Death of a wine merchant

18

Lady Lucy Powerscourt dozed fitfully through the night in her Beaune hotel. No Dukes of Burgundy after whom the establishment was named came to visit her in her dreams. Sometimes her right arm reached for the space where her husband would have been, but Francis was not there. Some of the time she thought Francis was still alive. The rest of the time she thought he was dead. These fears had crossed her mind often in the past when she felt his life was in danger. How would she tell the children? How would the twins survive, growing up without a father? Would they be damaged in some way? She wondered about the funeral arrangements. Would there be some sort of Memorial Service for him, graced by various forgers and burglars and a whole host of characters Francis had saved from prison or the gallows? And where would he want to be buried, laid to rest? She suspected if she were honest that he might like to join his parents in a Powerscourt grave in a Protestant cemetery in his native Ireland. Then I could not be with him at the end, she said to herself, we’d end up in different cemeteries hundreds of miles apart and I couldn’t bear it. For the first time that day she began to cry.

It was a short paragraph in the newspapers that did it. Nathaniel Colville was just finishing his breakfast when it caught his eye. He was to tell friends later that it was almost a miracle he saw it at all for he scarcely bothered to read the newspapers any more. ‘Trouble at wine merchant’ the headline said. It was part of a daily column that conveyed slightly gossipy information to its readers. ‘We are given to understand,’ Nathaniel read on, ‘that times are not easy for the firm of Colvilles where one of the partners has been murdered and the other is awaiting trial for the deed in Pentonville prison. No figure of substance has, as yet, appeared to take their place in the direction of the firm.’

Nathaniel put down his piece of toast. Trouble at wine merchant indeed. No figure of substance. It was monstrous. There was nothing a man could sue for but the innuendoes were as broad as daylight. The man could almost have put his message up in lights at Piccadilly Circus. Nathaniel shouted for his dog and set forth to walk off his wrath in the back garden. This garden had once been the envy of the other Colvilles. It was enormous. There was a tennis court on one side and a croquet lawn on the other. Banks of roses used to circle the vast expanse of grass. Ranks of fruit trees and bushes were organized at the bottom. Flowers whose names Nathaniel never knew came up every year to grace his garden. Now the senior gardener was on his last legs and the younger one was not much better. He was over seventy and while the spirit might have been willing the flesh was undoubtedly weak. If you knew where to look you could usually spot him asleep in the early afternoons, snoring quietly behind the raspberries. The grass on the tennis court was overgrown, baselines and tram lines scarcely visible now. It was almost halfway up the croquet hoops on the other side, so deep that the balls themselves would have been hard to see. Nathaniel’s dog Bacchus much preferred the wilderness to the order that had prevailed before. He would disappear into the wilder sections of the garden and leap up and down in pursuit of insects. Nathaniel decided this morning that his garden had become the mirror image of his life. Lack of organization. Bad planning. No strategic direction. The problems here were the same as those at the firm. Trouble at wine merchant indeed! Damn the journalists! Damn the newspapers! I may be seventy-two years old, Nathaniel said to himself, but I’m not too ancient to get on top of things. I’m going to pay off these two old fellows and employ some new gardeners. I’m going to put on my best suit and hat and go down to Colvilles this very morning. I’m going to take charge. And I’m going to find somebody to help me in the meantime. And then I’ll find some bright young fellow from some other firm to come and run the place. Colvilles were not born to provide idle tittle-tattle in the financial pages.

He strode back to his house and scribbled a short note. A footman was despatched to deliver it to the Chelsea residence of Sir Pericles Freme. Nathaniel had known him years ago and though he might not be able to secure his services full-time Freme could still join the board of Colvilles in an advisory capacity. He would not be alone. Nathaniel Colville had never felt happy doing business alone. All his life he had worked closely with his brother Walter. Now he would have a new companion in arms.

An hour later Nathaniel and Sir Pericles were installed in the Colville Head Office They brought with them an air of confidence, of experience. These were men who knew what they were doing. Inside forty-eight hours morale had improved dramatically. Colvilles, people in the trade said, are back in business.

Powerscourt slept surprisingly well in his hospital cell. He awoke to find that the outlines of a plan were forming in his mind. He rejected his first option, bribery. He had in his pocket as many francs as a warder here might earn in six months. The warder might help him escape, or he might tell the authorities and then Powerscourt would be a marked man, locked up somewhere even more forbidding, the knock-out drops in his daily medicine increased to a giant’s dose. He wondered at first about violence, about why nobody attacked the warders, about the violence that might be needed to overpower the guard and steal his keys. Surely some of the prisoners must be big and burly, bodies strengthened by years of manual labour, well able to overcome a warder before breakfast. Then he remembered the knock-out medicines. What had the warder said to him yesterday evening? ‘This’ll calm you down, it calms everybody down.’ The hospital authorities must have worked out how much medicine was needed to incapacitate every size and shape of patient they were likely to encounter. Maybe they had a book full of details with patients calibrated by age, weight, height, occupation. Extra large doses for blacksmiths and prize fighters. They didn’t have to worry, the authorities, about violence from the inmates. The madmen were incapable of it. Powerscourt tried to work out if that huge key ring the man carried contained the keys for all the doors in the hospital. He remembered from the way in that he had gone straight from the reception area to the third floor without any gates or barriers in the way. Did the man have the key to the front door? If not, did he have the key of some other exit, back door, side door, tradesmen’s entrance, madmen’s gate?

Lady Lucy’s breakfast consisted of warm croissants and jam and delicious hot chocolate. Her husband’s consisted of a hard roll and a glass of cold water. Powerscourt managed not to swallow the medicine again, but he knew he would not be able to keep this up for very long. The morning warder was different from the one he had talked to the evening before. He too was old, leading Powerscourt to speculate that they might be able to pay the elder ones less than the younger men. But sooner or later a more watchful warder would keep looking at him to make sure he had swallowed his dose or ask him to open his mouth. He would have to escape today or it might be too late. Evening would be better than daytime. It was dark between five and six in Burgundy in November. The last round of medicine came at about half past five. Powerscourt settled down to wait. He lay on his bed and tried to remember as much as he could about the journey to his cell the day before, about the locks on the front door. If he had known then what he knew now he would have taken a much greater interest in his surroundings. He wondered if they were given any exercise in this French prison. He saw in his mind’s eye one of those enclosed courtyards so dear to the hearts of English prison architects where the inmates trudged round and round under the watchful eyes of the guards in a ghastly arabesque, not allowed to speak to each other, unable to see anything of the real world except the stone blocks of their prison house and the little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky. Lunch time came and a further round of medicine, once more deposited in the bucket when the guard had left.

Powerscourt was now thinking about a weapon. He had his fists, of course, and they might well suffice to incapacitate the warder. He tried swinging the bed without the mattress but it was cumbersome and slow. He lay down once more and thought about his problem. His first plan had involved taking the warder’s uniform as a disguise on his way out of the hospital but he wasn’t sure one man without a weapon could force another to remove the outer layer of his clothes. The keys? Were they heavy enough to threaten a man’s face? Would they be credible? How about the belt? He wondered what they would do to him if he beat up a warder and didn’t manage to escape. He didn’t like to think about that. Shortly after lunch he lay down on his bed once more and made plans for his future.

Lady Lucy certainly had a more varied morning than her husband. A cable from William Burke arrived shortly after breakfast, informing her that Johnny Fitzgerald and Charles Augustus Pugh had been informed of her husband’s disappearance. Johnny Fitzgerald, he reported, had set off immediately for Beaune and hoped to be there late the following day. Burke had taken it upon himself to telephone Lord Rosebery, a close friend of the Powerscourt family and a former Prime Minister. Rosebery had hurried round to his old stomping ground, the Foreign Office. Shortly before eleven o’clock a telephone call from the British Embassy in Paris informed Lady Lucy that a Second Secretary was setting off for Beaune within the hour. Half an hour after that a handsome young French police inspector arrived and took from Lady Lucy all the details she could remember about her husband’s last hours in Beaune. He would begin his inquiries, he told her, with the Hospices de Beaune. A cousin of his was a sister in the hospital and should be able to help. Lady Lucy marvelled at all this movement and activity marshalled on her behalf. She suspected that Francis would manage his escape all on his own.

The light was beginning to fade and Powerscourt began to laugh. A visitor from the external world might have deduced that this one was indeed mad, pacing the floor of his twelve foot by eight cell, peering occasionally out of the window. And laughing. Perhaps he needed some medicine. In fact Powerscourt had just realized something about the keys on the warder’s ring. There had just been time that morning for Powerscourt to see a row of medicine phials on the trolley he brought with him. That surely meant that the warder had the keys to all the doors that held the patients on this floor due to take their daily dose. That also meant that once Powerscourt had the keys he could open all the other doors. He could let the patients out and lead a great escape, a mass break-out from the Maison d’Alienes. It would be tremendous. Then he wondered how wise it would be to release a band of lunatics into the French countryside. Maybe some of them were capable of violence or worse. Then he told himself that the rapists and the vicious criminals would be held in a prison rather than locked up in the Maison de Fous. And if the patients he might liberate were really mentally ill, wandering in their wits, paranoid, not sure who they were, would it be fair to those patients to return them to the hostile world that had caused them to break down in the first place? Would he have a better chance of success on his own or with a platoon of the insane for company?

The Second Secretary from the British Embassy in Paris arrived at Lady Lucy’s hotel in time for tea. He was a most fashionable young man, discreetly fashionable, Lady Lucy thought, surveying the expensive shirt and the slim gold cuff links and the highly polished shoes. She wondered if he did the polishing himself. Perhaps there was a sort of shoe-shine wallah inside the Embassy retained to ensure that the British diplomatic corps had the brightest footwear in Paris. He took a small cup of lemon tea with Lady Lucy, Piers Montagu, before departing for the Town Hall and the Mayor. He firmly believed, he told Lady Lucy, that the Mayor held the key to all French towns and cities. He was a strategic point, said Piers, in the manner of the Chateau of Hougoumont at the Battle of Waterloo. Hold the Chateau, or the Mayor, and success was assured.

The young Inspector learnt little from the sister at the Hotel Dieu. Nobody had seen any of the people involved in the chase the previous day before. They were all strangers. They could not be citizens of Beaune, surely, or we would have seen them about the town. You would not forget the man with no teeth for instance or the round man who was his companion. During the afternoon the policeman rang round some places in Beaune where the stranger might have been seen, the hotels, the restaurants, such chambres d’hote as were on the telephone. There were no reports of an English milord anywhere. He rang the Maison d’Alienes only because it was on the approved list of places to call in the hunt for missing persons. The administrative office told him that there had only been one new admission in the previous twenty-four hours, a Burgundy peasant called Albert Bouchet.

Emily Colville had turned into a different person. Or rather, Emily thought she had turned into a different person, a better person. It had all started with a present, a present from Montague, brought home from town one cold evening some weeks before. It was unusual for Montague to give presents, and even more unusual for him to give a present of this sort. It was oblong, and quite heavy, and seemed to Emily as her fingers crossed over the slight gaps in the surface to be in three different parts.

‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’ Montague asked with a smile.

‘Of course,’ she replied, and worked her way to three volumes of a book called Middlemarch written by somebody called George Eliot. It was the first time she had ever seen her husband with a book.

‘Have you read this?’ she asked her husband.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Montague, ‘my great aunt Philippa thought you might like it.’

‘Great Aunt Philippa, I see,’ said Emily. She had only met this great aunt once, an old lady more interested in the arts than in the world of commerce. This Philippa thought that life with Montague might be a little dull for a quick intelligent girl like Emily. George Eliot might fill the gap for a while. But George Eliot had done more than fill the gap. George Eliot made a convert. The new Emily longed to be good. She held imaginary conversations with Dorothea Brooke. The prize of goodness was always in her sights. And when she had finished Middlemarch, she told herself, she would be twice as good after reading The Mill on the Floss, twice as good again after Felix Holt, The Radical. A great parade of virtue stretched out before her now.

By nightfall Powerscourt was ready. He had managed to tear his sheets into strips that could be used if necessary to tie the warder up. He had placed his bed underneath the window. He had very few advantages in this business. Darkness might be one of them. He waited on the far side of the door. Over the next forty minutes he prayed that the warder would continue the pattern set by all of them on their rounds, morning or evening. Find the key. You could hear the clinking on the other side of the wall. Put it in the keyhole. Turn it in the lock. Open the door. Turn back to your trolley. Pick up the medicine. Come into the room. Powerscourt would be waiting.

He felt nervous, as he used to feel nervous before a battle. In this encounter he had only one chance. There would only be five or ten seconds where he had to get it right. If he failed, he dreaded to think what might happen to him. Maybe they would transfer him to some other ghastly hospital and Lady Lucy would not know he had gone.

He heard the keys jangling now. Not his door, but the one next door. There was a brief conversation while the man took his medicine. Then the key went back in the door. Powerscourt’s turn now. Open the door and look inside. Powerscourt saw that his guess had been right. The warder took a couple of steps into the room and stood still, staring into the gloom. The door, kicked by Powerscourt using both feet with all his force from a sitting position on the ground, caught him full in the face. The warder began to fall backwards into the corridor. In a second Powerscourt was on him, pulling him back into the cell, slamming the man’s head into the wall until he passed out and slumped to the floor. Powerscourt checked he was still alive – death and the guillotine had little appeal – and closed the door. He taped up the warder’s mouth so any calls for assistance would not be heard. He pulled off the jacket and the belt with the keys. Getting the trousers off the warder was incredibly difficult for a man on his own. Powerscourt remembered some funeral attendant telling him once how difficult it was to undress the dead. At last he had the trousers to go with the jacket. The warder began making faint groaning noises as if he might be about to wake up. Powerscourt used up his last two sections of sheet and tied up his wrists and his ankles. He put on his new clothes and inspected the keys. Then he stepped into the corridor and locked what had been his door. ‘You’ll find the bucket in the corner,’ he whispered to the trussed warder before he left. He had decided against liberating any of his fellow inmates. They might start singing on their way to the front door or wander off on their own. Indiscipline, he thought, might be rife in the ranks of the alienes. He pushed the trolley down the corridor until he came to the stairs. Each floor, he saw, had a trolley of its own, waiting for the staff to place their trays. He wondered how many patients would miss their evening dose. Then he remembered that there was, according to the warder, a fifteen-minute gap at his cell between the medicine and the evening meal. He had less than ten minutes to get out.

He made his way down the stairs carefully, listening intently for any movement from somebody in authority. Occasional groans drifted out into the corridor from distressed inmates, more aliene than their fellows. He was on the first-floor landing now, a small window with bars on at the end facing the outside world. Down the last flight of stairs, tiptoe to the front door, inspect the keys. He had one key with the legend Front Door on its tag. There were three locks in the door. He unlocked the central lock which he hoped might be the main one. The door did not open. Growing slightly frantic he tried his key in the other locks in the hope that one key might be able to open all three. It couldn’t. Powerscourt tried pushing the door but it did not move an inch. The bolts at the top and bottom were still undone. Somebody must come along later to draw them. Would the somebody have the keys as well?

He heard voices now. One of them was shouting. ‘Jean, Jean, where the devil are you? The supper’s ready to go round. Come along, for God’s sake.’

Powerscourt didn’t think Jean was going to wake up very soon. He wondered if they would realize what had happened to their fellow warder, that they would have to open the doors of every single cell until they found him. It seemed possible to Powerscourt that they would assume Jean had gone home early, or had been taken ill and gone to lie down somewhere. Maybe they wouldn’t realize he was locked in one of the cells, unable to speak, and in that case they wouldn’t come looking for him. A prisoner escaping was just impossible. It had never happened before.

The events of the next ten minutes confirmed to Powerscourt that they had no idea that one of their charges was at large. They shouted messages for Jean, some of them rather rude, and they returned to their own quarters. Powerscourt crept into the room where the doctor had talked to him, close to the front door. Even in here the windows were barred. He padded round the room, removing a doctor’s white coat from a hook on the door and some bandages from a drawer in the desk. To the side of the window was an enormous closet, large enough to hold a man. There was a bathroom to the side and from a little window in there Powerscourt had a view of the path leading up to the main gate. His plan now depended on somebody coming up to the front door and being able to open it. He put on his doctor’s coat and felt safer inside it. He put a couple of large pens in the top pocket. He put a stethoscope round his neck just in case. Everything in here depends on the colour of your clothes, he said to himself. Dress or be dressed in pale green and they’ll pour medicine down your throat two or three times a day. Pale blue and you’re a warder with vast powers over the patients. But a white coat? You’re virtually God.

He checked the time on the clock on the wall. The bastards had taken his watch and he didn’t think now was an ideal time to ask for it back. It had probably been sold already somewhere in the back streets of Beaune. Eight minutes to eight. He thought any more staff clocking on would come on the hour or the half-hour. Maybe a few minutes earlier to be on the safe side. Peering out of the bathroom window, Powerscourt saw that nothing moved for now. There was nobody in sight. He wondered if he should explore other parts of the hospital in search of windows with no bars or doors with no keys. He decided against because he might open a door on to a room full of warders and be sent straight back to the cells with extra dosage for having knocked out Jean. He checked that he could breathe if he was concealed inside the cupboard for a while.

Eight fifteen came. Eight thirty. Powerscourt was back on duty at the bathroom window, rubbing at the glass from time to time. He wondered about Lady Lucy and hoped she was bearing up. He hoped she had remembered to send a message to William Burke. If anybody could organize reinforcements it was Burke. Powerscourt thought his brother-in-law would have made a most efficient adjutant in the Army. He wondered about the theory that had brought them to France. It didn’t seem that important now, he told himself, until he remembered the forthcoming trial of Cosmo Colville on a capital charge.

At twenty to nine he heard footsteps. But they were on the inside, the footsteps, not outside, and there were voices too. Two people were heading for the front door. Powerscourt had a split second to make his decision. He waited until he saw the door opening. He patted the stethoscope round his neck and fastened his coat buttons all the way to the top and strode out into the corridor.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, ‘time to go home at last, I see. Even we doctors must rest.’ He was halfway out the door now, one of the men busy with keys in the locks.

‘Good evening, doctor,’ the men said in unison, peeling off to the side of the building to pick up their bicycles.

Powerscourt didn’t risk any more conversation. He was out. He was free. It had been brief, his stay in the Maison des Alienes, but it had been one of the more disagreeable experiences of his life. That and the monstrous pressoir where you felt your limbs could be crushed at any moment. A few stars were visible in the night sky. The two cyclists must have gone in the other direction, away from Beaune, south towards Chalon sur Saone. In the distance the low hills of Burgundy were dark against the night. Powerscourt felt glad to be breathing proper air again after the stale fug back in the hospital. Looking behind him he could just make out its great bulk, dark except for a couple of lighted windows on the ground floor. Ahead, over to his left, was Beaune and Lady Lucy and a welcome in a French hotel. He was just enjoying a mental glass of beer when the world behind him went mad. All the lights in the hospital had been turned on. Darkness was banished from every floor. A powerful bell was ringing continuously as if the Maison d’Alienes was an ocean liner in distress. ‘Man the lifeboats! We’ve struck an iceberg!’

Powerscourt wondered if they would send out a search party of warders. Either Jean had made his escape, or the two on the bicycles had returned to the asylum to reveal that they had met a strange man pretending to be a doctor at the front door. He could just see three figures emerging from the door and come trotting after him. Powerscourt wrapped his white coat round his waist and ran as fast as he could towards Beaune, checking behind him as he went. The gap appeared to be closing. He was in the street that led out of the town now. He plunged into the side streets, aiming for where he thought the centre of Beaune should be. He felt in his pocket for his money. It was still there. He saw a sign for the station and hurried towards it. Surely stations would have taxis in them, even this late. He put his white coat back on. Now he was in the station square, great puffs of smoke rising into the night sky from the Paris express. As he made his way towards it he crossed the path of a group of six gendarmes, commanded by a sergeant.

‘Forgive me, doctor,’ said the sergeant, ‘there is an escaped lunatic at large. He made his way out of the Maison de Fous back there. Forty years of age or thereabouts. Brown hair. Have you seen such a man, doctor?’

‘I do believe I might have seen him just now, sergeant. Running away from Beaune on the Chalon road. If you’re quick, you’ll catch him. Good luck!’

The sergeant and his men marched off at the double. Dr Powerscourt hurried off to the station and hailed the first cab he saw. ‘Hotel des Ducs de Bourgogne, if you please,’ he said, sinking into the red upholstery. As the cab rattled its way north into the town, Powerscourt saw yet more Beaune policemen marching towards the asylum. Even here you could still hear the bell.

He gave the cabbie a generous tip. ‘Would you like to earn some easy money, monsieur?’ he said, riffling through a bundle of French banknotes.

‘Of course,’ said the cabbie, ‘but not if I have to break the law and go to prison.’

‘You need have no fear on that score. All you have to do is to forget that you brought me here. If anybody should ask, say nothing. Deny it. Here.’

Powerscourt handed over the equivalent of a week’s earnings if not more.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the cabbie. He held his finger to his lips. ‘Mum’s the word.’