t think of anyone he had talked to so far who would have told him if Dauntsey was having affairs. They closed ranks, these lawyers, and only told the world what they felt the world should hear. Truth was rationed in the lawyers’ chambers; it was potentially too dangerous to be let loose.

Of the great battle with Porchester Newton, however, he was told a great deal. The benchers in Queen’s Inn were elected, he learned, and at the last vacancy a month or so before Dauntsey’s death there had been a fierce struggle between the two men. The benchers, in effect, were the governing body of the Inn. Like the other Inns of Court Queen’s demanded a substantial payment from new benchers. But unlike the others Queen’s also demanded that every bencher remember the Inn in his will, though the precise percentage of the total estate was not known. This double collection made the little Inn one of the richest places in London, with almost all the money earmarked for scholarships and bursaries for students from humble backgrounds. The largest Inns of Court had forty or even fifty benchers on their books. Queen’s had only eight. And Powerscourt heard whispers even on his first day about the bitter fight that had preceded Dauntsey’s election as bencher. These affairs, he was told, are not conducted like Parliamentary contests. There are no slates of candidates, no formal speeches. But aspirant benchers give sherry parties so they can shake the hands of voters they might not have met. Discreet dinner parties are held to win over the waverers. Supporters of the rival candidates whisper about the deficiencies of their opponents into the ears of all those who will listen, and there are many who will listen. Right up to the end it seemed as though Dauntsey’s great rival Porchester Newton was going to win. Nobody was prepared to say what rumour Dauntsey’s people had spread in the last twenty-four hours before the voting, but it worked. The ballot was secret but it was widely known that Dauntsey had a comfortable victory. Newton had not spoken to him since. Newton, Powerscourt realized, would make a formidable enemy. He was the opposite of Dauntsey in almost every way. Dauntsey had a soaring imagination which enabled him on occasion to see motives that were apparent to nobody else. Newton was a solid performer, plodding through his cases with little sparkle. Dauntsey was quick, mercurial. Newton was slow, stolid, some even ventured that he was stupid. Powerscourt’s only doubt about Newton as a possible murderer was the murder weapon. Certainly there was motive. Some of the insults traded during the vicious election campaign would have produced a duel in Temple Gardens in years gone by. Powerscourt wasn’t sure he could see Newton as a poisoner until he heard that he had worked in India in his youth. You could learn enough about poisons there, as Powerscourt well knew, to last you a lifetime.

Then there was Edward, the slim silent young man who did most of Dauntsey’s devilling, researching and preparing cases and submissions to the legal authorities. Edward did have a surname, but nobody except Edward seemed able to remember what it was. Everybody wondered why he had joined the profession of barrister for he had one overwhelming defect for his chosen calling, a defect that should have told him that, of all professions, this was the last one he should aspire to. Edward watchers, and there were plenty of people fascinated by him, said it was like a man who fainted at the sight of blood trying to become a surgeon or an atheist signing up for the priesthood, although the cynics pointed out that this might be an ideal quality for a career in the modern Church of England and that the atheist would probably end up a bishop at the least, if not Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward was painfully, incurably, woefully shy. The porters referred to him behind his back as Edward the Silent. He could manage to get through whole days without speaking. He could attend case conferences and not say a word. At dinners in Hall he would nod unhappily to his neighbours. Once, when he had really picked up his courage and asked his neighbour to pass the potatoes, a huge cheer had gone up from the company and Edward had fled the Hall, almost weeping with embarrassment. But according to the clerk, Dauntsey said that Edward was the finest deviller he had ever come across, that he had a very sophisticated understanding of the workings of the law in general and of judges in particular. He kept a form book on judges, the clerk told Powerscourt, so he could know how their particular temperaments might be affected by the new cases in front of them and the demeanour of the barristers arguing them.

Powerscourt planned his assault on Edward’s silence like a military operation. For a start he decided to remove Edward from his normal routine and transport him a mile or so across town to the drawing room in Manchester Square for afternoon tea. Lady Lucy, fresh and sustained by a triumph over packing cases and disorder, was on parade to inquire about Edward’s family. Olivia had been pressed into service, instructed to do whatever she could to make the young man feel at home. Even one of the twins was paraded through the drawing room to be admired. It was almost impossible, even in England, Powerscourt felt, for babies to be put on display without those present feeling they had to pass a comment, whether on their looks or their intelligence or their resemblance to more senior members of their families. The twin did not speak but Edward did on this occasion, observing that the infant looked very intelligent.

When the tea campaign was complete, Edward having displayed a considerable appetite for muffins, the family departed, leaving Powerscourt and the young man alone. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Edward. I’d be very grateful if we could have a conversation, in confidence of course, about Mr Dauntsey,’ Powerscourt began. ‘I wonder if you could tell me about his last case.’

There was a pause. For a second Powerscourt wondered if his entire strategy had failed, if the reasonable amount of speech Edward had managed during tea was now going to be replaced with silence once again. Then he was relieved. Perhaps Edward had been collecting his thoughts. Maybe the muffins had done their work.

‘Last case, murder, sir. At the Old Bailey. Eight days. Mr Justice Fairfax.’ Powerscourt thought Edward seemed to have a bias against verbs.

‘Mr Dauntsey appearing for the prosecution, sir. Quite rare these last years. More often retained for the defence. Very horrible case, sir. Young woman battered to death on a beach in Great Yarmouth. Former lover seen in the town on the day of the murder. Former lover had grudge against the victim. Defence admitted the man was in the town but denied that he killed her, sir.’

Verbs, Powerscourt noted, were beginning to make an appearance.

‘That judge didn’t like Mr Dauntsey for some reason, sir. He had quite a difficult time of it. But he won in the end. Jury out for only twenty minutes. Judge puts his black cap on and the defendant is probably gone by now, sir.’

‘Was Mr Dauntsey pleased with the verdict, Edward?’

‘Oddly enough, no, he wasn’t, sir. I think he thought the man was innocent. He never said anything to me but something about his manner gave me that impression, sir. I could be wrong.’

‘What was the defendant’s name, Edward? Can you remember where he came from?’

‘Moorhouse, sir. James Henry Moorhouse, 15 Hornsey Lane, London.’

Powerscourt wondered briefly if Edward knew the shoe and hat size as well.

‘Large family up there in Hornsey Lane, Edward?’

There was a brief pause as if some piece of machinery in Edward’s brain had got stuck. Then it clicked into place.

‘Four elder brothers, two younger sisters, sir.’

‘Thank you. And what about the next case, Edward?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Not another murder, I hope?’

‘No, sir, the next case would have been a huge one, sir. Mr Dauntsey was going to be Number Two for the prosecution, sir, with Mr Stewart, another one of our benchers, leading. They used to work together a lot in the old days, sir. It’s a fraud trial, sir. You remember that man called Puncknowle, Lord Powerscourt? He started up a whole lot of companies and the public subscribed by the tens of thousands. Companies paid good dividends, close on ten per cent most years, so more people subscribed. Only problem was the companies lost money and the dividends of the old ones were paid for by the new investors in the new companies. That’s why Puncknowle had so many companies, sir, he needed the new money to pay the dividends on the old ones.’

‘Didn’t he run away to America, this fellow, and have to be brought home again?’

‘He did, sir,’ said Edward, ‘and this is one of the most complicated cases I’ve ever seen. The opening speeches are going to last all day or even longer, sir.’

‘Tell me, Edward, you must have known Mr Dauntsey as well as anybody in the months before he died, devilling for him in these complicated cases. Was there anything unusual in him? Did anything change after he became a bencher, for example?’

Edward looked at Powerscourt carefully. Normal speech seemed to have been returned. Powerscourt felt sure Lady Lucy would put the transformation down to feminine company and the ease and security that came from being in a proper home rather than cooped up with a whole lot of men all the time. Edward took his time before he answered.

‘All the other gentlemen have asked me that, sir. Mr Somerville, Mr Cadogan, Mr Kirk, that police inspector. I didn’t tell them anything at all.’

There was another pause. ‘It was after his election as a bencher, sir. Something changed after that. Not immediately but two, maybe three weeks or so later, I should say, sir. Mr Dauntsey was very cross about something. I never knew what it was. One afternoon I came into his room when he wasn’t expecting me. I think he assumed I was in the library. He was studying some figures on a pad in front of him. He looked at me, Mr Dauntsey, sir, almost in despair. “It’s not right, Edward,” he said, “it’s just not right.” He sort of stared at the wall for a moment or two, sir, and then he put away his pad. He never referred to it again, whatever it was, not to me anyway, sir.’

Powerscourt saw Edward out into the evening air of Manchester Square. Lady Lucy came to say goodbye and to tell Edward he could come to tea whenever he liked, he would be most welcome. As Edward passed the Wallace Collection on his way home, lights blazing from the upper floors, Powerscourt wished he had asked just one more question. He should have sought information on any extramarital females in Mr Dauntsey’s life. He felt sure Edward would have had their names and addresses.

But for Edward afternoon tea had been an epiphany, a revelation. He tried to remember the last time he had been able to speak so freely and knew it was a long long time ago. Now perhaps he would be able to do what he most wanted to do in the world, speak to Sarah Henderson. Sarah had many admirers in Queen’s Inn and the Maxwell Kirk chambers, but few as devoted as Edward. He knew the softer tread of her shoes on the staircase as she went up to her attic quarters, he would watch her swinging walk as she made her way across the courts. Three times he had made up his mind to speak to her, three times he had promised himself that this time he would not fail. But he did. Until today he had been bound to fail. But now, with the confidence engendered by Powerscourt tea and Powerscourt muffins, now he would try once more.

Mrs Bertha Henderson had been in a state of growing excitement all afternoon. She managed, with great difficulty and considerable pain, to make a small cake. The effort involved in beating the mixture to the proper consistency exhausted her. As the cheap clock on her little mantelpiece moved on towards early evening she consulted it more and more often. Half past four. Quarter to five. Mrs Henderson was doing mental arithmetic in her head. Ten minutes to the station in Kent, forty-five minutes or so to Victoria, half an hour, maybe less, to their own little station in Acton, five minutes’ walk and Sarah would be home. Five o’clock passed and half past. Mrs Henderson was torn now between excitement and worry. Had anything happened to the trains? Had there been some delay at Victoria, always notorious for inefficiency at peak hours? Had anything happened to Sarah? For today was the day of Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and her Sarah, along with all the members of his chambers and the benchers of the Inn, had gone down to see him off. And, in Mrs Henderson’s excited imagination, not only would she hear the details of that poor Mr Dauntsey’s funeral and burial, but she should receive some intelligence about the treasures of Calne, the fabulous house where the Dauntseys had lived since time immemorial. Mrs Henderson had looked the family up once in the Dictionary of National Biography in the big reference library in Hammersmith but there were so many entries for so many different branches of the family that she had given up, overwhelmed by the available knowledge. One or two Lord Chancellors, back in the seventeenth century, she remembered, a Dauntsey who became a key figure at the Restoration Court of Charles the Second, a libertine involved in the foundation of the Hellfire Club.

From her vantage point in the window Mrs Henderson could see the local residents making their way home. It was ten to six before she finally caught sight of Sarah, wearing her new black coat and hat, looking rather tired, Mrs Henderson thought, as she let herself in and sat down by the fire.

‘I’ll just put the kettle on,’ Mrs Henderson sang, as she made her way to the kitchen. ‘I’ve made a cake. I’ll bring it in with the tea. It’s only a little cake.’

‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ said Sarah, wondering how much effort must have gone into that fairly simple domestic activity. She felt that her mother might be disappointed with her tales of the day. She suspected that her mother had been building up her hopes for days, looking forward to tales of magnificent drawing rooms and ornate long galleries, with possibly – Sarah felt her mother was perfectly capable of this – some young scion of the Dauntsey clan, of remarkable beauty and even more remarkable wealth, on hand to fall in love with her daughter and carry her off to marriage and glory, a sort of Kentish equivalent of Mr Darcy, as Sarah had put it to herself on the train.

‘Well then,’ said her mother, setting the tray with the tea and cake on the table between them in front of the fire, ‘how was your day, my dear?’

Sarah took a large gulp of her tea. ‘It was all rather tiring, mama,’ she began. ‘Just before midday the carriages came to take us to the station. Mr Kirk, he’s the Head of Chambers as you know, had arranged all that.’

‘I hope you didn’t have to pay for that, dear,’ said Mrs Henderson, concerned lest her daughter’s inadequate wages should be frittered away on the cost of carriages.

‘No, no, Mr Kirk saw to all of that, mama.’

‘Who did you sit next to?’ said her mother eagerly. It was this hunger for every detail that Sarah found irritating, dearly though she loved her mother.

‘I sat next to Mr Kirk, actually,’ said Sarah, helping herself to a slice of cake.

‘Next to the Head of Chambers himself,’ said Mrs Henderson proudly. ‘Remind me, dear, is he married, Mr Kirk?’

‘He is, mother, he has four children and he is very old, he must be nearly fifty.’ That, Sarah felt, should put paid to that particular fantasy.

‘And the train?’ her mother pressed on. ‘Had Queen’s Inn organized a special train to take you all down?’ Mrs Henderson had heard of special trains. She herself had never had the privilege of travelling in one. Now, perhaps, her daughter could remedy the situation. That would be a good piece of information to pass on to Mrs Wiggins next door, always boasting of the progress her son was making in the Metropolitan Railway. As far as Mrs Henderson knew, he sold tickets at Baker Street station.

‘No special, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile. She knew the way her mother’s mind worked but there was one piece of news which, while not having the knock-out punch of a special, did have a certain weight of its own. ‘But Mr Kirk had reserved three first class carriages.’

‘Three first class carriages,’ Mrs Henderson repeated, awe and wonder in her tones. ‘Three.’

‘I was still talking to Mr Kirk, mama, about this big fraud case that’s coming up soon. There’s a great deal of work I’ve got to do over the next few days. In fact I talked to him all the way to Calne.’

‘Do they have a station of their own, the Dauntseys?’ asked Mrs Henderson hopefully. The Dauntseys of Calne, she said to herself. How well it sounded. And her own daughter, borne there in splendour from Victoria station in a first class railway carriage, conversing with the Head of Chambers himself.

‘I think they used to, mama. Somebody told me that they owned a lot of the land used to build the railway. But the station is only ten minutes’ walk from the house.’

‘You didn’t all have to walk on a day like this, Sarah? There was a terrible wind up here at any rate. It could have wrecked people’s hair.’

‘But you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the park, mama,’ said Sarah with a smile, ‘it starts very near the station. Thousands and thousands of acres of it. And deer, lovely little deer, trotting all over it. I was told there are hundreds and hundreds of them. They’ve been there for hundreds of years.’

Mrs Henderson smiled quietly to herself. Thousands of acres and hundreds of deer should be able to flatten anything the Metropolitan Railway and Mrs Wiggins might have to offer.

‘And what was the house like, Sarah? Big, was it?’ Sarah suspected her mother imagined a building three or four times the size of Buckingham Palace.

‘Well, we didn’t see a great deal of it, mama. It’s enormous. They say there’s a room for every day of the year and a staircase for every month.’

Mrs Henderson was overwhelmed by this news. Three hundred and sixty-five rooms? It was scarcely credible. She wondered what they did in the leap years. Perhaps they had a room with open double doors in the middle. In leap years they would just have to close the doors to add on the extra room. But she mustn’t divert herself. More intelligence was coming from Sarah.

‘We went across two great courtyards, mama, one called Brick Court, I think, and the other one Reservoir Court.’

Funny, Mrs Henderson found herself thinking, there was Mr Dauntsey leaving all these courts at his home to go and work in a whole lot of different ones in London.

‘Just inside Reservoir Court there is the Great Hall, mama. That’s where Mr Dauntsey’s coffin was until just before the service when the pall bearers came to take him away. It’s a huge room, with great portraits of previous Dauntseys all over the walls and dark oak panelling everywhere. It’s where the servants used to eat in the seventeenth century when most of the house was built. They had an enormous oak table in there, about the length of our road I would say, where they all used to sit.’

‘How many pall bearers, Sarah?’ asked Mrs Henderson, leaning forward now in her chair, her eyes bright with curiosity.

‘Six, mama. Two gentlemen from chambers, two from the estate and two members of the family. So all parts of Mr Dauntsey’s life were there. They walked very slowly, mama. I remember thinking the coffin must have been heavy because Mr Dauntsey himself can’t have weighed very much. They went out across the two courts and turned right at the main entrance to reach the family chapel. Then there was the most extraordinary thing, I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Sarah paused. Mrs Henderson looked expectant. Sarah looked slightly embarrassed as she went on. ‘It was the deer, mama. It was as if they knew what was going on. A whole lot of them, I don’t know, thirty or forty maybe, came and stood very still about twenty yards from the funeral cortege. As if they were paying their last respects. One of the young barristers said afterwards that he’d never seen a man go to his funeral service with an honour guard of his own four-legged friends.’

‘Did they stay like that for the service?’ asked Mrs Henderson. ‘Were they still there when you all came out again?’

Sarah laughed. ‘No, they weren’t that patient. I looked round just before we went into the service and they were all trotting off. Maybe they thought they had done their duty.’

‘And the service, Sarah? What was that like?’

Sarah was beginning to realize how the victims of the Inquisition must have felt as their interrogators kept on and on with their questions. She helped herself to a large slice of Protestant cake.

‘All the usual stuff about I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ said Sarah with the world-weary resignation of a twenty-year-old attending her second funeral. ‘Mr Kirk read one lesson. Mr Dauntsey’s brother did another. The vicar preached a sermon about how impossible it was to understand God’s purpose. One of the young barristers in the pew behind me was whispering to his friend that it was equally impossible to understand the purpose of the vicar.’

Mrs Henderson shook her head at the flippancy of the young.

‘They buried him next to his father,’ Sarah carried on. ‘Nearly at the top of the hill. You could see most of the estate and the house and the deer and the cricket pitch, a lovely place to end up in, I thought.’

‘Was the church full, Sarah? Fifty mourners? A hundred, would you have said?’

‘More than that, mama, some people had to wait outside the church, it was so packed. Hundred and fifty, maybe more. That young policeman came, which I thought was nice of him. And that man Lord Powerscourt the benchers brought in to investigate Mr Dauntsey’s death. He was there.’

‘And the widow, Sarah? Was she very upset?

‘She looked very beautiful, mama, Mrs Dauntsey. Black suited her. And she had a black veil made of very fine lace, maybe it was a mantilla, which made her look rather mysterious.’

‘I’m not sure people should look mysterious at funerals. I was taught they should look sad.’

‘I was never very close to her, mama. There was one odd thing just when they were lowering the body into the grave. You know how they have four ropes or runners round the thing before they lower it into the ground? Well, Mr Dauntsey’s coffin sort of slipped. It looked for a second as if it might flip right over and fall in upside down. The bearers had a terrible time, almost wrestling with it. There was a sort of collective gasp from the congregation, everybody holding their breath for a moment. Then it was under control again. Just think, mama, how awful it would have been if Mr Dauntsey’s coffin had fallen in the wrong way round or the wrong way up.’

Mrs Henderson looked into the fire. ‘You could say, could you not, that the whole thing was a parable, a metaphor for Mr Dauntsey’s life. He ended up the wrong way round, the wrong way up, slumped into his soup bowl at that feast. You’re not meant to end up murdered, not in this bright new century of ours.’