Death Called to the Bar (40 page)

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her husband’s hand. She remembered him suddenly at the National Gallery where he had taken her on their first outing and she had talked
about Turner’s
The Fighting Temeraire
. She remembered him talking to the twins only the week before, walking them in his arms up and down the drawing room, that soft voice telling the
latest of his children about the house he came from in Ireland, and the blue colour of the mountains and the great fountain at the bottom of the steps. She started to cry. She hadn’t let
herself cry very much in case it upset the children but now there was nobody here, only Francis, and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t see and she might never hear his voice again. She
was racked by sobs, wondering if he knew how much she loved him, how happy he had made her, how her whole life with him had been illuminated by the power of his love for her.

‘Oh Francis,’ she whispered to him, ‘my poor darling. I love you so much. Please come back. I can’t bear it when you’re not here.’ Suddenly she remembered
saying ‘Please come back’ to him before, at that terrible early morning parting at the railway station when he went off to the Boer War. Day after day, she remembered, there had been
notices of the fallen in the newspapers, columns of names of the dead that seemed to grow longer every month. But Francis had survived all that. He had come home without a scratch. Now this
investigation into an Inn of Court had left him virtually dead. She made a resolution there at a quarter to midnight on the fourth day of her husband’s illness. When he was better she was
going to take him away somewhere warm, Amalfi perhaps or Positano, where they could look at the spectacular views and the deep blue sea. She would give him a beaker full of the warm south, with
beaded bubbles winking at the brim. And when he was better, not before, she was going to ask him to give up investigating for ever. No more heaps of masonry falling on him in cathedral naves. No
more maniacs tracking him through the elegant galleries of the Wallace Collection. No more desperate races down the mountain roads of Corsica with the bullets whining off the rocks. No more
butchered bodies dumped in the fountains of Perugia. Nobody could be expected to put up with all that any more. She certainly couldn’t. Then, as she looked at that beloved face, which seemed
now to be turning slightly grey, she started weeping uncontrollably again. For she might never have the chance to take Francis off to the Italian sunshine and the winding streets of Positano. He
might be dead before she had the chance to take him there. He might die tomorrow. He might die tonight.

Somewhere above her she heard a child weeping. It’s Olivia, she thought, come for her midnight cry. She began to compose herself. As she trudged slowly off to comfort her weeping daughter,
she tried to steady herself with the words of Dr Tony: ‘Of course there’s hope. Let us not forget that. Let us never forget that. There is always hope.’

Next morning the children continued their progress through
Treasure Island
, Olivia, possibly because she wasn’t reading, becoming much better at hopping round the
room on her crutch broomstick. If she were allowed outside with it, Johnny Fitzgerald felt sure, she would begin hurling it at her enemies like Long John Silver himself. Just after lunch Edward and
Sarah arrived and their engagement was toasted in champagne. Edward apologized for daring to bring any glimmer of happiness into such a tragic household and was immediately told to shut up by
Johnny Fitzgerald. Olivia wanted to know what an engagement was. She thought gauges had something to do with trains. She remembered a long story her father had told her once which involved, for
some reason, train gauges. Were Edward and Sarah going on a train? If so, could she come too? Like her father, she was very fond of trains. When all was explained to her Olivia decided that she had
better not ask any more questions. She thought now it would be like the twins’ christening all over again but with Edward and Sarah having to put their heads in the font.

After lunch Johnny Fitzgerald ordered a change in the reading matter for Francis. Lady Lucy and he, Johnny informed the company, were going to read Tennyson. Tennyson, after all, had been one of
Francis’s favourite poets. Johnny did not think it wise to mention it, but he remembered Francis saying years ago in India that he would like someone to read the last section of the poem he,
Johnny, was going to read at his, Powerscourt’s, graveside after his funeral. And, Johnny remembered, it was a poem Francis knew off by heart.

Lady Lucy gave a spirited rendering of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the children and the nurse enchanted by the rhythm and the romance of the story. Then Johnny began
‘Ulysses’, a poem about the Greek warrior hero who finally comes home to his island of Ithaca after twenty years of war and wandering. Soon he is bored, he cannot rest from travel.

The twins were asleep beside the bed. Edward and Sarah were sitting beside the flowers. Lady Lucy was by her husband’s side and Thomas and Olivia were on the opposite side of the bed.
Thomas remembered his father telling him stories about Troy, about Achilles sulking in his tent, about the body of Hector being dragged round the city walls, about the wooden horse that finally
ended the war. He looked at his father’s face and began to cry silently. Only the nurse noticed the tears running slowly down his cheeks and slipped him an enormous handkerchief when nobody
else was looking. Johnny was thinking as he read of the various Indian councils and the even stranger Indian governments he and Francis had seen. He went on.

Lady Lucy suddenly wondered if her question to Francis in Positano would be fair. How dull he would find it to make an end to detection, to give up what had become his career since he left the
Army for what he might call a woman’s whim. No, she corrected herself, casting a guilty glance at her husband, he would never say that to her. But he might think it. He would hate it,
Francis, rusting unburnished. Had she the right to ask him? Johnny Fitzgerald remembered that there was a tricky passage coming up about the passing of Ulysses’ life: ‘of life to me
little remains; but every hour is saved from that eternal silence.’ That, he felt sure, would not seem appropriate in these circumstances. Nor would the lines about handing control over
Ithaca to his son Telemachus. That might set Thomas off. So he moved on, hoping nobody would notice.

It was at this point that they heard a low muttering noise from the bed, like thunder far away. There was a faint stirring of the bedclothes as if Powerscourt was wriggling about in his sleep.
Johnny Fitzgerald read on. Edward and Sarah left their chairs and tiptoed over to take a closer look. Olivia had grabbed hold of Thomas’s arm and wasn’t going to let go.

During this passage the murmuring turned into a recognizable voice. The voice was weak but it was definitely Powerscourt’s and he was speaking the words of Tennyson’s poem in unison
with Johnny Fitzgerald. Lady Lucy began to cry. Thomas was squeezing the bedclothes in disbelief. Olivia stared at her father as if she had never seen a male person before. On they went, the two
friends, Powerscourt and Fitzgerald, that had ever with a welcome frolic taken the thunder and the sunshine so many times together in so many different parts of the world in days gone by.

We’re not finished yet, Francis and I, Johnny Fitzgerald said to himself. He paused as if Powerscourt’s return from the dead should be properly celebrated.

‘Don’t stop, Johnny, please don’t stop.’ Lady Lucy felt the thread, the skein of her husband’s life was tied up with the poem, that they had to continue together,
she was certain of it. Powerscourt’s voice was almost normal now. The nurse and Lady Lucy had raised him to a semi-sitting position. He smiled weakly at the people around him as if he had
just come back from an afternoon nap.

If the return of Powerscourt’s voice was the first miracle of this extraordinary afternoon, the second was just about to begin. Master Christopher Powerscourt, youngest of all the
Powerscourts, was waking up in his Moses basket.

Christopher knew that voice. He had been listening to it nearly every day of his life, except for the last four or five. He liked the voice. He raised a small hand. Then he smiled at his father.
It was a beautiful smile. It lasted a long time. It was the first time Christopher had smiled at anyone in his life. Lady Lucy and Thomas and Olivia all saw it, those deep blue eyes lit up, the
great beam going right across his tiny face, his look of intense happiness. Powerscourt began to cry. Tears of joy were running down his face until he saw that his twin son might follow his example
and start crying too.

The poem went on. There was now a ring of hands, Edward to Sarah to Johnny Fitzgerald across to the nurse, weeping uncontrollably, to Lady Lucy, to Powerscourt, to Olivia and Thomas and a last
link to Christopher in his basket. A circle of love, with words by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Christopher smiled once more, this time at his mother. He seemed to like smiling. Maybe he was going to be a happy child. Everybody round the bed felt certain that Powerscourt had turned the
corner, that he wasn’t going to die. A very faint colour was beginning to return to his cheeks. Lady Lucy felt incredibly tired suddenly as she looked at her Francis. She wondered if she
would have the courage to ask him to give up investigating for ever when they went to Positano. Edward was thinking of the terrible ordeal Powerscourt had gone through in solving a couple of
murders in an Inn of Court. Sarah supposed she would have to describe this extraordinary scene to her mother, the return of Lazarus Powerscourt, Powerscourt Redux, helped on his journey back to
life by a beautiful first smile from his baby boy. Casting his eyes down to the end of the poem, Johnny Fitzgerald knew how right Lady Lucy had been to insist on his reading to the very end of
‘Ulysses’. For these last lines could be Powerscourt’s epitaph, not an epitaph for him now, but one that would serve so well when his life had run its natural course. Johnny let
his oldest and closest friend say the final words on his own, Lord Francis Powerscourt’s voice firm now, his two sons holding hands, his own hands locked with those of his wife and his
daughter.