Death Called to the Bar

16

Powerscourt walked slowly back to Manchester Square. He was still marvelling at the vicious hatred Somerville had directed his way. All of the vitriol seemed to be targeted at him. Chief Inspector Beecham, object of so much venom at the beginning of the investigation, had escaped scot free.

Perhaps a painting or two will calm my brain, he said to himself as he passed the Wallace Collection, more or less opposite his own house in Manchester Square. It was a quarter to five and there was still an hour and a quarter before the Head Porter closed up for the night, his great bunch of keys jangling on his belt as he patrolled right round the building checking that everything was in order. Powerscourt slipped into the Housekeeper’s Room and stared idly at an extraordinary painting by Paul Delaroche showing the State Barge of Cardinal Richelieu on the Rhone. A couple of aristocrats who had conspired to overthrow the mighty Cardinal were being towed in a boat behind, guarded by soldiers with halberds. Richelieu himself was dying at this point but he was still towing his enemies to Lyon for their execution. His barge was luxuriously furnished with red silk drapes and a rich oriental carpet trailed in the water by its side. Delaroche was interested in the reflections in the water, the almost Eastern luxury of his Cardinal. Powerscourt still had lawyers running through his mind, the living and the dead ones he had dealt with earlier that afternoon. He wondered briefly if Richelieu would have been a successful lawyer, Master of the Rolls perhaps, or a hanging judge. He stared briefly at the sister painting on the left which showed Richelieu’s successor Cardinal Mazarin literally on his deathbed, playing cards with his friends and surrounded by intriguing courtiers.

For Powerscourt there was something too rich, too decadent about these men of God flaunting their earthly power. It was time to move on. These two Delaroches were in the Housekeeper’s Room to the left of the main entrance. And on this particular day Powerscourt had his timings wrong. The Collection was going to close at five, not six. The Head Porter had already completed his circuit of the first floor, ushering the last visitors out of the building. And because Powerscourt was on one side of the building, he was not seen by the Head Porter as he began his Royal Progress on the other side, moving the pilgrims on, seeing to the doors and windows. By the time he did reach the Housekeeper’s Room Powerscourt had moved off up the stairs towards his favourite landscape in the Great Gallery, vacated by the Head Porter some ten minutes before. Just as he arrived in front of Rubens’ The Rainbow Landscape he heard a dull thud coming from downstairs. He checked his watch. It was exactly five o’clock. The Collection must have closed an hour earlier than usual today. He set forth for the front door, fingering the gun in his pocket. Ever since he heard the warnings from the underworld as relayed to Johnny Fitzgerald about threats to his life, he had carried it in his pocket every day. Lady Lucy checked with him every time he left the house. By the time he reached the ground floor he thought that he must be the only person left in the building, certainly the only one inside by mistake. At the front door he realized that no amount of manpower was going to let him out. The locks were huge, dark and forbidding in the shadows by the door. Powerscourt remembered that the nightwatchman came early in the evening, seven or eight o’clock. He would have a couple of hours to enjoy the paintings entirely on his own.

He stopped halfway up the stairs. He thought he heard a noise. Somebody with heavy boots was walking along the Great Gallery. And from the pattern of the steps he thought they were coming in his direction. Powerscourt didn’t wait for formal introductions. Something told him that this might be enemy action. His right hand felt once more for the gun in his pocket. Suddenly he remembered being locked in the cathedral with the dead of centuries in his last case in the West Country, when a huge pile of lethal masonry had been poured down, missing him by inches. He tiptoed down the stairs as fast as he could and made his way into the armoury section on the ground floor. Early evening light was falling on the great wood and glass cases that lined the walls, illuminating enormous spears, or ancient sets of body armour. There was a huge collection of weapons of death in here, long lances for horsemen to carry and run through their enemies, heavy pikes for foot soldiers to decapitate their foes, long swords and short swords, swords with pommels and swords without, swords for stabbing people, swords for cutting them in two, straight swords, curved swords, daggers, cuirasses, kris, armour from many centuries. In one of the rooms there was, he remembered, a horse clad in armour, ridden by a man in armour, a general perhaps, his visor slightly open so he could catch a proper sight of the opposition.

Powerscourt listened carefully. He could hear nothing. He suddenly realized that on either the ground or the first floors you could go right round the building in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. There was no wall or staircase that would force a man to retrace his steps and go back the way he had come. Here, in this beautiful set of rooms, he was going to play hide and seek round the galleries. The prize might be life or death. Powerscourt thought there was a staircase in the room next to the last of the armoury collections which had once been the Victorian smoking room. He thought he could hear those footsteps again, coming from the upper floors. The noise would continue for about half a minute or so and then stop. Was the man on the floor above waiting for him to appear? Was he looking for a hiding place, inside some great curtain perhaps, where only the barrel of his gun would need to come out of hiding and shoot his enemy in the heart? Very gingerly Powerscourt tiptoed up the stairs into a room full of Dutch landscapes. There was one painting of a ferry boat very early in the morning where the light glittered beautifully on the water and the daily commerce of the Dutch ebbed and flowed across the river. There was that sound again. His opponent certainly wasn’t concerned about making a noise. Powerscourt wondered suddenly about Somerville’s terrible threats and hoped he had not escaped from the police station to come here and take his revenge in the middle of the masterpieces of Europe and the armour of the East.

If he went round the building anti-clockwise he would be in the Great Gallery, where most of the finest paintings were hung, almost at once. If he went in the other direction he would go right round the first floor before he reached it from the other end. He decided on the long route and glided off through another roomful of Dutch paintings. Dimly on the walls he could just make out a loaf of bread being brought into a house, the interior of a church, a woman making lace, a girl reading a love letter. Any dark paintings, some of the most celebrated Rembrandts, would soon be almost invisible as the daylight began to fade. He checked his watch. A long time to go before the arrival of the nightwatchman. Then it was past the Canalettos, the blue-green water and the blue cloud-speckled skies and the public buildings of Venice rendered immortal under the artist’s brush. Powerscourt paused again. The footsteps were still marching up and down in the Great Gallery, almost as if the man was on sentry duty. Perhaps he knew that Powerscourt was bound to arrive there sooner or later. All he had to do was to wait for his prey. He glanced quickly at the Canaletto by his side. For no reason at all he suddenly remembered recently seeing a painting of Eton College done by Canaletto during his years in London. Even that most English of buildings under Canaletto’s hand looked as if it really belonged in Venice, somewhere behind San Zaccaria in the sestiere of San Marco, or floating improbably on its very own island like San Giorgio Maggiore. He pressed hard up against the wall by the door and made a rapid inspection of the landing. It was empty.

Powerscourt crossed the landing at a run, bent almost double. He was now trespassing in the improbable world of Boucher, naked gods floating in the skies without visible means of support, pagan heroes living out the myths of ancient Greece in a naked innocence charged with considerable erotic force. Still he could hear the footsteps, slightly closer now. He wished he had the same means of upward propulsion as Boucher’s characters and could float right through the ceiling and the roof and alight in Number 8 Manchester Square. Then a room full of Greuzes, rather sickly portraits of young girls’ faces that looked as if they were designed to appeal to women and middle-aged and elderly men rather than to the young of either sex. He listened for the footsteps again. They seemed to have stopped. He stood absolutely still for two minutes to see if they started again. They did not.

Powerscourt was now in a kind of magic kingdom, the creations of Antoine Watteau making music and love in the open air in some enchanted fete champetre. He remembered reading somewhere that with Watteau, as with Mozart, one could learn that sincerity in art does not have to be uncouth and that perfection of form need not imply poverty of content. Then there was Fragonard, a painter of such sensuous indulgence, such glorious decadence that the French Revolution might have been created in order to abolish him. Why, Powerscourt said to himself, did his brain wander off into artistic thoughts when death might be just a corridor away? He listened again. Still no noise.

When he reached the Great Gallery that ran right across one side of the house he lay down on the floor. He inched his way forward until his head just poked round the corner. At least I’m a smaller target this way, he said to himself. Nothing stirred. On the walls the Van Dycks and the Rembrandts, the Hals and the Gainsboroughs kept to their frames. Powerscourt watched the far door with great care. Maybe his opponent was hiding behind there, biding his time before an exploratory shot down the room. Suddenly Powerscourt wondered if the man might not have taken his boots off and crept round to take him from the rear. He looked behind. Only Watteau on guard there, though Powerscourt doubted if those effete-looking lovers and musicians would have been much good in a fight. He wondered what to do. Charge straight down the Great Gallery? Wait? Go back he way he had come? To his left an austere Spanish lady with a fan and a rosary, painted by Velasquez, was taking the register of his sins. Still there was silence at the far end. Suddenly Powerscourt decided to take the initiative. He rose to his feet, took his pistol in his right hand and ran as fast as he could down the gallery. Fifteen feet from the end he fired two shots just past the door. Then he kicked the door as hard as he could and peered round. There was nobody there. Only some Dutch peasants, too preoccupied with their own world to have any time for his, lounged about on the walls. Powerscourt stood still and locked the Great Gallery door behind him. He was worried about being outflanked to his rear. So where was the man? Had he given up and gone home? Had the nightwatchman arrived? Powerscourt rather doubted it. He feared he had somehow lost the initiative, that his enemy had the upper hand. Even the views of gloomy Dutch churches, peopled with sombre worshippers dressed in black, would not be enough to save him now. There were only two players left in the Wallace Collection game of hide and seek, and death might be the prize for the loser.

Carefully, cautiously, he made his way along the East Galleries. Powerscourt was concentrating so hard on his opponent’s whereabouts that he scarcely looked at the paintings at all. He had his gun ready to fire in his right hand. He feared that if he left it in his pocket he might be wounded before he had time to reach it. Maybe his last stand was to be on the landing above the ornamental staircase that led to the ground floor. Maybe he needed some armour. He checked his watch again. If the nightwatchman came at seven he would be here in less than fifteen minutes. You could, he realized, go round and round the Wallace Collection just as easily as you could go round and round the mulberry bush.

As he rushed out – slow progress affording the enemy too much time and too much target – he saw his opponent at last halfway down the stairs, but facing upwards. He too had his pistol in his right hand. Both men fired at almost exactly the same time. Powerscourt’s bullet caught the man at the top of the stomach. He turned round and fell down the stairs, rolling slowly down until he came to rest under an ornate fireplace in the hall. A trail of blood followed him down the steps. Powerscourt was hit in the chest and collapsed on the floor, knocking his head against the marble floor with a mighty crack. Neither man made a sound.

Albert Forrest, nightwatchman to the Wallace Collection, liked to reach work a little early. That way he could feel he was ahead of his timetable. He wouldn’t be rushed. He was at an age now, Albert, when he liked to take things at his own pace and in his own time. So it was about five minutes to seven when he opened the great door that led into the Wallace Collection from Manchester Square. The blood had continued to flow from the man by the fireplace. It had now spread all over the floor. Albert Forrest took one look and hurried to his tiny office at the back of the Armouries. He did something he had wanted to do ever since they had installed the thing just before the house was opened to the public in 1900. He pulled the alarm. Then he pulled it again. The noise, meant to warn of fire or flood, of Armageddon or the Second Coming, sounded as if it might wake the dead. Even as Albert was making his way back to the front door – that fellow looked pretty dead to Albert, no point in hurrying – Johnny Fitzgerald was coming down the stairs of Number 8 Manchester Square four at a time. He exchanged alarmed looks with Lady Lucy, who was already concerned that Francis had not come home, and rushed across the square. A small crowd was beginning to form outside the front door. The hotel behind seemed to be emptying all its guests out on to the street. Drinkers from the pub across the road were peering in through the doors, glasses in hand. Johnny took one look at the villain in the hall and shot up the stairs, pausing only to apprehend his pistol.

Johnny sprinted to his friend and knelt by his side. Powerscourt was unconscious and he seemed to Johnny to have a most unhealthy colour. Johnny ripped off his own shirt, the finest silk that Jermyn Street could provide, and did what he could to staunch the flow of blood. He put his jacket over Powerscourt to keep him warm and dashed off to Number 8. Lady Lucy was pacing nervously up and down the hall.

‘Lady Lucy,’ Johnny Fitzgerald panted, ‘Francis has been shot. It looks bad. He’s at the top of the staircase on the first floor. Can you get Rhys and the footman to improvise a stretcher? I’m going to get a doctor, man we both knew in South Africa, lives round the corner. He’s wonderful with wounded people. Don’t move Francis, for God’s sake, don’t move him at all till I get back with the doctor.’

Lady Lucy felt numb, icy cold on receipt of the news. He had come through so much, her Francis, so many campaigns, so many battles, so many dangerous investigations. Now she might lose him. She could not believe it. She refused to believe it. She tried, briefly, to imagine a future without Francis and she knew she could not bear it. Even with all these children, she thought, she would find it intolerable. She pulled her coat tight around her and waited for the doctor.

Johnny Fitzgerald set off at full speed across Manchester Square, over Marylebone High Street and a hundred yards or so up Marylebone Lane before turning left into Bulstrode Street. In his mind’s eye he saw not the great hulk of the side of the Wallace Collection or the fashionable hotel opposite, or the shadowy buildings with the lights being lit in their windows. He saw his greatest friend bleeding to death, surrounded not by his friends but by the Old Masters of centuries long past. Even Francis, he thought, with his great love of art, wouldn’t want to go like that. Number 16 had the nameplate. Dr Anthony Fraser, it said, universally known during his time in the Army as Dr Tony.

The scene on the landing now resembled one of those melancholy religious paintings showing Christ being taken down from the Cross that might have lined its walls. A bloodied Powerscourt lying unconscious on the ground. Lady Lucy, representing the weeping women, not actually weeping but gazing at her husband and praying with all her strength for his safe recovery. Rhys the butler and Jones the footman, hovering with the stretcher, might have been Roman soldiers perhaps, come for a last look at the one they had called the King of the Jews.

Dr Fraser knelt down by the side of his new patient. He felt Powerscourt’s pulse and grimaced slightly. Then he stood up.

‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Fraser, usually known as Dr Tony. I knew Lord Powerscourt in South Africa. You must be his wife,’ he bowed to Lady Lucy, ‘and you must be his staff. We must get your husband on to the stretcher you have managed to bring. Your house is across the square? That will be best for now. I have sent for some nurses.’

They manoeuvred Powerscourt on to the stretcher and the four men took him, rather like a coffin going to its last resting place, Lady Lucy felt, to the big bedroom on the second floor of Number 8 Manchester Square. There was now a fire in the grate. The sheets on the bed had been changed. Extra chairs had been brought in for those on attendant and nursing duty. The doctor examined Powerscourt very closely.

‘There is an exit wound here on his back – the bullet must have gone straight through him. And it has narrowly avoided both his heart and his lungs. I shall wait for the nurses before we clean it all up and put on the dressings. In the meantime I will give your husband an injection against the pain.’

Dr Fraser sat with Powerscourt for over an hour, Lady Lucy on the other side of the bed. The doctor, Lady Lucy observed, was a short slim man in his middle thirties whose hair was beginning to recede. He had a prominent nose and very bright eyes. When the nurses arrived, she left them to it and went to order some tea in the drawing room.

‘Lady Powerscourt,’ the doctor began about a quarter of an hour later, ‘we have done what we can to clean the wound. We could have done more but there is always a slight danger to the patient in carrying out over-vigorous measures at this stage. I shall be going back to keep watch for a little while longer when I have finished my tea.’

Lady Lucy looked at him with pleading eyes. Already, she felt reassured by his presence. ‘What is your judgement, doctor? Will Francis…’ she paused for a moment to fight back the tears, ‘pull through?’

‘Your husband has received a most serious wound, Lady Powerscourt,’ said the doctor. ‘I would not hide that from you for a second. I have seen far too many people with similar wounds to his in South Africa. In the case of your husband it’s simple. We must keep the wound clean. In time we can give some assistance for it to heal. The room where he lies must be kept clean. No infection can be allowed to get anywhere near him. But he has also sustained a serious blow to the head. I have no idea when he will wake up from his coma, Lady Powerscourt. So much depends on the will, his will to live. If he despairs, he will die. I have seen men die from wounds that are less serious than his and I have seen men recover from wounds that were worse.’

‘What can we do, Dr Tony? Everybody in this house wants Francis alive.’ The thought of the twins with no father struck Lady Lucy yet again and she had to turn away for a moment.

‘I believe there is a great deal you can do, Lady Powerscourt, believe me. Many of my colleagues would have taken your husband to hospital. I thought of that and rejected it. If he had gone to hospital he would have been placed in a ward full of people as seriously injured as he is, or worse. Death would call every day if not every hour and constantly reduce the numbers. Here your husband is surrounded by love and his loved ones. I think we should keep him quiet tomorrow and the next day but after that your children should go and talk to him, whether he is awake or not. Maybe they could read to him. Other people could read to him, talk to him. The more activity, the better I believe it will be for your husband. If all is quiet people could think they have gone to that eternal silence before their time is due.’

‘So there is hope, doctor?’ Lady Lucy was looking at him very closely.

‘Oh yes, Lady Powerscourt. Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’

Lady Lucy felt a small, but definite, onset not of hope but of resolve, of determination. Maybe it was courage. She thought of her love for Francis, she thought of all her ancestors who had marched and sailed and fought and died for their country across the centuries. Maybe some small portion of their bravery would come to help her in her ordeal. If she was not brave, she knew, Francis would surely die.

Those first two days seemed to most of the inhabitants of 8 Manchester Square to be like a dream. Thomas and Olivia refused to believe their father was seriously ill until Lady Lucy took them in to see him. Thomas turned white and stared at his father for a very long time. Olivia rushed off to her room to pray for her Papa’s recovery. Dr Tony came at regular intervals. The nurses changed over every eight hours, keeping endless watch over their patient, making him comfortable, washing his face, taking his pulse, entering their findings into a large black notebook. Lady Lucy kept vigil when she could. She had made a private arrangement with Johnny that one of them should be awake when the other was asleep and vice versa. The staff tiptoed about, popping in every now and then to look at Powerscourt. The flowers began arriving late the first morning. William Burke sent an enormous bunch. Lady Lucy thought how amused Francis would have been as the bouquets began arriving from her relations, dozens and dozens of them, enough to open a bloody flower shop, she could hear him saying. Soon a whole wall in the Powerscourt bedroom was lined with flowers. Only the twins were immune to the change of lifestyle, Lady Lucy convinced that it would take the Second Coming to make the slightest dent in Nurse Mary Muriel’s routine.

On the third day the atmosphere in the sick room was very different. Gone was the silence that had held the sick bay in its grip, broken only by the whispered conclaves between the nurses and Dr Tony. For a good section of the morning the twins were now placed on chairs close to the bed in their Moses baskets. Occasional wails punctuated the morning conversations between Dr Tony and the nurses. They took great interest in the twins, the nurses, peering into their faces and talking a great variety of nonsense to them. Thomas came in his most grown-up mode and read to Powerscourt from the sports section of the newspapers. Olivia tried to make up stories of her own for him. As these were largely based on stories her father had invented for her, it was, as Lady Lucy said, rather like hearing the brain of Francis come back in the voice of Olivia. When they got tired of stories, the children would talk to him, saying whatever came into their heads usually, and the nurses found that even more captivating than looking into the faces of the twins.

Just before lunch Detective Chief Inspector Beecham arrived. He had felt he would be intruding if he called on the Powerscourt household. Only after he had met Edward and Sarah in front of Queen’s Inn and learned that they were going to call at 8 Manchester Square very soon, did he change his mind.

‘Lady Powerscourt, Johnny Fitzgerald, how is Lord Powerscourt? Is he making good progress?’

Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy looked at each other.

‘He’s not getting any better, Chief Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘but he’s not getting any worse.’

‘I would like to see him and pay my respects, before I leave, if I may, Lady Powerscourt. This has been truly terrible for you all. I do have some fresh intelligence which fills in some of the final details of the case your husband so ably solved, Lady Powerscourt. But I would not want to keep you from your duties here.’

Lady Lucy smiled. ‘It sounds to me, Chief Inspector, as though Francis would want to hear your news at some point quite soon after he recovers consciousness.’ Beecham thought he could hear a repressed ‘if’ in that last sentence.

‘I shall be brief,’ he said. ‘Let me begin with the villain who shot your husband.’

‘The fellow at the bottom of the stairs?’ asked Johnny.

‘The same, Johnny. Lord Powerscourt is an excellent shot but his bullet landed a couple of inches too low. Had it been a fraction higher, the bullet would have killed him. It nearly did for him, the rogue is still in hospital. But he is alive.’

‘Has he spoken?’ said Johnny. ‘Has he told you what was going on, Chief Inspector?’

‘He certainly has. I regret to say I tricked him into making a confession he might not have made otherwise.’

‘How was that?’ asked Johnny.

‘I didn’t get to see him until early this morning. The man was unconscious in the Marylebone Hospital round the corner from here. The Hippocratic oath is a wonderful thing but I don’t think you receive the fastest treatment in the world if you’re brought in as an attempted murderer. Anyway, I told him he had half an hour left to live and that he should speak up at once. It wasn’t true, of course, but he wasn’t to know that. It seems he had a very religious education from his mother when he was little. He began muttering bits of prayers and hymns at me. I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound, so I told him St Peter would be pleased with him if he told the truth before his departure from this vale of tears. So he did, or I think he did.’

The Chief Inspector pulled a notebook out of his pocket and checked a couple of entries halfway through.

‘It seems Somerville defended him some years ago on a charge of grievous bodily harm. Tompkins, Dennis Tompkins, that’s the fellow’s name, admitted the other man had been beaten almost to a pulp. Sentence likely to be ten years minimum, probably more. But Somerville gets him off, Tompkins is pathetically grateful, says he would do anything for Somerville as a result. Three weeks ago he gets a note from Somerville asking Tompkins to meet him in the gardens of Hampton Court. Bloody enormous grounds they are, as you know, my lady, you could plot anything in there without anybody being the wiser. Anyway, Somerville gives him an envelope with five hundred pounds in Treasury notes. Says there’s another five hundred when the job’s done. The job is to kill Lord Powerscourt, description and address to be supplied. Somerville told Tompkins Lord Powerscourt was coming to see him at the Inn three days ago. He followed him from there to the Wallace Collection. Tompkins said it was pure chance they both got locked in there together. He had no idea what the building was, he was only planning to see where Powerscourt lived and make his attempt later.’

‘That would explain the funny looks and the whispers I was getting about Francis when I went to check out the underworld,’ said Johnny. ‘Did he say why Somerville wanted Francis dead?’

‘Somerville had explained some of it, but brother Tompkins didn’t remember it very well. And, by this time, on my own timetable, I’d only six minutes left before he was due to pop off. Brother Tompkins was probably thinking his time was nearly up too. He kept looking at his watch. I’ve thought about it since and this is what I think Tompkins meant. Somerville was forced to invite Lord Powerscourt in to investigate the murders by the other benchers. But I think he was also the man who opposed appointing Lord Powerscourt at that first meeting. I imagine he felt he might be caught out. But what really rattled him was when no suspects were hauled off to jail. He thought Newton would be arrested. Then he thought somebody else must be picked up. When they weren’t he felt he must have been rumbled so the man who was about to expose him had to go.’

‘So what’s going to happen to this Tompkins person?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Will he have to stand trial? And that horrible Somerville, will he be put in the dock as well?’

‘When Tompkins is recovered, he will have to stand trial,’ replied the Chief Inspector. ‘Mr Somerville, well, he may be on trial somewhere else, but he won’t be attending any trials down here. This is the other piece of information I am sure your husband would wish to know. We had to let Somerville out on the most enormous bail after twenty-four hours. You will recall that Maxwell Kirk, the barrister at the head of Dauntsey’s chambers, was going to address a meeting of protest of all the barristers in Queen’s Inn. Somerville tried to prevent it but failed. The barristers were incandescent with rage at what had been happening about the money. Edward said I was to mention this point in particular, Lady Powerscourt. He said your husband would have enjoyed it hugely. They decide, these lawyers, to pass a vote of no confidence in Somerville. Just one sentence was all they needed. According to Edward, a roomful of monkeys with typewriters would have produced it quicker. It took them fifty-five minutes to agree the wording and even then there were six different caveats on the final version. So the Petition of Right, as one wag called it, is sent off to Somerville. It must have been terrible for him, total public humiliation at the hands of his peers. At any rate, when the servant goes into his rooms yesterday morning, there was Somerville slumped at his desk. The vote of censure was in front of him. The pistol was by his side. He’d blown his brains out.’

There was a brief silence. ‘There are just two other things I’m sure your husband would like to know, Lady Powerscourt. The man Porchester Newton has turned up again. He came back about three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the shooting. Said he’d been fishing in South Wales. We asked the local police to check it out and it was all true. And John Bassett, the old Financial Steward – it’s been confirmed that he died of natural causes.’

‘I’m sure my husband will be most interested to hear all this news, Chief Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy, upset far more than she could have imagined by this new death. ‘And now perhaps you would like to come and see him and talk to him before you have to leave. The doctor is very keen people should talk to him.’

On this day too, other visitors began to arrive. There were relations, always too sombre in their appearance and too gloomy in their assessments. ‘They look,’ Johnny Fitzgerald observed sourly to Lady Lucy, ‘as if they’ve decided he’s dead already and are trying to work out what to wear for the funeral.’ But some of them had been involved in earlier Powerscourt investigations. Patrick Butler, the young editor of the local newspaper in the cathedral city of Compton in the West Country, called late in the afternoon. He had been very closely involved in the Powerscourt investigation into the mysterious deaths in the cathedral the year before. He gave Lady Lucy an enormous kiss and a huge bunch of flowers. She took him straight in to see her husband and told him the details of the shooting. Compton Saviour Shot in Legal Feud was the headline that flashed through his newspaper brain. Patrick Butler thought in headlines just as farmers think of the seasons and the weather. He always had. The young Patrick sensed that beneath the surface optimism, the good cheer and the impeccable manners reserved for visitors in this politest of households, despair was probably not very far away.

‘I saw him, Lady Lucy,’ he began with a smile, ‘the morning after those bastards tried to kill him with all that falling masonry in the cathedral. Do you remember? Of course you do. Well, he looks to me very like he did then. He pulled round on that occasion and I’m sure he will this time.’

He stopped talking suddenly. Lady Lucy remembered that this was a fairly rare occurrence and waited for what was coming next. They were sitting side by side by the edge of Powerscourt’s bed. Patrick Butler reached out to take her hand.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Lady Powerscourt, with your permission.’ A whole front page of his paper, the Grafton Mercury, was flashing through his brain as fast as the paper would come off the presses. A long article on Powerscourt’s role in the salvation of Compton the previous year. A brief description of his present difficulties. A prayer for his recovery from the Dean, maybe even the Bishop. ‘We’ll give the whole front page of the next edition of the Grafton Mercury over to Lord Powerscourt! An account of his role as the Saviour of Compton. A brief summary of his current predicament. And a prayer from the Dean or the Bishop! I’m great pals now with the new Dean, Lady Powerscourt. He says I’m the only person in the city of Compton who can tell him the whole truth about what went on before. Tell you what, even better, I’ll get the Dean to organize a service of prayer for Lord Powerscourt’s recovery. The whole of Compton will turn up and pray he gets better. That’s bound to help!’

Lady Lucy remembered Patrick’s wife’s description of him as being rather like a puppy. He hadn’t changed.

‘That would be very kind, Patrick,’ she said, smiling at her editor. ‘Francis and I were very fond of Compton. But tell me, how is Anne and what brings you to London at this time?’

Patrick Butler blushed. ‘Anne is well, Lady Powerscourt. She is expecting our first child in August.’ He made a close inspection of the nearer twin at this point as if intent on getting some practice in child care early on. ‘And I,’ he was going rather red at this point, ‘I have been asked to London for an interview about a position on The Times. I should know in three or four days if I have been accepted.’

‘That’s wonderful news, Patrick,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling, as she often did with Patrick, like an elderly aunt with her favourite nephew. ‘It would be splendid to have you and Anne in London.’

‘I must flee, Lady Powerscourt,’ said Patrick, pulling a reporter’s notebook from his pocket, ‘or I shall miss my train. Please give my very best love and wishes to your husband. I shall write part of the front page on the train!’ He took a last sad look at Powerscourt as he left the room. Patrick Butler had tried his best to be cheerful, to keep up the spirits of the little band on the second floor of 8 Manchester Square. But anybody watching him set off up Marylebone High Street towards Baker Street station would have seen that his eyes were filled with tears.

On the next day Dr Tony came early in the morning. He went through the usual routines with his patient and had a long conference with the nurse on duty. Then he went downstairs to talk to Lady Lucy.

‘What news, Dr Tony?’ she asked him with a smile.

‘Some of the time, Lady Powerscourt, we doctors swing between very different emotions. At eleven we may have to tell some unfortunate person that there is no hope, their time is almost gone. At twelve we may be in the fortunate position of having to tell some other luckier soul that the treatment has worked, that they are cured and may well live for another thirty years.’ He watched Lady Lucy’s face swing between hope and despair as he spoke. The lights were going on and off in her eyes. Perhaps that was a mistake, he said to himself, and hurried on.

‘Lord Powerscourt is much the same as he has been since he was shot, more or less. I can detect little change in him today from yesterday, Lady Powerscourt. I shall return after lunch to see him again.’

‘Hope?’ said Lady Lucy, very quietly.

‘As I said before,’ briefly he took her hand, ‘there is always hope. You must not give up. You must not let your household give up. I can only guess how difficult it must be for you all. But, please, please, hope, hope for your husband, hope for your children, hope for yourself.’

Thomas and Olivia had decided on a different tactic for their papa on this day. They were going to read to him together, they told Lady Lucy over breakfast, well, not exactly together because Olivia wasn’t a great reader yet while Thomas was quite proficient by now. But they were going to read Treasure Island, a work their father had often read to them. Thomas was to do most of the reading. Olivia had a number of tasks to perform. She had some paper and a pair of scissors and pens of different colours as she had to make a black spot for Blind Pew to press into the palms of his victims as he did in the story. She had to join in the reading every time the book said ‘Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’ or the longer version with the two extra lines ‘Drink and the Devil Had Done for the Rest, Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’ The children had agreed upstairs that they should be able to make enough noise with this chorus to wake their father, if not the persons at rest in the nearest graveyard.

In the end the nurse put them off. Nurse Winifred was one of the kindest people alive and loved children of every age. But her appearance, what Olivia privately thought of as that sea of starched white at the front of her, put you off if you were only six years old.

There was one very important visitor late that afternoon. Shortly after five o’clock a beautifully dressed man of about forty years presented himself at the door. He had an enormous bunch of flowers. ‘They’re from Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield greenhouses, Lady Powerscourt. The Prime Minister was most insistent I should deliver them in person.’

The impeccable suit bowed. Inside it was Schomberg McDonnell, Private Secretary to Prime Minister Salisbury, now, so the gossip said, nearing the end of his tenure at Number 10 Downing Street. Powerscourt had taken his orders twice before, once in saving the City of London from a terrible plot, and on the second occasion taking up, at Salisbury’s request, the position of Head of Army Intelligence in the war in South Africa. Truly, the great world had come to pay its respects to Francis Powerscourt in his hour of need in Manchester Square.

McDonnell listened gravely to Lady Lucy’s account of her husband’s situation. ‘I would stay longer if I could but I have to return to the Prime Minister, Lady Powerscourt. I have often brought your husband messages from Lord Salisbury in the past. I have another one for him today. Lord Salisbury says that he is weary of office, and, between ourselves, expects to leave it soon. He does not expect to live very long in retirement. But his message to Lord Powerscourt is very clear. He is damned if he is going to have to attend Powerscourt’s funeral. He expects, nay, he orders that Powerscourt should attend his, whenever that may be. Your husband, Lady Powerscourt, in the Prime Minister’s words, is under government orders to recover.’

Johnny Fitzgerald took the last watch that day. The children were asleep. He hoped Lady Lucy was too. He walked up and down the room for a long time, lost in the memories of his and Powerscourt’s lives together. They had been to so many places after leaving Ireland and had shared so many adventures. He thought of Lady Lucy and the enormous strain she must be under. Johnny had seen how, more than ever now, all the threads of this house and of Francis’s life ran through her hands. Lady Lucy had to determine the altered routines of the house with the cook and the domestic staff. She had to liaise with the nurses and with the frequent presence of Dr Tony, who demanded total attention when he came. She had to look after the two oldest children who stitched on, at her instructions, he suspected, a mask of cheer and optimism about their father’s chances of recovery during the day. At night, he knew, the hope deserted them and Thomas and Olivia fled to weep in their mother’s bed. Johnny had heard them crying from two floors further up the night before. And all the time, reassuring her children, organizing her household, welcoming the visitors and ordering yet more tea, Lady Lucy must, Johnny felt sure, have her own private nightmares. Would Francis pull through? Could she imagine life without him? How would the children cope? And this worry above all, he was sure, how would the twins, so tiny and so young, cope with life without their father?

At about half past eleven Johnny sat down by the side of the bed. He began telling his friend stories about the officers and men they had known in India, the eccentric, the mad, the brave, the cowards, the ones who liked the Indians, the ones who despised Indians, the very occasional ones who went completely native. Most of these stories contained jokes, some of them very good jokes. But the laughter Johnny hoped for did not come. As the church clock rang the midnight hour Lord Francis Powerscourt was still in a coma, drifting uncertainly between life and death.