Death Called to the Bar (2 page)

Where on earth did this lot come from, Joseph said to himself, as he inspected his waiters for the day in the Great Hall. The Inn’s normal complement was insufficient for the numbers and
complexity of the feast. Recruitment of these worthies was not his responsibility, but that of the Head Porter, a man with whom Joseph did not share the most cordial of relations. Desperately he
tried to remember how he might have offended the Head Porter. It came to him in a flash. Three nights before there had been a drinks party for the benchers, an elaborate occasion graced with some
of the finest wines of the Queen’s cellars. Custom and practice dictated that two or three bottles from this occasion should have found their way to the Head Porter’s cupboard. Joseph
had genuinely forgotten. So here was the Head Porter’s revenge. Four boys who looked as though they were sixteen or so, an age which found it, as Joseph knew only too well, extraordinarily
difficult to stand still for more than two minutes at a time. Four old men, hovering, Joseph thought, somewhere between sixty and seventy. They might have been waiting at table long before the
Congress of Berlin, but they would need regular and repeated trips to the lavatories to see them through the evening. One of the old men, Joseph noticed to his horror, seemed to be nodding off on
his feet, asleep where he stood. If he could do that in the middle of the day, what, in God’s name, would the greybeard be like in the closing stages of the feast way after ten or even eleven
o’clock in the evening? Comatose in the buttery? Passed out, maybe even passed on, in the pantry?

Good generals know how much depends on their relations with their troops. Joseph would have liked to shout at this ludicrous collection of humanity but he knew it wouldn’t work. Charm,
kindness, that’s what’s needed here, he said to himself, I’ve only got to keep them on their toes for ten hours or so.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Joseph addressed his little army, his perfect teeth gleaming at the heart of his smile. ‘Tell me this, have you all waited at table for a feast like
this one before?’

There was a general chorus of affirmatives.

‘You,’ said Joseph, pointing dramatically to his eldest recruit, ‘you are serving vegetables that accompany the main course. Which side do you serve from?’

A pair of sleepy eyes gazed at Joseph, as if reproaching him for daring to ask such a question. ‘The left, sir.’

‘Excellent,’ said Joseph, flashing a smile at Methesulah, ‘and you, young sir,’ he pointed to a youth with huge sad eyes and curly hair, ‘which wine would we serve
with the fish course, Chablis or Châteauneuf-du-Pape?’

‘Chablis, sir,’ said the youth, and for a brief second his eyes looked happy before returning to sad.

‘Very good,’ said Joseph. ‘I can see we are all going to get along fine. If you suddenly find that you have forgotten something about the distinguished art of waiting, just ask
me and I will tell you the answer. Now, let me tell you the programme for the rest of the afternoon. All around you you can see these canteens of cutlery, with two large cloths and a bottle of
polish beside them. That is the first task for you, to polish these knives and forks and spoons until you could shave in them. Then we will do the same for the glasses, the two wine glasses and the
glass for the liqueur or port. Then we lay the table, under my supervision. Then we all have a rest before the final briefing after supper. Let us show honour today and this evening to the memory
of Theophilus Whitelock, gentlemen. He may not have mentioned us waiters in his bequest, but without us it could not be fulfilled.’

There were nine of them gathered round the font, the cold water very calm inside the marble. The boy twin had two godfathers, Powerscourt’s particular friend and
companion in arms, Johnny Fitzgerald, and his brother-in-law, William Burke the financier. Burke had recently astonished the family by pulling off the roof of his enormous villa in Antibes and
adding a further two storeys to the property. Powerscourt had inquired if he intended accommodating the entire family under this roof at the same time. Powerscourt’s eldest sister was
godmother to the male and various members of Lady Lucy’s tribe did duty for the girl. The canon held his prayer book well away from his face as he read the Exhortation, as if he was losing
his sight.

‘Doubt ye not, therefore, but earnestly believe that Christ will likewise favourably receive these present infants; that he will embrace them with the arms of his mercy; that he will give
unto them the blessing of eternal life, and make them partakers of his everlasting kingdom.’

Powerscourt looked down at the tiny bundle in his arms. The little boy was fast asleep with a blond curl lying on the top of his head. His elder brother and sister had been most eager to attend
this part of the service and had been bitterly disappointed when told it was impossible. In vain had they said they had every right to be there. Olivia, the younger child, had pointed out that she
already had more practice in holding the two babies than her father and that she would, obviously, be closer to the ground to catch her infant brother or sister if their father or the vicar dropped
them. Thomas, the elder, had announced that it was sure to bring bad luck on all of them if he and his sister were not allowed to attend the christening. Lady Lucy had to resort to bribery to buy
them off in the end.

Now the canon was conducting the interrogation of the godparents.

‘Do you, in the name of these children, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the
flesh, so that you will not follow nor be led by them?’

There was a general murmuring of ‘I renounce them all.’ Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald and William Burke were not too emphatic on that one. Burke was not an avaricious fellow
but he did make his living out of the covetous desires for money of his fellow men. Powerscourt felt Lucy’s foot tapping lightly on his shin. She nodded to the pew behind him which had been
empty as they came down the aisle. Kneeling happily on it, their faces wreathed in smiles, Thomas and Olivia had left their place to find the closest spot to the action they could find. Powerscourt
grinned at them and made a further inspection of his infant.

Then the preliminaries were over. Very gently the canon leant over and took Powerscourt’s bundle from him. Powerscourt felt a sudden, irrational spurt of alarm when he remembered how far
away the prayer book had been. Would Olivia’s worst fears be recognized as the canon dropped his charge on the hard floor? Looking slowly round the assembled godparents the canon said,
‘Name this child.’

‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt,’ they chorused. Very gently and very slowly the canon dipped the head into the font. A mighty wail of protest followed. Powerscourt wondered
if the child would be able to make more noise later in life than the two coachmen outside.

‘Christopher John Wingfield Powerscourt, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’

The wailing bundle was handed back to the earthly father. Then it was the turn of the other twin. Elizabeth Juliet Macleod was added to the Powerscourt family in total silence. Powerscourt could
hear Olivia whispering to Thomas that girls were much braver than boys as her sister hadn’t made a single squawk during the ordeal.

Six weeks or so after the end of one of Powerscourt’s cases the year before, a dramatic and dangerous affair in a West Country cathedral, he had taken Lady Lucy to St Petersburg. It was
there, in their beautiful hotel bedroom overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, that Lucy believed the twins had been conceived. She was absolutely certain of it. Johnny Fitzgerald had suggested calling
them Nicholas and Alexandra after the Tsar and his wife but Powerscourt had demurred, pointing out that at some point in the future Britain might be at war with Russia and two children wandering
about the country lumbered with the Christian names of the Russian royal house might not be a good idea.

By the end of the first course of the Whitelock Feast Joseph, the steward of Queen’s Inn, was reasonably pleased with the evening so far. The Hall looked magnificent. The
candles were glittering in their places on the tables and the walls. The portraits of the great lawyers of the past looked down on their successors. Along the bulk of the great room were trestle
tables of oak, supposed to be as old as the foundation itself. On the raised area at the north end was the High Table reserved for the benchers of the Inn. On the walls behind them two full-length
Gainsboroughs of previous Lord Chancellors, sombre and forbidding in their dark robes, presided over the proceedings. And above them hung one of the treasures of the Inn, Rubens’
The
Judgement of Paris
, where a bucolic-looking Paris, son of the King of Troy, held up a ruddy apple in front of three scantily clad goddesses. So popular was this painting with the citizens of
the capital, its great appeal possibly residing in the nakedness of the ladies, that the Hall was opened to the public once a week during term-time so the pilgrims could pay tribute in person.
American visitors sometimes expressed surprise that it was not a courtroom scene they were seeing, with learned friends appearing before some frosty judge, but they seemed to recover quite quickly.
A plaque beneath it announced that the painting was paid for by the generosity of past and current benchers and benefactors.

The first course had been a terrine, a rather intricate terrine principally composed of glazed cured salmon and Beaufort cheese. That had been easy for Joseph’s motley army of waiters to
serve. The more active service of bringing the plates with the food already in place from the kitchen to the Hall was shared between his regular forces and the young auxiliaries. Joseph had been
more impressed by the old than the young. They shuffled about their tasks very slowly but they didn’t speak too loudly or nearly drop the plates like the young.

It was the soup that really worried Joseph. It was one of the new chef’s special favourites which he claimed to have devised for the members of the Imperial Family in St Petersburg,
Borscht Romanov, a beetroot-based broth laced with herbs and a Russian vodka whose name even the chef could not pronounce and lashings of sour cream. Joseph watched with dread as his waiters began
the long march with a soup bowl in each hand from the kitchens, over a wet floor, into the Hall and onwards for what was, at its longest, a journey of over a hundred and fifty yards. One hundred
and sixty-two guests, eighty-one voyages of the Borscht Romanov. One man tripped in the kitchen and had to be removed from duty altogether as he had pink stains right down his shirt front. Two of
Joseph’s young men had watched the regular waiters and imitated them, gliding rather than walking with the elbows tucked in tight to the body. The other two held the bowls too far away and
were in permanent danger of tipping forward.

Disaster struck the feast shortly after eight thirty, but it didn’t come from the waiters. Just as Joseph was congratulating himself on the safe arrival of the soup, he glanced up towards
High Table. The benchers were arranged in order of seniority, radiating outwards on either side of the Treasurer in the centre, the top official of the Inn. At the edge, in the most junior
position, sat one Alexander McKendrick Dauntsey, KC, right in front of one of Gainsborough’s Lord Chancellors. Dauntsey, to Joseph’s experienced eye, looked like a man who might have
been drinking heavily before the feast. He was perspiring freely and his face was turning grey rather than white. Joseph watched as he took three mouthfuls of his soup, and then, very suddenly, and
very violently, pitched forward on to the table, his bowl of soup tipping forward in a pink stream across the white tablecloth and on to the floor. There was a crack as Dauntsey’s face hit
the wood and a trickle of blood ran from his chin to join the beetroot broth, Borscht Sanguinaire rather than Borscht Romanov. The mixture of blood and borscht continued to drip slowly on to the
floor, a pinkish red that looked like watered blood. After a couple of minutes the Hall had fallen completely quiet, only for the silence to be broken by the Treasurer in what seemed to be a very
loud voice.

‘He’s drunk. Bloody fool! Leave him there. He’ll come round in a moment. Carry on.’

Two of Joseph’s waiters were on hand with mops and cloths to clear up the mess. Joseph indicated with pouring signals that all the glasses were to be topped up to help restore the mood.
Soon the noise levels were back to normal and the soup was being cleared away. As the feast progressed through roast venison with juniper, tiramisu with dark and white chocolate sauce, accompanied
by Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, Joseph became increasingly worried about Dauntsey. He made no move of any kind. Everybody else in the Hall was growing
redder or pinker by the hour. Dauntsey’s face had turned a sort of chalky white. Nobody took any notice of him at all, as though collapsed drunks or worse were a regular feature of the
Whitelock Feast. Joseph knew how much store the Treasurer set by tradition, how he would hate to disturb the glittering occasion. This particular feast after all, the finest one in the
Queen’s Inn calendar, was his favourite.

Yet Joseph too had as much loyalty to the Inn as the Treasurer or anybody else present. Perhaps it was because he had come to London from Italy looking for work over thirty years before and had
found a job as a temporary waiter at the Inn. Now, of course, he was a permanent fixture, who had watched many of the silks progress from nervous lisping students to giants of the Old Bailey and
the Royal Courts of Justice. He knew how damaging it could be to the Inn’s reputation if word flew round the gossip-ridden world of London’s barristers that the people of Queen’s
had been eating reindeer and drinking some of the finest burgundy in the capital while one of their number had collapsed into his soup and been left to rot by his peers as they carried on with
their feast. Joseph knew that if he consulted the Treasurer, then the other benchers would all have to give their views. That was what it was like working in a place full of lawyers. Every last one
of them had to have their say. Invisible judges and imaginary juries were ever present in the deliberations of Queen’s Inn. Nothing could have been guaranteed to destroy the atmosphere
faster. But, Joseph reasoned, if Dauntsey was simply removed, as if he were an empty dish of potatoes or vegetables, so to speak, it would attract much less attention. It was only that Dauntsey was
considerably larger than the Inn’s best serving dishes. Joseph took the four strongest men in his command into a little alcove between the Hall and the kitchens.