Death of a Chancellor

1

There was just one figure on the deck of the ship at four o’clock in the morning. Surely only a madman would venture into the open on such a night, the sky above black as pitch, illuminated by neither moon nor stars, the fierce wind cutting across the decks, a relentless rain slanting down from the invisible sky, the spray from the prow of HMS Fearless, one of the Royal Navy’s newest destroyers, washing and swirling round the madman’s feet, sloshing its erratic way towards the gunwales where it returned to the foaming sea. On the bridge the Captain stared at his instruments and wondered whether he should decrease his speed in case his most eccentric passenger turned into a man overboard.

But Captain William Rawnsley did not alter his course or his speed. One part of his mariner’s brain was permanently, subconsciously, attuned to the beat of the great engines beneath him, the finest and the most modern that the engineers of the Clyde could produce. As long as that heart beat strong and sure he was confident that his ship would do whatever he asked of her. And Captain Rawnsley had made a promise to the madman on the deck in Cape Town at the very start of their journey back to England. He would deliver his passenger on to dry land at Portsmouth at eight o’clock in the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth of January in the year of Our Lord 1901. No earlier, no later. The Captain knew his passenger the madman was anxious to see his wife and family who had been informed of his time of delivery. The Captain himself, as he told the madman, was equally anxious to return to his home. He had a pair of twins waiting for him. And Captain Rawnsley had never seen them since they were born three long months before.

The madman was clutching the rail of the ship very tightly in his lookout post some twenty yards from the prow where the sea crashed over the Glasgow steel in angry torrents. Sometimes he peered up at the empty sky as if willing some stars or some fragment of moon to come out and cast light on his journey. Sometimes he stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the relentless crashing of the waves or the white line of spray along the side of the vessel. Sometimes he stared out to his left as if he might spy land, a faint outline that would mark the coast of England.

Always he thought of the people waiting for him at the other end. Lady Lucy, wife of his heart and love of his life, Thomas, his son, and little Olivia, his daughter. He had not seen any of them for over a year, four hundred and five days since he had waved goodbye at that melancholy railway station. For the madman was Lord Francis Powerscourt and he was going home. He wrapped his great sou’wester ever more tightly round his body and stared yet again at where he thought England must be. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, he muttered to himself, and the spirit of God moved upon the waters.

Thirteen months before, the Prime Minister himself had despatched Powerscourt and his small private army to South Africa to improve the British Army’s intelligence in the war against the Boers. Even now Powerscourt could still remember the exact words of his orders: ‘The whole structure of military intelligence in South Africa is wrong. War Office can’t sort it out. Useless bloody generals can’t sort it out. They think the Boers are here. They’re not. They’re over there. The generals plod over there. By the time they arrive, Mr bloody Boer has disappeared again. Difficulties in the terrain, they keep telling me. Rubbish. Faulty intelligence, maybe no intelligence at all.’ It had taken Powerscourt and his companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald a year to sort out the problem, but he had left in place a whole new system of intelligence gathering, based on the speed and mobility of the African scouts he recruited, and the information gleaned from hundreds of black spies.

Some thirty miles north-east of HMS Fearless another figure was peering out to sea. Lady Lucy Powerscourt was rubbing at the window of her hotel room on the sea front in Portsmouth. Surely, she thought, the hotel people could keep their glass cleaner than this. The visitors wanted a proper view of what was going on down below in the harbour. But all she could see were the lights on the shore and a dark, impenetrable blackness behind.

When she married Lord Francis Powerscourt some eight years before, he had left his career in Army Intelligence and become one of the foremost investigators in Britain, solving mysteries and murders that once went right into the heart of the Royal Household itself. Neither she, nor indeed he, had ever imagined that he would be recalled to the colours and sent to the other side of the world to help in a grubby and difficult war. She had found his absence very hard to bear. Only the children rescued her from depression. Thomas sometimes had a way of flicking his hair off his forehead that replicated to the last detail the behaviour of his father. Then, for what seemed to Thomas to be completely unaccountable reasons, she would sweep him up into her arms and smother him with kisses.

Lady Lucy was fully dressed. She turned from her lookout post and glanced at the sleeping children. She smiled. They had taken their father’s absence in totally different ways. Thomas had an enormous map of Southern Africa on the wall in his bedroom, covered with stars and dates for the places his father had been. The map itself was now scarcely visible. What the little boy did not know was that his father never put his real location in his letters in case they were captured by the enemy. When he was in Natal, he told Thomas he was in the Transvaal, and vice versa. So Thomas’s map was accurate in the sense that his father had been in all the places ringed with stars, but never at the time marked on his wall.

Olivia had never seen the point of the map and the stars. Instead she had appropriated a photograph of her Papa from the drawing room and she drew dozens and dozens of pictures of him, scarcely recognizable to anybody else, but a constant record of her devotion. She made her Mama keep a list of all the things she had to tell her father about, her new shoes, the pony in her grandmother’s stable in the country, her new friend Isabella on the other side of their house in Markham Square in Chelsea.

Lady Lucy checked the time once more. Half-past four. Not time yet to wake the children. She prayed that the ship would arrive on time. Perhaps they would be able to spot it better from the quayside. At six o’clock, she said to herself, I shall wake Thomas and Olivia and get them dressed. They will be so excited. She smiled again. After four hundred and five days, an hour or two was nothing, nothing at all.

On board HMS Fearless the rain seemed to have grown still more powerful. Captain Rawnsley and his officers on the bridge could just see a second madman come to join the asylum on deck. Even through the roar of the elements they could hear him shouting to the first lunatic.

‘For Christ’s sake, Francis, why do they have to put these bloody guns in the middle of the floor? You’d think they’d put them higher up somewhere.’ Johnny Fitzgerald had banged his knee on one of the Navy’s latest and most lethal weapons as he crossed the deck to join his friend. ‘It’s bloody inconsiderate of them, that’s what I say.’

‘Good morning to you, Johnny. Mind how you go now. You don’t want to fall overboard at this stage.’

‘One of those bloody officers up there,’ Johnny Fitzgerald gestured vaguely towards where he thought the bridge must be, ‘has just taken a bet with the Captain person that one of us will fall in.’

The Fearless sank at that moment into a particularly deep trough. As she rose out the other side a wall of water flooded over Powerscourt and Fitzgerald.

‘That’s the other bloody thing,’ said Johnny bitterly, never a happy sailor. He was hanging on to the rail with both hands. ‘Ever since we left, this bloody boat has been either going up and down like this,’ he ducked as another helping of ocean cascaded over them, ‘or rocking from side to side. It’s drunk all the time this boat, that’s what it is. Why can’t the damned thing move along on an even keel? They cost a fortune, these bloody boats, Francis. You’d think they could make them go along steadily, like a train. I mentioned the fact to the Captain the other day.’

There was a temporary lull in the weather. Fitzgerald plunged his right hand deep inside his clothes and produced an enormous flask.

‘This is what you need on a night like this, Francis. Naval rum. Fellow in the catering department gave it to me. Said it’s the stuff they give the sailors before a battle. Makes them fighting drunk, he said. Seems to me you’d need to have the bloody stuff twenty hours a day, battle or no battle, to survive on these wretched vessels.’

Powerscourt smiled. He suddenly remembered Johnny Fitzgerald turning green and being sick over the side on a yachting expedition years before when there was barely enough breeze to fill the sails. ‘I’m very curious, Johnny,’ he shouted into the wind, ‘to know what the Captain said.’

‘What the Captain said when?’ Fitzgerald yelled back.

‘When you complained about the ship not travelling like a train.’ Powerscourt had turned very close to his friend’s ear. Johnny Fitzgerald laughed.

‘He said to me, Francis, “You’re a hopeless case. Don’t think I could convert you to ships any more than I could convert the Hottentots to Christianity. Here, you’d better have another drink.’’’

Fifty miles to the west of Lady Lucy’s hotel, Andrew Saul McKenna finally decided that he must get up, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. McKenna was butler in the great house of Fairfield Park, situated in the tiny village of Hawke’s Broughton in the county of Grafton in the west of England. He knew something was wrong. He had heard strange noises in the night. He thought, or had he imagined it, that he heard a muffled scream. Now there was no noise, just this overpowering sense that something was terribly amiss in his little kingdom. He lit a candle and climbed rapidly into his clothes for the day, left out in neat piles the night before.

McKenna’s first thought was for the master he had served for the last fifteen years. Mr Eustace’s bedroom was one floor below. McKenna could still remember his master coming round the desk to shake him by the hand when offering him the job.

‘I do hope you’ll be able to stay with us for a long time,’ he had said with a smile. Eustace was Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, responsible for the archives and the famous cathedral library.

Now McKenna was tiptoeing down the back stairs in the middle of the night, his stomach churning with worry and fear. A floorboard creaked as he made his way along the corridor. Outside he could see, very faintly, the trees shaking slowly in the wind. He passed an ancient statue of a Roman goddess, lost in thought. For a big man, he moved very quietly.

Andrew McKenna paused before he opened the door to his master’s bedroom. There was a loud creak when you opened it, he remembered. He’d meant to have the door oiled for weeks now. He gripped the handle firmly and twisted it open as fast as he could. There was no noise this time.

Nothing, he thought, nothing could have prepared anybody for what he found inside. As he moved slowly across the room towards the great four-poster bed, he found the long discarded habits of childhood had returned to take temporary occupation of his brain. His hands moved automatically into the folded position. He said two Our Fathers. He closed his eyes briefly to avert them from the horror. Hail Mary, full of grace, his lips muttered, his hands moving along the beads of an invisible rosary, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. As he took in the full horror lying across the bedclothes, he realized that the words in his brain suited his master much more than they suited him. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen. Charles John Whitney Eustace, Master of Fairfield Park, Canon and Chancellor of the Cathedral of Compton, had died in the most terrible fashion. There were still two hours left before the dawn. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

The rain on the deck of HMS Fearless had stopped. The spray and the waves were as powerful as ever. The night was still an impenetrable black. Powerscourt was wondering if this happy return might become an anticlimax. He had heard stories from men in the Army about upsetting reunions, so passionately desired over such a long time, so eagerly awaited on the long journey home, but where people found they had little to say to each other after the initial euphoria had worn off. Time had ensured that there was too little experience left in common after a long separation. After a fortnight, one man had told him, he realized he was living with a complete stranger he didn’t know at all. Powerscourt didn’t think that was going to happen to him. He groped about inside the folds of his sou’wester and produced a pair of binoculars. They were of the finest and the latest German make. The Kaiser had sent whatever he could to the Boers to confound perfidious Albion, guns to kill the British, ammunition to keep killing them, binoculars to find them. He peered despondently into the gloom.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll see anything yet, Francis.’ Johnny Fitzgerald was peering into the water below. ‘How deep would you say this bloody water is?’ he went on, as if he saw himself being sucked overboard right down to the bottom of the ocean floor where there were no reviving bottles to console the living or the dead. ‘Very deep, I should think,’ said Powerscourt.

‘Half owre half owre to Aberdour

It’s fifty fathoms deep

And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens

Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.’

Lady Lucy checked her watch again. Time seemed to be moving very slowly this morning. Twenty to six. Still an hour and a half to go before the dawn as the helpful hotel people had told her the night before. Francis is coming, she said to herself, remembering the mantra she had used like a comfort blanket when she had been kidnapped by a gang of villains and locked up on the top floor of a Brighton hotel. He had found her then. She checked the children once more and returned to her vigil by the window. Francis is coming. She smiled again.

Andrew McKenna was shaking slightly as he stood by his dead master’s bed. Part of it was shock. Part of it was anger that anybody human could have done such a brutal thing to his gentle master. Part of it was that he simply didn’t know what to do. He felt suddenly that he was the lone representative left on earth of Charles John Whitney Eustace, charged with special duties towards the dead. His master had been quite small in life. Now, lying on this bloody bed, with blood dripping on to the floor, he looked smaller still.

McKenna knew that terrible scandal could follow the discovery of the body. The newspapers would invade this remote corner of rural England and titillate their readers with exaggerated stories of vicious and violent death before dawn. The rest of the staff would want to come to pay their last respects. The women would turn hysterical if they saw this bloodied corpse, the men would turn homicidal towards the unknown perpetrators. The only thing to do for now, he said to himself, is to fetch the doctor who lived but a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t leave the remains of his master where they were. Somebody else might come in and find him. So the only thing to do was to move him. To move him now. McKenna shuddered violently as he thought of carrying this corpse, of all corpses, anywhere at all. And where should he take it? To the doctor’s? Some early-rising farmhand might spot him walking along the village’s only street with blood and gore running from the package in his arms. Then he remembered the spare bedroom above the stables, recently refurbished and remote from the main part of the house.

McKenna took a deep breath. He found that his hands were making the sign of the cross. He pulled out all the bedclothes and rolled them round his master till he looked like a wrapped-up sausage or an Egyptian mummy en route to the burial chamber deep inside a pyramid. He tried putting the body over his shoulder like a fireman rescuing somebody from a blazing building. That didn’t work. The body kept slipping. Between the bed and the door he found that the best way to carry his master was in his arms, like an overgrown baby wrapped – the biblical reference came to him again from Christmases past – in swaddling clothes. Going to a stable, he said, his mind on the edge of hysteria now, like they did all those years ago.

The journey to the kitchen passed off without incident, apart from the fact that Andrew McKenna had started to weep and had no hands to wipe away his tears. Outside the back door they were hit by the force of the wind. McKenna reeled like a drunken man. The real disaster came on the way up the stairs to the bedroom above the stables. McKenna slipped and almost fell over. Desperately he reached out his left hand to steady himself against the wall. The body fell out of his grasp and began rolling down the stairs. It stuck four steps from the bottom. Summoning the last of his strength McKenna picked his master up once more and went up the stairs as fast as he could. He dumped John Eustace on the bed and went down the stairs two at time. Out in the fresh air he stood still for a moment, panting heavily tears still rolling slowly down his cheeks. He noticed that a spot of blood had escaped from the wrapping and fallen on to his hand. He set out to wake the doctor. His hands were out of his control by now. They were shaking violently from the strain of carrying a corpse a couple of hundred yards in the dark. Pray for us, his lips were moving as he swayed up the village street, pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Six o’clock at last. Just two hours to go now. Lady Lucy decided the time had come. The children would never forgive her if they missed the boat’s arrival. They could have breakfast downstairs in the great dining room that looked over the harbour. Just over four hundred days have passed, she said to herself happily as she woke Thomas and Olivia on the morning their father came home from the wars.

Powerscourt and Fitzgerald had company in their night watch on deck. A cheerful ‘Good morning, gentlemen’ announced the presence of Captain Rawnsley himself, fresh from his command post and his instruments on the bridge.

‘There’s just an hour and a bit to go before the dawn,’ he announced as if sunrise and sunset followed the orders of the Royal Navy. ‘I hope to take the ship into the harbour at first light. We shall dock at about a quarter to eight. The first passengers should be able to disembark on the stroke of eight. Then,’ he smiled broadly at Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘you will owe me fifty pounds.’

Johnny had placed the bet one day out of Cape Town, refusing to believe that anybody could calculate their journey time so precisely in such an unreliable and dangerous thing as a boat. He laughed.

‘Touche, Captain,’ said Johnny. ‘I don’t have the money on me at this moment, forgive me. Too dangerous carrying money around on the deck of one of these things.’ He waved an arm dismissively at the surrounding bulk of HMS Fearless.

‘But come, gentlemen, we are having a special breakfast at seven o’clock. I hope you will be my guests. A little champagne might ease the memory of the fifty pounds, Lord Fitzgerald?’

Johnny tried to persuade Powerscourt that his only reason for placing the bet had been to make sure that they did actually reach Portsmouth at precisely eight o’clock in the morning. ‘Fellow like that Captain, Francis, nothing like a bet of fifty pounds to make sure you got home at the time you’d told Lucy. Stands to reason, if you ask me.’

Powerscourt didn’t believe him.

‘Dear God, why would anybody want to do that to John Eustace, of all people?’ Dr William Blackstaff was fastening his boots on the edge of his bed with Andrew McKenna in dutiful attendance. Blackstaff, like John Eustace, was in his early forties. They had known each other for over ten years. Every Wednesday, without fail, they had lunch together in the upstairs dining room of the White Hart Hotel in Northgate in the little city of Compton . At weekends they walked together over the hills. In spite of his walks Blackstaff was thickening out. The beginnings of a paunch were showing through the tweed suits he always wore, a collection so large and varied that the children in Compton always referred to him as Dr Tweed, amazed in later years to discover that his name was not Tweed at all but Blackstaff.

‘We must have a plan,’ he said, making the final adjustments to his tie. He had served in the Army for five years and some memory of the need for proper staff work had stayed with him all his life.

‘Yes, sir,’ said McKenna, looking out into the dark night beyond the doctor’s windows. ‘It’s going to be light in under an hour or so.’

Blackstaff stared vacantly at his friend’s butler. ‘Let me just try to think this through, McKenna,’ he said. ‘Please tell me when there is a flaw in the plan.’ Dr Blackstaff paused, well aware that his mind was so tinged with grief and shock that he probably wasn’t thinking straight.

‘We take him out of the stables at once,’ he said. ‘But where do we take him? We could bring him here, but that’s not going to solve the problem, is it?’

‘The chief difficulty, it seems to me, sir,’ said McKenna, ‘is that the family are going to want to look at the body in the coffin. And that’s impossible.’

‘This is the best I can do for now, McKenna,’ said the doctor, moving heavily towards his front door. ‘I take my carriage with the covers up along the road towards the house. I stop about a hundred yards away in case anybody hears the noise. You bring the body down from the stables into the carriage. I shall take it into Wallace’s the undertakers in Compton. Old man Wallace knows how to keep his mouth shut. He can put the body in the coffin and seal it up so tight that nobody can get at it.’ Blackstaff and McKenna were climbing into the carriage by now, groping their way with the reins in the dark.

‘The cover story is slightly different. You must make up the bed as if nobody had ever slept in it. And of course you must clear up the blood in the bedroom. I shall say that your master came to see me late last night, feeling very unwell and complaining of chest pains. I kept him here overnight as I judged that the walk back to Fairfield might kill him. I watched over him all night. Later this morning I shall return to Compton and bring Wallace back again, as if to fetch the body. We’ll say he died shortly after ten o’clock this morning. I shall send word up to the house once Wallace has gone with the imaginary body.’

Dr Blackstaff paused. ‘Are we breaking the law?’ he whispered. ‘Are we going to end up in jail?’

‘Don’t see how we are breaking the law, sir. Poor Mr Eustace is already dead.’

‘And,’ said the doctor, stopping his carriage shortly before the entrance to the stables, ‘I shall tell anybody who asks that he most definitely did not want people peering at him when he was dead. Indeed, I shall say that he repeated that wish to me only last night as he sat by my fire, looking very pale and ill. Got that, McKenna?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Andrew McKenna, and he loped off along the path to start his late master’s journey to the undertakers and to the grave.

Powerscourt was back at his post on deck. He watched as the black turned to dark grey, then to a paler grey as visibility grew from fifty yards to two hundred and then to half a mile. A thin pencil of land was visible ahead of him. When he raised his binoculars he could see a tall spire somewhere near the centre of Portsmouth. He could see the naval buildings lined up along the quayside and the multitude of dockyards, repair workshops and training stations that marked it as the centre of the Royal Navy the greatest seafaring power on earth. His heart was beating faster. He remembered the words Lady Lucy had said to him in the drawing room of their house in Markham Square on his last evening in London and again on the station platform the following morning as the train took him away. ‘Please come back, Francis. Please come back.’ Now the moment, of all moments the one he had most longed for, had nearly arrived.

It was Thomas who claimed he saw him first. He had appropriated the binoculars from his mother, in true male fashion, and thought he recogniszed another figure with binoculars on the deck of HMS Fearless.

‘There he is!’ he shouted. ‘There’s Papa! Up at the front of the ship with the binoculars!’ He shouted at the very top of his voice, ‘Papa! Papa!’ and waved furiously as fast as his hands could move. The other people waiting at the quayside for their loved ones smiled at the little boy and his enthusiasm. Now they were all waving, all three of them, Olivia standing on tiptoe so her father would recognize her across the water.

Then Powerscourt saw them. He put his binoculars down and waved for all he was worth. Johnny Fitzgerald had stolen a naval flag from somewhere and was waving it above their heads like a banner. Powerscourt thought he was going to cry. These three little figures, waving as though their lives depended on it, these three, not the mighty ships with their great guns, not the peaceful English countryside that rolled back behind the city, these three were his homecoming, his landfall.

He came down the gangway as the church bells of Portsmouth rang the hour of eight. He embraced Lady Lucy. She was crying. He picked up Thomas in his arms and kissed him violently. He hid Olivia inside his cloak and squeezed her till she thought she might break.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was home.