Death Called to the Bar (10 page)

‘I take it, sir, that you don’t wish to see the cellars on this occasion?’ Marshall spoke for the first time as they descended yet another oak staircase, dust sheets on the
ornate banisters, rough matting on the floor. Powerscourt had a sudden nightmare vision of Goliath-sized shadows flitting across abandoned wine racks, of discarded pieces of furniture, sharp at the
edges, lying in wait for the unwary, of cobwebs and spiders brushing across his face, of dirt and grime and smell and squalor.

‘You are quite right, Marshall,’ said Powerscourt, now deposited outside Elizabeth Dauntsey’s doorway once again. ‘Thank you very much.’

Powerscourt thanked Mrs Dauntsey profusely for her time and her insights into her husband. She thanked him for his visit and said she hoped he would feel free to come again if he thought she
could help. But it was the handshake Powerscourt remembered most vividly as he set off back towards the station. It had been cold, her hand, and the grip firm, but it seemed to him, or was it just
his imagination, that the grip meant more than it seemed to say. Quite what that might be, he did not know. But he did feel that at some point in the future it might be necessary, if not vital, to
return to Calne and shake Mrs Dauntsey by the hand once again. Most of all, he fretted about the children that were not there.

I wonder if she’ll come, Edward said to himself. He checked his watch again. She was ten minutes late already. Edward had placed himself at the top of the drive that led
into the Wallace Collection, a famous collection of paintings, armour and furniture in Manchester Square. He had sent Sarah Henderson a note the day before asking her to join him here at three
o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. She had dropped in to see him on her way home and said she would be delighted. Powerscourt, who had appointed himself to a position of unofficial godfather
to the attachment and the meeting, had insisted that the pair should come to tea at his house in Number 8 Manchester Square. He had, he told Edward, recently purchased a typewriting machine and
would be grateful for an expert opinion on the instrument.

Sarah had not intended to be late. Perhaps her mother had planned it. For just as Sarah was about to set off for the distant quarters of Marylebone and the Wallace Collection, her mother
suddenly announced that she had run out of one set of pills. It would be all right, she said, if Sarah got them on Monday, but then she might be in agony for the rest of the weekend. Maybe, maybe,
Sarah could find the time to pop down to the chemist’s and collect the medicine this afternoon. Surely her other engagement couldn’t take precedence over her mother’s health.
Fuming quietly under her breath, cursing her brother and sister for having escaped the drudgery and the intensity of their Acton home, Sarah walked as fast as she could to the chemist, but it was
fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes home again. When she got back her mother calmly informed her that she was now so late it was hardly worth while going. Nobody would wait that long. Sarah
might as well stop at home and read to her mother from one of the weekly magazines. Sarah smiled sweetly, said she would see her mother later and fled to the smoky embrace of the District Line.

Some people might have wondered how Sarah reconciled her earlier resolve to have nothing to do with her colleagues at work with an afternoon tryst with a young man, even if he seldom spoke. That
had not proved too difficult. For a start, she told herself, most of the men she had been warned against on her secretarial course were older. They were married. They had families. Edward fitted
into none of those categories. Anyway, she thought, Edward was perfectly harmless. Everybody knew that.

It was only after about fifteen minutes delay that Edward began to grow seriously worried. I’ll go at twenty past, he said to himself. Twenty past came and went and Edward was still there.
There were vague rumours, nothing substantiated, nothing Edward would ever have allowed any of the men he devilled for to take into court, but rumours nonetheless that Sarah’s mother was ill
and liable to be difficult. Half past came and half past went. Edward was reluctant to abandon the afternoon because he had arrived two hours early. He had spent them learning about the story of
the collection and about the most famous of the pictures. He had astonished himself by asking one of the curators two questions about one of the Fragonards. And on his afternoon vigil, he could
console himself with surreptitious glances at the Powerscourt house and wonder about what was going on inside. He hoped he might meet the other twin this time, but then he wondered if he, an
outsider, would be able to tell the two of them apart.

‘Edward, I’m so sorry.’ Sarah was out of breath and put a hand briefly on Edward’s arm as if to slow herself down. ‘I’m so glad you waited.’ All the way
there on the trains Sarah had been wondering if Edward would write her little notes, as he had with the invitation, or would he actually speak? He spoke.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, escorting her to a wooden bench just outside the house. ‘We’ll go in when you’re ready.’

Sarah wanted to say Well Done. Nine consecutive words from Edward in Queen’s Inn would be a day’s portion, if not a week’s. Now it was tumbling out.

‘Have you been here before, Edward? Can you tell me about the place?’

Sarah watched as Edward collected his thoughts. She wondered if he had realized how much conversation might be involved on this sort of afternoon. Or had he thought they would peer at the
pictures in silence?

‘Named after Sir Richard Wallace. Illegitimate son of fourth Duke of Hertford.’ Edward had reverted to staccato prose once again. ‘All Hertfords collected pictures and things.
Wallace died. Left everything to wife. Wife lived here for last seven years of life. Famous for smoking black cheroots. On her death left all to the nation. Pictures and stuff, not cheroots. Now
here for ever.’

Sarah wondered about the black cheroots. Where had Edward found that out, she wondered? Once a deviller, she recalled, always a deviller. You could root out facts about art galleries as easily
as you could those about court cases.

‘Shall we go in? You’d better lead the way, Edward.’

Edward wondered if Sarah had been to this sort of establishment before. He was constantly amazed by the number of people who didn’t even know where the National Gallery was. He had planned
a route round some of the more dramatic pictures, the ones that should interest a newcomer. The armour he had resolved to ignore, and the furniture he would leave to the end. Edward was bored to
tears by armoires and escritoires and secretaires and writing tables and garderobes and commodes and wardrobes. He led them rapidly across the hall and into the Housekeeper’s Room.

‘This one,’ he whispered, ‘very bloody, but very dramatic. Painter French Romantic, name of Delacroix. Called
The Execution of Doge Marin Falier
.’

The painting showed the interior courtyard or loggia of a great Venetian palace. White marble stairs led up to a higher level. Lining the stairs and crowded round a figure at the top were
noblemen, some dressed in rich costumes. A beautifully dressed Moor with an orange headband stared into the courtyard below, as if he were expecting trouble. At the top a Venetian senator held
aloft a bloody sword. At the bottom of the steps, a few feet from the supercilious Moor, the headless body of the former Doge Marin Falier lay flat on the ground.

‘What’s going on, Edward? Why did this poor man have his head chopped off?’

‘Falier Doge of Venice. Meant to be constitutional ruler like our King Edward. Power very limited. Falier wanted to smash the constitution and make himself tyrant. Nobles found out. Nobles
cut his head off. Byron wrote poem about it. Byron fond of blood and gore. Painter probably knew poem. Painter also fond of blood and gore, probably fonder even than Byron.’

Sarah looked closely at Edward who was perspiring lightly from all this conversation. She hoped it wasn’t going to make him ill.

‘Going somewhere bit more peaceful now. Still Venice.’ Edward led the way into the small drawing room where a pair of unusually large Canalettos looked across the Basin of St Mark
from opposite directions. One showed the view from the mouth of the Giudecca Canal with the Customs House on the left out to Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The companion piece
looked out from the steps of San Giorgio back to the mouth of the Giudecca Canal. The water was pale green, the sky a light blue with fluffy clouds. Small groups of Venetians discussed their
business on the quays. Gondolas carried cloaked men and bales of cargo across the bay. A couple of sailing boats lurked at the edges of the picture. The great Venetian symbols, the Doge’s
Palace and the huge baroque dome of Santa Maria della Salute, reminded the viewer of the topography of the city. In both paintings there was an air of great calm as if Venice were at peace with
itself and the world, as if these scenes had existed for hundreds of years past and would go on for hundreds of years into the future.

Again that hand briefly on Edward’s arm. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Sarah. ‘I would so much like to go to Venice, wouldn’t you, Edward?’

Edward nodded. ‘English on Grand Tour bought Canalettos,’ he said, ‘like photographs on your holiday. Only in colour. Time for some froth and fluff now.’

So far, Edward hoped, Sarah had not realized how deliberate their itinerary was. Edward was taking them to the places where he had done his homework. If Sarah had wanted to stop in front of the
Greuzes or the Watteaus, Edward would have been lost for words. As it was he was heading straight for Fragonard.

‘
The Swing
,’ he said quietly. ‘Frenchman. Eighteenth-century. Name of Fragonard.’

In a dreamy forest of varying shades of green an attractive girl rode on a swing, dressed in layers of pink silk. Behind her, in the shade, an elderly gentleman in a dark green suit controlled
the strings of the swing. Convention dictated that he was her husband. And on the far side of the girl, who was hiding him from sight of her husband, stood a handsome young lover in a pale green
suit with a flower in his buttonhole, his hand stretched out towards the girl. One of her feet was much higher than the other on the swing, giving a view of her legs, and her slipper had fallen off
her foot and was flying upwards through the air.

‘Edward!’ said Sarah, giggling to herself. ‘Just look where that young man’s looking! You’re very naughty showing me this one, nearly as naughty as that girl in the
picture. Haven’t you anything more decent to show me?’

Edward smiled at her. ‘All right, Sarah. Not naughty, these ones. But fantastic all the same.’

Edward took her to the first-floor landing where the world of François Boucher awaited them. This was a world where the laws of gravity and reality, of time and space, had been suspended,
a world where naked gods rode chariots across the sky and semi-naked goddesses scattered pink roses among the clouds. Clothes were the exception in these fabulous landscapes although some scanty
shifts were included from time to time so the artist could show off his brushwork. There were putti everywhere, plump little cherubs rolling back clouds or performing arabesques in the sky or
gambolling playfully on the surface of the sea. Almost everything was subordinate to the naked female figure. A judgement of Paris was constructed in such a way as to give three different
perspectives on the female form, groups of nude women frolicked on the waves, a glorious naked Venus caressed her husband Vulcan, god of fire and armourer of the gods. These were the wilder
mythological poems of the wilder mythological poets translated on to canvas in shades of pale blue and pink and diaphanous green, a world of rococo and make believe and fantasy.

‘My goodness me,’ said Sarah, ‘how absolutely wonderful. I wouldn’t tell my mother this, Edward, but I like them, I really do. I think they’re marvellous. Are there
any more?’

Edward smiled. ‘Not here. Probably in National Gallery. Nothing else as exotic as Boucher here.’

Sarah lingered in front of the rising and the setting of the sun.

‘Boucher had important patron, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis the something or other,’ Edward whispered. ‘Kept wolf from door later on by designing tapestries
for royal tapestry factory.’

‘Where now, Edward?’

He led them halfway down the Great Gallery on the first floor, past a couple of sombre Van Dycks, a gorgeous full-length Gainsborough, and a sumptuous Rubens landscape. He stopped in front of a
young man with a turned-up moustache, an elegant black hat and very fashionable clothes. Even back in the seventeenth century painters were keen to show how versatile their brushwork could be. This
young man had a beautifully depicted ruff with a dark grey kerchief hanging from it, and a very intricate white cuff on a richly embroidered jacket. A faint smile played across his lips as if he
were thinking of a secret or a joke that only he and the painter knew. It all looked totally spontaneous as if the young man had walked in and parked himself on Franz Hals’s canvas the
afternoon before.

‘That’s the Laughing Cavalier,’ said Sarah knowledgeably. ‘Everybody knows him from the advertisements. Isn’t he by Franz somebody or other?’

‘Good,’ said Edward solemnly. ‘But work originally called
Portrait of a Young Man
. Franz Hals. Dutchman. Early sixteen hundreds.’

‘But why,’ asked Sarah, ‘do we call The chap The Laughing Cavalier?’

‘Painting up for sale,’ said Edward, now firmly back in cryptic mode, ‘forty or fifty years ago. Nobody paid much attention. Nobody heard much of Hals chap. Fourth Marquess of
Hertford takes a fancy to it. So does a Rothschild. Big battle in the auction rooms. Sells for six times its asking price. Newspapers drawn to battle between a Marquess and a Rothschild, supposed
to be as rich as Croesus. Laughing Cavalier makes better copy than
Portrait of a Young Man
. Not good title. Look carefully.’

Sarah inspected the gentleman on the wall carefully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see what you mean,’ she said, frowning slightly at Edward.