Death of a Chancellor (10 page)

‘I got all the servants together – we had to wait a while, my lord, for the gardeners to come in from outside – and I told them the terrible news.’

McKenna stopped. Powerscourt found himself looking closely at McKenna’s hands. They were clasped together very tightly, as if to stop them from shaking.

‘Very good, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt in his most emollient manner. ‘Could I just ask you one more thing? Would you have said that Mr Eustace was upset or depressed about
anything in the days and weeks before his death?’

McKenna thought for a moment or two. ‘I wouldn’t have said he was depressed, my lord. He was always a very cheerful gentleman, at least to us servants. Maybe preoccupied would be the
word, my lord. But then he was often preoccupied if he had to preach an important sermon or something like that.’

‘Thank you so much, McKenna. I am much obliged to you for that account. And now, perhaps, you could be so kind as to bring me a whisky. I shall be in Mr Eustace’s study.’

Without realizing at first what he was doing Powerscourt began pacing restlessly up and down the drawing room. Lady Lucy would have smiled had she seen the habits of Markham Square reproduced so
perfectly in a country house nearly two hundred miles away, the same abstracted air, the same sense of having completely departed from the immediate surroundings. Suppose it wasn’t suicide,
he said to himself. Suppose John Eustace was murdered. But by whom? By the butler? By the doctor? By another of the servants with a grudge against his master? By an outside hand, by a person or
persons unknown? But how did they get in? How did they get out? McKenna had told him very clearly on his first afternoon in the house that none of the doors or windows had been disturbed during the
night of John Eustace’s death. The whole household would have had to be involved in such a conspiracy. And what should he tell the ferocious Augusta Cockburn? She was, after all, his
employer. Was he bound to pass on his suspicions to her? Powerscourt dreaded to think of the mayhem her tongue and her malevolence could cause if she thought her brother had committed suicide or
been murdered.

Andrew McKenna was waiting in the study with the whisky. Powerscourt told the butler he could go, and not to wait for him. He checked his watch. He had just given McKenna the same instructions
at virtually the same time as his previous master had done some days before. And in virtually the same place. Maybe, thought Powerscourt fancifully, this is my last evening on earth. Maybe I shall
meet a mysterious death in this very house tonight. Maybe my body too will be sealed in its coffin before its time, leaving Johnny Fitzgerald to conduct an investigation into the circumstances of
my demise.

‘Shut up,’ he said quietly to himself and took a drink from his whisky. He sat down at the Eustace desk. Hanging on the wall directly in front of him was a reproduction of a Raphael.
Powerscourt remembered reading about this painting. It showed Pope Leo the Tenth flanked by two other cardinals who just happened to be his nephews. The Pope, a powerful figure of a man, is wearing
a red cape over an ornate white cassock. The fleshy jowls on his face reveal that whoever may have been his favourite saint it was not one of the ascetic ones like St Francis of Assisi. Leo is
seated at a desk, covered with a rich red cloth, examining an illustrated book with a magnifying glass. One of his nephews is to his right-hand side, staring into space, possibly praying. The
other, a rather shifty-looking prelate in Powerscourt’s view, is looking directly at the painter. Powerscourt shuddered as he remembered that Raphael painted it shortly after a murder plot
against Leo had been unearthed in the College of Cardinals. This was Leo’s way of telling the world, and the College of Cardinals in particular, that he was still at large. The whole canvas,
dominated by reds and scarlets against an almost black background, reeked with pomp and power and privilege.

A sudden thought struck Powerscourt. He got up from the desk and went to the door to look at the painting from a greater distance. His original assumption was that it must be a reproduction.
Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was the real thing, an original Raphael hanging here in the quiet hamlet of Hawke’s Broughton. He peered at it again. He looked round the other walls to
see if Leonardos and Michelangelos might be hanging here as well. He didn’t think so. He remembered what he had learnt in a previous investigation involving works of art and forgeries and
murdered art critics. Raphaels for some reason fetched incredibly high prices. John Eustace could certainly have afforded a whole gallery of Raphaels. Perhaps the value of his estate would have to
be increased by another hundred thousand pounds or so if Pope Leo and his nephews were consigned to the art dealers and the auctioneers of New Bond Street.

Powerscourt sat himself down at the desk once more. He hadn’t come here to look at the paintings on the wall. He began a systematic examination of John Eustace’s kneehole desk. The
drawers to the left-hand side were filled with business correspondence. There were bills from the local shopkeepers, details of repairs to the house, correspondence with his bank. The bottom two
drawers were filled with letters from friends and acquaintances. Powerscourt would much rather have seen John Eustace’s own letters to his friends. They might have told him something about
his state of mind. He took a note of the addresses of his two most frequent correspondents, a country clergyman in Norfolk and an archdeacon in Oxford. Maybe they could tell him something.

If the left-hand side of John Eustace’s desk rendered unto Caesar, the right-hand side belonged to God. The first two drawers related to his work in the cathedral. The third contained
bundles of sermons. Powerscourt riffled through John Eustace’s thoughts about the meaning of Lent, about the Christmas message, about how it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Powerscourt suspected John Eustace might have had some difficulty with that one. But the bottom drawer was the most interesting of all.
It too contained sermons. But whereas all the ones in the drawer above had been stacked in neat piles, in the bottom drawer Powerscourt found that the pages were all confused. Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself was jumbled up with the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the five thousand had alternate pages with the forty days in the wilderness, the parable of the fig tree was mixed up
with turning the water into wine. Powerscourt took all the pages out and laid them on the floor. Perhaps I am doing this in tribute to John Eustace’s memory, he said to himself. For he felt
that whatever desecrations might have happened to the dead man, somehow he would want his sermons left intact. After half an hour they were all reconstituted and replaced in their drawer. All
except one. John Eustace’s sermon on the first verse of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, had two pages missing. Powerscourt realized as he stared at the Roman numerals at the top of the first page that all the sermons had
the dates of composition on them. The tongues of men and of angels had been composed fifteen months before. It seemed to have been the last sermon John Eustace ever wrote. Maybe he adapted some of
the older ones for other occasions. And two pages of the six had disappeared.

Powerscourt leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the fleshy features of Raphael’s Renaissance Pope. Most probably somebody took the missing pages after the death. But why? A dark
suspicion crossed Powerscourt’s mind. He took two more pages from the sermon. Then he looked back and took a page from Lazarus, preached three years before, and from the parable of the fig
tree, written five years earlier in 1896. Handwriting, he knew, changes slightly over time. The next time he went into Compton he would take his pages from the sermons of the late John Eustace into
the offices of Drake and Co. and compare them with the scripts of the various wills. He thought he knew what he would find.

‘So what are you going to do about that young man?’ Hilda Davies, previously Hilda McManus, had been Anne Herbert’s best friend at school.

‘What do you mean, what am I going to do about that young man?’ said Anne defensively. The two were having early morning tea in the little house on the edge of the Cathedral Close.
Anne thought she was uncertain about her feelings for Patrick Butler, the editor of the
Grafton Mercury,
so she had invited her best friend around for an exchange of views.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean, Anne. Let’s not beat about the bush. What are you going to do about Patrick Butler?’ Hilda Davies had been described in one of her school
reports as a forceful personality in class. The passing years, the acquisition of a rich husband and three children and a large house, had made her almost domineering. Her servants called her a
bully behind her back.

Anne felt she was under attack. ‘Well,’ she said defensively, ‘I like him well enough.’ A month before, the three of them had attended a concert together and Patrick had
taken them out to dinner in the town’s finest hotel.

‘Such a pity, I always felt, that your first husband died on you, Anne.’ Hilda made it sound as though Anne was personally responsible for his passing. ‘Such respectable
people, clergymen. And such prospects too in a place like this. I’m sure Frank might have become the Dean at least.’

‘Are you saying that newspaper editors aren’t respectable people?’ Anne was beginning to feel cross.

‘I grant you he is good-looking, that Patrick,’ condescended Hilda, ‘but why can’t he find a proper job like other people?’

‘What’s wrong with newspaper editors?’

Hilda Davies felt it was not the time to mince words. ‘For a start,’ she said, ‘I don’t think they’re quite respectable. Lots of the county people round
here’– Hilda obviously thought of herself as being at the very epicentre of county and Compton society – ‘wouldn’t dream of asking one of them to dinner. You’d
have to check the silver after they’d gone.’

‘If you’re suggesting that Patrick is in the habit of going out to dinner and pinching other people’s spoons, then you’re sadly mistaken.’ Anne, normally so placid,
was in danger of losing her temper. She remembered that their schooldays had been punctuated by occasional very vicious rows.

‘It all depends on the society one keeps,’ said Hilda, casting a superior glance at the fairly humble furniture in Anne Herbert’s little drawing room. ‘If you want to
consort all your life with the minor clergy and the poor vicars of Compton, then I suppose it might be all right.’ She paused briefly before firing another salvo. ‘It’s not just
that they’re not quite respectable. Journalists are known for having a number of serious deficiencies in their character.’

‘And what might those be?’ said Anne.

‘Horace has had a lot of dealings with them, especially when he goes up to London on business for the firm.’ Horace was Hilda’s long-suffering husband. He was a partner in a
firm of Compton solicitors. Once a year at most, to the best of Anne’s knowledge, he ventured forth to the metropolis. She suspected he would have gone more often if he could for a respite
from his domestic bliss.

‘Drink,’ said Hilda firmly, shaking her head at the hazards of a reporter’s life. ‘They all drink far too much. Maybe not when they start, but it gets most of them in the
end. Horace said he knows of a number of them who have ended up destitute, their poor families abandoned for the spirit bottle.’

‘Patrick doesn’t drink very much,’ said Anne defensively.

‘He may not now, but he will. They all do in the end. And they’re unreliable. Never home at a respectable hour like my Horace. Think what appalling parents they must be.’

‘Patrick is very good with the children, he couldn’t be kinder.’

‘That’s only until he gets his hands on you, my dear. Then it will change. You can’t possibly contemplate being married to such a creature.’

Anne Herbert wondered suddenly what it would be like if Patrick Butler got his hands on her. She thought it might be rather agreeable.

‘And what about his family? Are they proper sort of people?’ said Hilda with a sneer on the word proper.

‘They’re a perfectly respectable family Patrick’s people. His father is a schoolmaster in Bristol.’

‘My dear, I think the position is quite clear,’ said Hilda Davies, drawing the meeting to a close. ‘You should break things off with this young man. He sounds most unsuitable.
You must wait for a better offer to come along. I’m sure there must be a regular supply of unmarried clergy passing through the cathedral. One of them will turn up.’

‘Wait? Wait?’ said Anne Herbert angrily. ‘I am now twenty-eight years old. I have two small children. As for waiting, you couldn’t wait at all. You threw yourself at the
first rich man who came into view. I don’t think you’re in any position to talk to me about waiting.’

‘I certainly am in a position to talk to you about unsuitable young men. And this Patrick or whatever he’s called seems to me to be most unsuitable. Now I must go. I have an
appointment to keep. When you have had a chance to reflect in peace I am sure you will see that I am right.’

Mrs Hilda Davies departed into the morning air of Compton. Anne closed the door firmly behind her. Well, she said to herself, I may not have been altogether sure of my feelings towards Patrick
before this morning but I am much more certain now. She wondered wistfully if he would come round for tea that afternoon.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was smiling to himself as the Fairfield coachman drove him into Compton early in the morning three days after his encounter with the sermons. He had a
recent letter from Lady Lucy in his hand. The first page expressed the hope that his mission was going well and that the case wasn’t going to prove very difficult. There was news of her vast
tribe of relations, two of whom, elderly aunts in their late eighties, Powerscourt learned, had recently passed away. He had once worked out that with the sheer numbers of Lucy’s extended
family, at least six should perish every year according to the law of averages. Replacements were arriving even faster to fill up the numbers at the other end of the age scale.