Death Called to the Bar (11 page)

‘Look again,’ he replied. ‘He’s not laughing, he’s smiling. And look at his clothes. No indication he’s a cavalier at all. Just the name stuck.’

Sarah looked round the gallery. The place was going to close in ten minutes’ time and they were the last people there apart from a solitary curator lost in his own thoughts in the far
corner.

‘Last picture, Sarah. Another portrait. Different story.’ Edward led her ten yards away from the Laughing Cavalier and stopped in front of another young man. He had a head ringed
with dark brown curls and a dull red beret on top. His face was pale and handsome. He was looking slightly to the left of the painter. The young man wore a dark brown robe with a gold chain. Some
people thought they detected a hint of a smile on his red lips. Others felt he had more serious matters on his mind.

‘Titus,’ said Edward gravely, moving back a few yards to get a different view. ‘Titus Rembrandt. Terribly sad story. Titus’s mother dead. Rembrandt married again.
Rembrandt declared bankrupt the year before. Rembrandt not able to sell any pictures. The Dutch people in Amsterdam didn’t care for them, didn’t commission any. God in heaven.
It’s as if the English abandoned Shakespeare. Under the rules of the guild, Titus and the second Mrs Rembrandt had to administer the production of his etchings and the sale of his paintings.
It’s terrible.’

Sarah noticed that Edward was speaking in perfect sentences now and that he was more animated than she had ever seen him.

‘There’s worse,’ he said. ‘Much worse. The second Mrs Rembrandt died. Then Titus died. This Titus here, the boy in the painting, died before his father. Rembrandt had to
bury his own son.’ Sarah thought there might be a tear in the corner of his eye now as he recounted the various disasters that befell the great painter.

‘When Rembrandt died, one of the finest painters who ever lived, all he left were some old clothes and his painting equipment. How very sad! So if anybody ever says to you, Sarah, that the
Dutch produced some great painters, that is perfectly true. They also turned their back on the greatest.’

Ten minutes later Edward and Sarah were eating their first muffins in the Powerscourt drawing room. Olivia was there, and Thomas, and both twins, fast asleep. Listening to all
these young voices, Olivia asking Sarah what it was like working in an Inn, Thomas discussing football teams with Edward, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of all of them, Powerscourt found it hard
to believe that he earned his living investigating violent death and that his latest victim had been poisoned as he tucked into his beetroot soup. After tea they all trooped off to inspect the new
typewriter. Sarah pronounced it an excellent model and astonished the children by typing perfectly coherent sentences as she looked over her shoulder. Olivia made her do it again with her eyes
closed. Touch typing, Sarah explained, meant that you knew where all the keys were automatically so you didn’t have to look down to find the letter you wanted. Both Thomas and Olivia thought
it was a form of witchcraft or magic. Powerscourt wondered how long it would take to learn. He suspected that the young policeman had already mastered it.

‘I want to ask your advice, Lucy,’ he said when Edward and Sarah had gone and their own children had departed to the upper floors.

‘Of course, Francis. Whatever you want.’

‘I’ve been thinking about the Dauntseys and their lack of children. I have no idea if it has anything to do with this investigation. Can you tell me what it would mean to Elizabeth
Dauntsey, knowing you couldn’t have children?’

Lady Lucy looked at a child’s picture book left lying on the sofa.

‘I’m sure you know as well as I do, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think it must have been absolutely frightful. I presume she didn’t go into any details of what the
doctors told them. I presume they have no idea who is at fault, although fault is the wrong word completely and I take it back.’ She bent down to pick up a diminutive teddy bear, bought for
one of the twins, sitting upright against a side table.

‘Guilt,’ she went on. ‘I think you’d blame yourself for not being able to have children. I think you’d feel incomplete without them, that you hadn’t fulfilled
your duty by being a mother. Every time you went out into the streets and saw all kinds of people, people with less money than you, people with less taste than you, people uglier than you, people
stupider than you, carrying their children about or holding their hands as they learn to walk or watching them run about in the park, why, it would nearly break your heart. When you went to stay
with people you would have to watch others getting their children up in the morning or reading them bedtime stories at night, it would be awful, just awful. You don’t think we’ve got
too many, Francis, do you?’

‘Too many what, Lucy?’ said Powerscourt who had been thinking of Elizabeth Dauntsey going through Lucy’s litany of misery.

‘Too many children.’

‘No,’ said Powerscourt firmly. ‘Four isn’t very many between us. Two each. Lots of people have more than that, ten twelve, fifteen, imagine fifteen of them, Lucy, you
could scarcely remember all their names. But tell me, is there anything a woman in such a predicament might try?’

‘I don’t understand, Francis,’ said Lucy, looking confused.

‘Might she try to get pregnant by a different man?’

‘And pass the child off as her husband’s?’ Lady Lucy looked as though she found the conversation distasteful. ‘Well, she might, I’m sure that’s been done
often enough in the past. Risky though, if the husband finds out. Or I’ve heard of people who go abroad for nine months or a year and come back with a child they say is theirs. It may be
adopted, or the husband may have paid some other woman to have his child and then they pass it off as theirs. At least half the genes will be right that way.’

Powerscourt remembered what Elizabeth Dauntsey had said about her husband’s love of Calne, his feeling for its past and its future. A man with that sense of historical continuity would
find the lack of heirs more distressing than most.

‘It must have been pretty frightful for Dauntsey too,’ Powerscourt said. ‘That place meant so much to him, that sense of it belonging to Dauntseys past, Dauntseys present and
Dauntseys future. Only there might not be any future, or a different future peopled by relations, your own flesh and blood of course, but not your own issue.’

Lady Lucy smiled at him. ‘I always think issue is such a dreadful word, Francis. It’s a lawyer’s word, beginning halfway down the first page of some dreary document about
inheritance or something.’

‘Sorry,’ said Powerscourt. He was struck once more by the image of Elizabeth Dauntsey in her slim elegance gliding through the deserted drawing rooms and empty galleries of Calne,
hoping maybe to find inspiration in the portraits of the ancestors who lined the walls. ‘Dauntsey could have had an illegitimate child with some other woman,’ he continued,
‘somebody he could maybe adopt or make his heir later on. That chap whose widow left the Wallace Collection to the nation, he was illegitimate, but he was still able to inherit the lot. I
don’t think, forgive me, that he’d want to breed from any old stock. I can’t see Alexander Dauntsey hoping to produce his heir with some common female who was prepared to bear his
child for money.’ Powerscourt paused and looked closely at the teddy bear. Already it was beginning to show signs of wear and tear, from the twins or Olivia. The fur on one arm had almost
disappeared as if some strange disease had struck. One eye was slightly out of position, giving the bear a rather sinister aspect as if it was looking in two directions at once.

‘I can’t very well advertise in the newspapers, Lucy, can I? Would anybody involved with the late Alexander Dauntsey, especially in a child-bearing capacity, please get in touch with
Francis Powerscourt, of Manchester Square?’

Lady Lucy shook her head. She knew what was coming. In a number of his previous investigations Lady Lucy had activated for her husband the vast tribe of her relations to report on particular
individuals, whether they had fallen out with their wives or husbands, whether they were having affairs, who had been jilted in love. Powerscourt attributed the success of the venture to one
important difference between the sexes. Women, he believed, were more curious than men. Women liked gossip more than men. What else were institutions like hairdressers’ and ladies’
luncheon clubs for, in heaven’s name. Women were more interested in human relationships, their rise, their decline and fall, their occasional recoveries. Women, in his view – and he did
not condemn them for these characteristics – were able to talk, gossip, if you will, about a particular topic or person or relationship for hours longer than their male counterparts. The
final proof of his theory, in Powerscourt’s view, had been given to him by one of London’s leading booksellers, who informed him that women outnumbered men by a factor of four to one in
the purchase of the novels of Miss Jane Austen.

‘Do you think, Lucy, that you could rouse the team? Bring them out of retirement or wherever they’ve been to report on Elizabeth and Alexander Dauntsey? Not a clarion call, not a
drumbeat, just a whisper, it all needs to be very quiet. I don’t suppose any of your relations live anywhere near Calne, Lucy?’

Lady Lucy blushed slightly. ‘I’m afraid, Francis, that I have a second cousin twice removed who lives on the other side of Maidstone. Her husband is very rich, something in the City,
I think. I’m sure they move in the same circles as the Dauntseys.’

‘Put the word out, please,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and holding his wife by the hands. ‘What do you say to dinner out, Lucy? It’s all those young people we
had here earlier on this afternoon. I’m feeling quite reinvigorated.’

Powerscourt and Chief Inspector Beecham were greeted by a bizarre sight when they went to meet Joseph the steward in the Hall on the Tuesday morning after Edward and
Sarah’s tea in Manchester Square. The top half of the tables were roughly laid out with knife, fork and spoon. Each place had its own wine glass. And circulating round this phantom feast were
the waiters who had served at the real one. It was, Powerscourt thought, like looking at the three ages of man. The old boys were back, swaying slightly as they carried round their dishes of
imaginary vegetables, the veteran nearest Powerscourt with a face that looked like a parchment map. The regular staff of the Inn, middle-aged mostly, looked as if they served imaginary guests every
day of their lives. The young men, two of whom did not look to be properly awake yet, were carrying bowls full of imaginary soup, or filling glasses with water Joseph had put in empty wine bottles.
Powerscourt thought the prospect of it being turned into wine were slim.

‘I thought this would get them into the swing of things,’ said Joseph cheerfully, emptying a couple of wine glasses into a bucket. ‘I’ve told them all to be ready to
answer questions in a few minutes.’

Chief Inspector Beecham had gone to Dauntsey’s place and sat down in it, looking carefully at the passing waiters.

‘Gather round!’ said Joseph and a macabre circle assembled round the place of the poisoned bencher. ‘Lord Powerscourt!’ He introduced him like a major-domo.

‘Thank you all very much for coming in today,’ he began. ‘I know it can’t have been easy for you. Now, do any of you remember anything about the feast? About Mr
Dauntsey’s death?’

There was a certain amount of shuffling and then one of the regular waiters spoke up. ‘We’ve talked about this a lot, my lord, on the night itself and earlier this morning. We
don’t see how the poor gentleman could have been poisoned at the feast. They started with that terrine. We took the plates up to the High Table and nobody could have known which one was going
to Mr Dauntsey, no one at all. Then there was the soup, my lord. How are you meant to put a drop of poison into a bowl of soup when you’re carrying two at a time? It’s not possible.
Same with the wine, you don’t know whose glass you’re going to refill when you collect a fresh bottle from the wine room. If you wanted to kill the whole lot of them’ –
Powerscourt suspected this might be the preferred option for this particular waiter from the vehemence with which he said it – ‘that would be easier. The cook slips the poison into the
soup and off you go. Or you add something special to half a dozen bottles of wine and finish them off like that. But one person, no, not possible.’

The waiter stared at them rather defiantly, as if he thought they would contest his findings. They did not.

‘First class,’ said Chief Inspector Beecham. ‘We agree with every word of that.’

It is a rare, almost impossible event for an investigator like Lord Francis Powerscourt to come face to face with the man whose death he is investigating, for the living, as it
were, to meet the dead. But it was happening now, the day after the phantom feast in the Hall. Edward had been the midwife to the meeting.

‘New benchers,’ he said cryptically to Powerscourt, ‘always have portrait done. Hangs in Hall or library.’ Now Edward mentioned it, Powerscourt remembered seeing some of
these portraits displayed in prominent positions. He recalled, in particular, the two full-length Gainsboroughs of previous benchers behind Alexander Dauntsey in the Hall on the night of the feast.
‘Painter man wants to see somebody from Inn. Check he’s got the details right.’

Powerscourt and Edward were walking along the Mall that runs from Hammersmith Bridge along the river in the direction of Chiswick. Some of the houses were recent but there were also some fine
eighteenth-century specimens looking out over the Thames. Number 35, The Terrace, Powerscourt learned, was where their painter lived, a man by the name of Stone, Nathaniel Stone.

‘Who the hell are you? What the devil do you want? Why can’t you leave me alone?’ This violent reaction to Edward ringing the bell came from a small red-bearded man with angry
eyes, wearing a painter’s apron now stained with all the colours of the rainbow and a few more besides.

‘My name is Powerscourt,’ said Powerscourt in his most authoritative voice, ‘and this is my friend Edward. We have come from Queen’s Inn about the portrait of Mr
Dauntsey. As you probably know, Mr Dauntsey is dead but the Inn still wants his portrait.’