Death of a Chancellor

25

Lord Francis Powerscourt was pacing up and down in front of Anne Herbert’s cottage. Inside the Herbert household the Chief Constable was talking to a young canon from Exeter called Gill who had been an unobtrusive witness to the morning’s events. Chief Inspector Yates and his men, accompanied by a section of Colonel Wheeler’s horse, were ensuring the safe dispersal of all the visitors to their trains. Patrick Butler had departed to his office to write up his notes while they were still fresh in his mind. Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy were indoors, discussing the Bishop’s sermon.

Powerscourt thought of the murder that had brought him to Compton in the first place, John Eustace, one of England’s richest men, despatched in his own bed. He thought of Arthur Rudd, roasted after his death on the spit in the kitchen of Vicars Hall, the flesh falling off the cremated body. He thought of Edward Gillespie, hung drawn and quartered, sections of his frame dumped all across the surrounding countryside. He wondered again about the murderer. The Dean with those organizational skills? The Archdeacon, longest known convert to Catholicism, with his secret visits to celebrate Mass at Melbury Clinton? The Bishop himself, so secure and comfortable that morning in his new role? The Dean's monosyllabic servant, strong enough to tip that pile of masonry over Powerscourt in the minutes before the cathedral closed? The mysterious Italian from Civitas Dei, Father Barberi, companion of the Archdeacon? Five of them, he thought, like the Five Wounds of Christ. Then it struck him. There might just be a way to bring the matter to a conclusion. It would be risky, it would be dangerous, there could be yet another death in Compton. He rushed inside to fetch Canon Gill. As the Bishop had said, Time is short.

The two men walked along the path that led to the west front. The statues were still there in their niches, staring past the sinners below them towards John Henry Newman’s long eternity. Powerscourt did most of the talking. Canon Gill was in his early thirties, clean shaven with a distant look in his soft brown eyes.

‘I think it could be done,’ the Canon said at last. ‘It wouldn’t be the real thing, of course, but then that wouldn’t matter for your purposes. And I would need another Anglican priest. But I’m sure we could rustle up one of those from a neighbouring parish.’

‘You do realize, Canon,’ Powerscourt was very emphatic at this point, ‘that it could be very dangerous. It could even prove fatal for somebody if we’re not careful.’

The Canon smiled. ‘Of course I realize that, Lord Powerscourt. But in my profession we are not meant to take any account of such things.’

‘Forgive me if I ask this question, Canon. Do you have a wife and children? You do realize that you could leave them without a husband and father if things go wrong?’

‘I believe, Lord Powerscourt, that you too have a wife and children. Shall we return and confer with the Chief Constable?’

Johnny Fitzgerald looked very closely at his friend as he came back into the room. ‘I know that look, Francis,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I don’t think you’ve been discussing the finer points of Reformation theology out there. I think you’ve been concocting some scheme or other.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘I have indeed. Lucy, Chief Constable, Johnny Anne, Canon Gill from Exeter, let me put forward a plan that might get us out of some of our difficulties.’

He removed a one-legged teddy bear, property and victim of one of Anne Herbert’s children, from the corner of a chair and sat down. ‘In all the excitement of the past few days, I have not lost sight of one thing. I am here to investigate a murder, not to participate in any religious wars. I want to see if you agree with my hypothesis about this murderer.’

He paused and accepted a cup of tea. ‘We presume that he has killed to ensure that the service earlier today went ahead. His three victims were all slaughtered because in one way or another they threatened to expose the plans to make Compton a Catholic cathedral once again. I have been extremely concerned in the days of Holy Week that any possible threat to his plan would make him kill again.’

Lady Lucy was watching her husband’s hands which were twisting round each other as he spoke. The Chief Constable was looking closely at Powerscourt’s face. Johnny was watching Canon Gill from Exeter who was looking something up in the appendix to a very small and very battered Book of Common Prayer.

‘Now,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘you might think that the murderer will be able to rest on his laurels, as it were. His mission has been successful. His work is done. But what do you think would happen if there was a sudden reversal in the position of the cathedral?’

‘What do you mean, Powerscourt?’ said the Chief Constable.

‘My plan is very simple. We set a trap to catch the murderer. The cathedral should be reconsecrated to the Anglican faith at the earliest possible opportunity, tomorrow if it is not feasible today. The murderer will have to try to stop that, by fair means or foul, since it would mean all his efforts had been in vain.’

‘But,’ the Chief Constable interrupted again, ‘the murderer is surely under house arrest. How is he going to stop it?’

Johnny Fitzgerald had seen Powerscourt carrying out a similar manoeuvre in a murder case in Simla. ‘I presume, Francis,’ he said, ‘that you are going to suggest that word is put about to all those under house arrest that the cathedral is going to be rededicated at a particular time. Discreetly, of course. But the gossip must be swirling round all those houses like wildfire. Then you would flush him out.’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Absolutely right, Johnny. Your men, Chief Constable, would have to relax their guard at the appointed time. The murderer or murderers would have to be allowed to escape from their confinement to go to the cathedral. Johnny and I would be hiding inside. After ten or fifteen minutes from the start of the service your men and Colonel Wheeler’s horse would surround every known exit from the building. We wait for the murderer to make his move. Then we pounce. Then this terrible affair might be at an end.’

The Chief Constable looked apprehensive. ‘Could you do it?’ he asked Canon Gill. ‘Rededicate the cathedral, I mean?’

Canon Gill looked up from his prayer book. His voice was very soft. Outside they could hear the local children playing on the Green. ‘The answer is No and Yes,’ he said. ‘No in the sense that I must confess I do not know the precise form of service to be used in these circumstances. But I am not sure that matters. I just need another Anglican priest to assist me. We can cobble together some form of service that might not be entirely correct but would be sufficient to convince the murderer. We could quote from the Act of Supremacy that you invoked earlier, Chief Constable. We could read the Thirty-Nine Articles. I’m sure I could make it pretty convincing.’

Lady Lucy intervened for the first time. ‘Wouldn’t the murderer know that it was the wrong form of service? If he’s been pretending to be an Anglican all these years wouldn’t he realize that this wasn’t the proper way to do it? And therefore that the re-dedication would be invalid and the cathedral still be a Catholic one? So he wouldn’t have to stop it.’

‘What you say is entirely plausible, Lady Powerscourt,’ Canon Gill bowed his head slightly in her direction as he spoke, ‘but I don’t think it’s going to be like that. These gentlemen now under house arrest know all about how to rededicate the cathedral to Rome. But I don’t think they will have thought for a second about the traffic the other way, if you see what I mean. You could spend your whole life in the Church of England, you could end up as Archbishop of Canterbury, without knowing what to do in these circumstances. Nobody’s been here since the Reformation.’

Powerscourt turned to the Chief Constable. ‘It is for you to decide, sir. You and Colonel Wheeler would have to make the plan work.’

‘Is it dangerous, Powerscourt?’

‘Yes, I think it could be. We have to assume that the murderer would want to stop the service. And that he might try to kill those taking part. I have discussed this aspect with Canon Gill. He is willing to proceed.’

The Chief Constable stared out of the window. A couple of the Compton Horse could be seen marching up and down on sentry duty outside the Dean’s house.

‘Dammit, Powerscourt,’ he said at last, ‘let’s try it. These murders have been an intolerable strain on the citizens of Compton and on the morale of my force. What time would you like the curtain to go up?’

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘I feel that the service to rededicate the cathedral should commence at eleven o’clock sharp.’

Easter Monday dawned bright and sunny in the little city of Compton. The daffodils were waving brightly behind the minster. Some of the trees around the Close were in bloom, blossom of white and pink adorning the green of the grass. At eleven o’clock precisely a small procession of four men in white surplices entered the cathedral by the west door, Canon Gill in the lead with Richard Hooper, a young curate from the neighbouring village of Frensham, at his side. The other two were several paces behind. The air in the building was musty, faint whiffs that might have been incense or perfume still lurking in the atmosphere. The hundreds of candles that had enlightened the proceedings the day before were all burnt out, wax lying about on the bodies of the dead interred beneath the floor. The chairs in the nave had not been put straight, resting in exactly the places the congregation had left them as they departed. There was no choir. Canon Gill led them to a large table, covered with a white cloth and a couple of silver candlesticks, placed across the great transept at the top of the nave. He began by reading the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the Collect for the Day.

‘Almighty God, who through thy only begotten son Jesus Christ hast overcome death and opened up unto us the gate of everlasting life…’

One of the white surplices was behind the table, facing the high altar beyond the empty choir stalls, eyes flickering from side to side. The other was on the opposite side, scouring the space towards the door, scanning the triforium and the clerestory, the upper levels above the nave. Both men kept their hands by their sides.

Canon Gill had moved on to the Thirty-Nine Articles, the defining statement of Anglican belief. He and Richard Hooper were reading them alternately. By twenty past eleven Hooper had reached the end of Article Number Twenty-One on the Authority of General Councils. Outside all the doors and passages leading into the cathedral were watched or guarded by Chief Inspector Yates’s policemen and Colonel Wheeler’s horse. The Chief Constable had decided that the murderer must be inside by now, if he was going to make his move. Patrick Butler, notebook in hand, was just behind the Chief Constable. Anne Herbert and Lady Lucy were staring at the cathedral from the front garden of the Herbert cottage. Along the roads that lined the Close cavalry in red uniforms were guarding the houses of the converts.

‘“Article Number Twenty-Two,”’ said Canon Gill, his soft voice disappearing upwards to fade away in the arches above, ‘“Of Purgatory. The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics,”’ the eyes of the white surplice facing the door were locked on a glint that seemed to be moving along the clerestory, ‘“and also invocation of saints, is a fond thing vainly invented -”’

‘Down!’ shouted Powerscourt. Johnny Fitzgerald in the other surplice hurled himself to the ground. Canon Gill dropped to the floor a fraction of a second before the shot rang out. The bullet hit one of the candlesticks and ricocheted off into a chantry chapel. Canon Gill’s voice continued from underneath the table, ‘“ . . . vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”’

Johnny Fitzgerald fired back. There was a scream from high above. Powerscourt, tearing off his surplice, sprinted towards the little door that led up to the higher levels. Johnny fired again. The Canon continued reading from the ground the article on Ministering in the Congregation. Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to provide covering fire for Johnny as he too shot across the nave. Powerscourt, panting slightly by the door, was wondering about the last time there had been Murder in the Cathedral. Thomas a Becket? Cromwell’s soldiers on the rampage in the Civil War, despatching their foes who had sought sanctuary at the high altar?

Powerscourt pointed upwards. Johnny whispered very quietly, ‘Better be careful when we get near the top of the stairs, Francis. The bloody man could pick us both off as our heads come out.’ Powerscourt wondered who they would find on the next level. Was this the end for the Compton Cathedral murderer? And which one of them was it? He still didn’t know. The stairs curved around a central pillar. The stone was very cold to the touch. There was only room for one person at a time. They paused from time to time to listen for sounds of the murderer on the move. Richard Hooper was speaking of the Sacraments. Powerscourt wondered when the clergy would stop.

They took the stairs at a run. When they reached the floor above, Powerscourt tiptoed up towards the light coming in through the windows. A foot or so from the summit he raised his hand above his head so it was level with the ground. He fired three shots at a different level and in a different direction each time. Another scream rang out. As Powerscourt and Fitzgerald charged into the clerestory they saw a man wrapped in an enormous black cape, leaning through an archway, preparing to fire once more at the Protestant clergy below. He turned when he saw them and limped as fast as he could through the door into the lower tower. He left a trail of small puddles of blood behind him. It was the Dean. They heard his prayers, punctuated with mighty sobs, coming through the door.

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.’

A Protestant response rose out of the nave below from Article Twenty-Eight, Of the Lord’s Supper. ‘“Transubstantiation or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ . . .”’

‘Pray for us now . . .’ from the wounded Catholic above.

‘“. . . but it is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of the Sacrament, and hath given rise to many superstitions,”’ from the Protestant below.

‘. . . and in the hour of our death, Amen.’

‘Dean!’ shouted Powerscourt. ‘Are you badly hurt, man? Give yourself up and the doctors will attend to you!’

‘I don’t want to be taken alive!’ The Dean was weeping with the pain as he spoke.

‘Are you responsible for these murders?’ Powerscourt spoke again. Johnny Fitzgerald was inching his way towards the door, preparing to rush in.

‘I certainly was. They would have spoiled everything, those people. They wouldn’t listen to reason.’

With that the Dean kicked open the door and fired two shots. One caught Powerscourt between the elbow and the shoulder of the left arm. The other hit Johnny in the leg.

They heard the sound of feet clattering up another set of stairs. Powerscourt fired defiantly after the retreating figure.

Johnny looked sadly at his leg. Protestant blood was now flowing freely on the upper levels of Compton Cathedral. ‘Dammit, Francis, one more minute and I could have got the bastard.’ He tore off a section of his surplice and wrapped it round the wound. ‘Are you sure God is on our side, Francis? Is your arm all right?’

‘Mine’s only a scratch, Johnny. Not sure about God. Can you wait here for a while?’

Johnny Fitzgerald winced. ‘Bloody hell, Francis, I’m not going to miss the last minutes of the match. I’ll crawl if I have to.’ With that he inched his way into the lower tower. Powerscourt was peering suspiciously at the stairs.

‘That’s the upper tower above,’ he said. ‘After that it’s the spire.’ The words of the Thirty-Nine Articles were still sounding from the middle of the great transept. Powerscourt thought he heard something about the marriage of bishops, priests and deacons. Surely they must be near the end by now. A gust of fresh air rushed into the lower tower. Powerscourt began to climb the wooden stair. Blood was still flowing from his arm. Very faintly now, they could hear the sobs above them. When Powerscourt charged into the upper tower it was empty. A door was open and the bright blue sky of Compton’s Easter Monday was visible outside. He heard Johnny behind him, coming up the stairs backwards, swearing as he raised himself up step by step.

‘Dean!’ Powerscourt shouted into the open air. He wasn’t sure if the man had jumped down or begun to climb the spire on the series of rungs and brackets that marked the way to the top. ‘Why did you do it?’

Powerscourt poked his head out of the door. He doubted if the Dean would be in a fit state to fire down at him and hold on at the same time.

‘I’ve waited and planned and organized for years for yesterday! Finest day of my life! ‘Powerscourt saw that the weathered grey of the stone was flecked with the Dean’s blood. The Dean was about twenty feet above him, making his way agonizingly slowly upwards.

Powerscourt saw that blood was flowing fast from a great wound in his side.

‘I’ve left you a letter, Powerscourt. I wasn’t sure today was going to go well.’ The Dean began speaking to the spire in front of him, then turned to look down at Powerscourt. Powerscourt saw that the Dean’s face was white, turning grey. Down below a collection of tiny dots in uniform were staring upwards at the Dean’s last moments.

‘Come back! For God’s sake, man, come back!’ Powerscourt yelled at him. ‘You can still come down the same way you went up! I could come and get you with a rope, if that would help!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had raised himself into a sitting position against the wall. ‘I’ve heard of the Good Samaritan but this is ridiculous. Bloody man must weigh fifteen stone at least. He’d pull you both down to your deaths for sure. Don’t think Lucy and the children would approve.’

Powerscourt looked at the rope he had found in a corner of the upper tower and put it down again.

‘Dean!’ he shouted once more. ‘Turn back, man! For God’s sake, turn back! You’ll get yourself killed!’ He looked up the face of the spire. The Dean was now over halfway to the top, moving ever more slowly. Powerscourt suddenly remembered that there was a statue of the Virgin at the top, next to the risen Christ. Another prayer began.

‘Anima Christi, sanctifica me, Soul of Christ be my sanctification.’

Powerscourt heard the sound of footsteps rushing up the stairway to the clerestory beneath him.

‘Body of Christ, be my salvation.’

Powerscourt leant out of the door as far as he dared and shouted up into the sky, ‘Come back, man! Come back!’

‘Blood of Christ, fill all my veins, water from Christ’s side, wash out my stains.’

In the nave the voices of Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had fallen silent. The words of a Catholic prayer, the Anima Christi, Soul of Christ, punctuated with great groans, filled the air.

‘Passion of Christ, my comfort be. O good Jesus listen to me.’

Powerscourt saw that the man had only another fifteen rungs to go before he reached the top. Somehow, in spite of the terrible deaths, he hoped that the Dean would reach the pinnacle. Then the investigator in him fired one more question up into the morning sky.

‘Dean,’ he shouted. ‘Did you act entirely alone?’ It was, he realized, an absurd question to put to somebody two hundred and fifty feet above the ground, blood pouring from his wounds, desperate to reach the statue of the Virgin before he died.

‘Yes. Alone.’ The voice was little more than a groan now. The prayer went on.

‘In thy wounds I fain would hide. Ne’er to be parted from thy side.’

Chief Inspector Yates, panting heavily, was inspecting Johnny’s wound. One of the other policemen tried to step out of the window on to the spire. Powerscourt pushed him back.

‘Guard me when my life shall fail me. Bid me come to thee above.’

The Dean was but a few rungs from the top now, way above Powerscourt and the others in the upper tower. Then something seemed to happen to his lower leg. He looked as though he might fall. Just in time he reached aloft and pulled himself up, holding on to the feet of the Virgin. Then his other arm reached her waist.

‘With all thy saints to sing thy love. World without end. Amen.’

It was hard to tell the precise sequence of events at this point. The statue, designed to withstand the storms and gales of centuries, was not designed to take the weight of a fifteen-stone man holding on to it for dear life. Very slowly the Virgin began to lean. Then she leant a little further. Then she fell, breaking into several pieces on the cathedral roof before tumbling to the ground. The Dean seemed to hang suspended at the top of the spire. Then he too fell, a last Hail Mary following his passage back to earth, bouncing off the side of the spire, rolling over the parapet of the upper tower, crashing on to the roof of the east transept, then a final sickening crunch of flesh and bones as he landed on the ground twenty paces from the Chief Constable. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot, Dean of Compton Cathedral, was dead before he touched the ground. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Two burly policemen were carrying Johnny Fitzgerald down to earth. Powerscourt sprinted along the clerestory and down the stairs. The cathedral dedicated to the Virgin was empty. Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had departed. A dark blue police cloak had been placed over the body of the Dean where he had fallen. Dr Williams, summoned to attend the morning’s events by the Chief Constable, had made a cursory inspection.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said to Powerscourt and the Chief Constable. ‘Let’s pray that he’s the last.’

‘He is,’ said Powerscourt quietly, staring sadly at the dark blue cape that covered the battered body of the Dean. ‘It’s all over now.’

The Dean’s letter was three pages long. Powerscourt found it on the study desk in the Deanery, addressed to himself, written in a flowing copperplate. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot spoke of his growing disillusion with the Anglican Church, a disillusion that gradually turned into hatred. He said it was a Church that had turned its back on belief in favour of comfort, that had sacrificed the difficult truths of the Christian faith in favour of a quiet life in the countryside and the pomp and privilege of its bishops in the worldly surroundings of the House of Lords. Its buildings were in the wrong place, in the countryside rather than in the cities, where a national Church should be based with the vast numbers of the urban poor rather than in the upholstered comfort of parsonage and rectory. Soon, the Dean continued, the Anglican Church would be completely filled with the wrong sort of worshippers, devotees of the numinous cadences of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the soaring beauty of the anthems of Purcell and Byrd. But a Church was not meant to be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the English language or the anthems of centuries past. It should be rooted in the present, daily confronting the problems of God’s people, preaching Christ’s Gospel where it was most needed. It was in his own former parish in the slums of London’s docks that his Anglican faith had finally ebbed away with the tides. So great was the personal crisis that his doctors ordered him to take a quieter position in Compton. Nine years ago the Dean had joined the Bishop in the Catholic faith. The Bishop, with a more acute sense of history than his, had first suggested the reconsecration of the minster to the true faith on the Easter Sunday of its thousandth anniversary. The Dean had organized it, the slow process of secret recruitment, the appointment of the Archdeacon to carry out the negotiations with Rome. Reluctantly they had sanctioned his mission to Melbury Clinton, realizing that it was a terrible risk, but believing him when he said he could not carry on out without the consolation of regular celebration of the Mass. All three had been members of Civitas Dei for the past seven years. The two missing vicars choral had found out about the Archdeacon at Melbury Clinton. The Dean had packed them off to a new life in Canada with six months’ wages in their pockets.

Powerscourt had hoped for more information about Civitas Dei, but suspected that Talbot was being faithful to its principles of secrecy to the last.

Single human lives, the Dean went on, had little meaning to him in comparison with the glory of the enterprise and the reclamation for the Catholic Church of a cathedral that had been stolen from it at the Reformation. He had, throughout, acted entirely alone. He hoped and prayed that the events of Saturday and Sunday would mark the sounding of the tocsin, a trumpet call that would signal the beginnings of the return of the people of England to the Holy and Apostolic Church, that the lives of the isles would once more be carried out to the slow rhythm of the Church’s calendar and the central mystery of the Mass.

John Eustace had changed his mind about making the journey to Rome. So had Arthur Rudd, who had referred extensively to his doubts in the diaries he had kept which had perished with him in the flames. Edward Gillespie had been overheard telling a colleague that he proposed to tell Powerscourt in person all about the conspiracy. He had, the Dean went on, deliberately echoed the deaths in Compton at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a tribute, a memorial to those faithful Catholics who had given their lives for the true religion in 1539 and 1540. He reminded Powerscourt that as a gesture to a more squeamish age he had killed all his victims before the burning and the disembowelment. He had no regrets, for he was the servant of a higher Truth, the pupil of a greater authority, the handmaiden of the only true faith.

‘Let me conclude, Powerscourt,’ the Dean’s letter ended, ‘with the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay which have been an inspiration to me for years: “The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the furthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.”’

Powerscourt read the letter twice. Then he folded it up and put it into his suit pocket. He felt numb before the Dean’s diatribe, sad that his life had ended in such a terrible fashion. Then he thought of the families of John Eustace and Arthur Rudd and Edward Gillespie and grew suddenly very angry that one man could think he had the right to play God, to take away human lives, to leave behind broken families who would mourn for years. Not only mad, he said to himself, but bad. He wondered about the people the Dean had betrayed, the baptized he christened in one faith while believing in another, the young couples he had married in his deception, the funerals and burials of those who believed they were under the care of a Protestant priest and going to a Protestant destination.

Two days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were making their way once again across the Cathedral Green. The sun was still shining but there was a bitter wind. They were going to say their farewells to the minster at Evensong. They would both be back, in a month’s time, for the wedding of Patrick Butler and Anne Herbert. Patrick had threatened to expose him in the pages of the Mercury if they failed to turn up.

Johnny Fitzgerald was recovering fast in the upstairs room of Anne Herbert’s cottage, entertaining her children with tales of four-eyed giants who lived in caves in the Punjab and six-legged horses who galloped at incredible speed across the veldt in South Africa. The Bishop of Exeter had arrived to take charge of the ecclesiastical proceedings. The Catholic Bishop from Rome and his party were sent back to the eternal city, escorted by the police as far as the Dover boat. The Bishop and the other members of the Chapter who had converted were to be dispersed around the Catholic churches of England and Wales. The Chief Constable was preparing a report for His Majesty’s law officers on the strange events at Compton. Patrick Butler had scarcely been seen since the service of dedication, working around the clock on a special edition of his paper. Powerscourt had written again to Mrs Augusta Cockburn, naming her brother’s murderer and telling her that he had been brought to a kind of justice. There would, he said, be no trial with its attendant publicity. He passed on the opinion of Mr Drake, the Compton solicitor, that it was unlikely that the legal wrangling about the will would be complete before Christmas. In Drake’s view maybe even next Easter would be too soon.

‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord,’ Canon Gill and Richard Hooper were taking the service, spoken not sung in the absence of the choir, ‘and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.’ The two old ladies who had attended all the earlier services were back in position. Powerscourt looked at Lady Lucy, now fully recovered from her ordeal in the crypt. Tonight, over dinner at Fairfield Park, he was going to propose an expedition to St Petersburg, a place as remote from Compton as he could imagine. In the morning they were to return to London.

Richard Hooper was reading the Nunc Dimittis. ‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word.’ His clear tenor voice rang out across the wooden angels and the wooden instrumentalists that adorned the choir stalls. Powerscourt was drawn once more to the names on the back. Fordington and Writhington. Grantham Borealis. Alton Australis. Yetminster Secunda.

‘May the Lord bless you and keep you.’ Canon Gill’s soft voice caressed the great cathedral as he spoke the closing prayer. ‘May the Lord make the light of his countenance shine upon you and be gracious unto you and give you his peace.’

Hurstbourne and Burbage. Minor Pars Altaris. Netherbury in Terra. Shipton in Ecclesia.

‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

Perhaps they’re a message, Powerscourt thought, a message from the distant past into the unknowable future, inscribed here on the wood of centuries. Beminster Secunda. Lyme and Halstock. Wilsford and Woolford.

And their names liveth for evermore.

Winterbourne Earle. Gillingham Minor. Chardstock. Teynton Regis. Bishopstone.