Death of a Chancellor (33 page)

‘Would you say, Lucy,’ he found Lady Lucy in the drawing room singing something to do with a refiner’s fire, ‘that I am looking particularly virtuous this
evening?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Lady Lucy replied, turning round from her piano stool to inspect him, ‘that virtuous is the first word that springs to mind when people look at you,
Johnny.’

‘Come, come,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘you are looking at a man who has been to church three times today. And I’ve spent many hours working in the County Library. Is
virtue not apparent? Surely the power of all those prayers must be visible in my face?’ He poured himself a third glass.

‘Three visits to the cathedral, Johnny? Libraries? Are you feeling all right? Do you need to lie down?’

Johnny Fitzgerald laughed. ‘I’ve been trying to remember the faces of all those people up at the cathedral.’

‘Forgive me for seeming obtuse, Johnny, and I’m sure it’s good for your immortal soul spending all that time in the cathedral, but how is that going to help?’

‘It’s so that I’d recognize them if I saw them again,’ said Johnny. ‘Francis asked me to find out if any other members of the clergy up there are secret Catholics.
Look, Lucy, I worked it out like this. Suppose, like me, you’re fond of a drink. You need regular supplies of alcohol to keep you going. Well then,’ Johnny Fitzgerald proved his point
by helping himself to a fourth glass of burgundy, ‘suppose it’s the same thing with these crypto-Catholics. They’re going to need a fix of the Mass or something every now and
then, just like our friend the Archdeacon of Thursdays. I have here from my time in the library,’ Johnny pulled his black book out of his pocket and proudly showed Lady Lucy the first four
pages, ‘a list of all the Catholic churches within a radius of twenty miles, and the times of all their services. So if any of our friends are going for a fix, they’ll find me lurking
in the back pew. And I’ll know who the bastards are. There’s only one problem with this plan.’

‘What’s that?’ said Lady Lucy, smiling at her friend.

‘Do you know what time they start their services, these Catholic persons? Wouldn’t you think they’d wait for a reasonable hour? Give a man time to digest his breakfast? They do
not. Most of them only have one service in the week. And that’s Mass at half-past bloody seven in the morning.’

Powerscourt found two of William McKenzie’s cryptic messages waiting for him. They concerned the movements of the Archdeacon’s mysterious visitor, who had,
apparently, decamped from Compton.

‘My lord,’ the first message began, ‘the subject departed from Compton station two days ago on the 7.45 train bound for London, stopping at Newbury, Reading and Slough for
local connections. Subject travelled alone in first class carriage except for final stage of journey when he was joined by elderly female in fur coat. Very little conversation between the parties.
Unlikely to have been pre-arranged rendezvous.’

My God, thought Powerscourt, he’s got a suspicious mind, that William McKenzie. Then he reflected to himself that so did he. Perhaps they were well suited.

‘Subject spent most of journey reading documents in his case. Only caught sight of one of them when subject had gone to bathroom. Something to do with Consecration of Cathedrals. On
arrival at Paddington subject did not take cab. Walked across London until he reached the priests’ house attached to Jesuit church in Farm Street shortly after ten o’clock in the
evening. Subject let himself in with own key. Did not venture out again that evening.’

How long had McKenzie waited, Powerscourt wondered. Eleven? Midnight? One? Did he stand in one place, behind a tree perhaps, or did he engage on regular patrols of the vicinity? What did he
think about?

The second note was dated the following evening.

‘My lord,’ Powerscourt wondered what was coming this time, ‘have further information to report on the subject. Subject’s name is Barberi, Father Dominic Barberi. Believe
him to be a member of the Jesuit order, but am not as yet absolutely certain. Subject only ventured out once today. Went to nearest branch of Thomas Cook and purchased return ticket to Rome in
three days’ time. Did not wish the clerk to make any hotel reservations in his name. Presume he must stay once more with religious order. Subject also said by housekeeper, married by chance
to former corporal in our old regiment, to be member of secret Catholic society called Civitas Dei. Housekeeper unable to provide any details of said organization. Stressed it was
secret.’

Civitas Dei? City of God, maybe community or polity of God. God’s kingdom, that’s it, said Powerscourt to himself. What on earth was that? Why was it secret? What did it have to
hide? What was it doing in Compton? Maybe the man at Trinity would know something about it.

‘Subject said to be very reserved and earnest individual. Not likely to be a bosom friend of Lord Fitzgerald. Subject works in his room during the day most of the time. Only known weakness
said to be partiality for fish.’

Powerscourt decided that somebody should write a book about the different types of Oxford and Cambridge don. They spanned an enormous range after all, from the silent, the
monosyllabic, the taciturn, the sarcastic, the arrogant, the superior, the rare ones who were almost normal, the talkative, the garrulous, the ones in love with their own voice, the ones in love
with their own ideas, the ones in love with their own books, the windbags and the ones who couldn’t shut up. Christopher Philips, Powerscourt was certain, sitting in his rooms overlooking the
beautiful gardens of Trinity College Oxford, was in the gold medal class of the ones who couldn’t shut up. Powerscourt had explained on his arrival that he was interested in the process of
conversion from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic faith over the last twenty-five years. After ten minutes without a break, without even apparently a pause to draw breath, Philips still
hadn’t got as far as Newman’s arrival in Oxford as an undergraduate. After twenty minutes Newman and his friends had launched the Oxford Movement and Powerscourt had decided that the
only movement he was interested in at that point was movement out of Oxford as fast as possible. After forty-five minutes Newman had defected to Rome in 1845. There were, Powerscourt realized,
another fifty-five years to go before they reached the present day. At the current rate of progress that was going to be some point well after sunset.

‘Forgive me, Mr Philips, this is all most interesting, but I don’t want to take up too much of your time,’ he said. ‘It is the conversions of the last twenty-five years
that are of particular interest to me.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Christopher Philips, and he was off again. The interruption did seem to have accelerated the flow of history, even if only slightly. The decades were now
passing, Powerscourt calculated, at the rate of one every five minutes. Maybe he could escape in an hour and a half. He heard about Gladstone’s sister Helen, a passionate convert to the Roman
faith, who refused to have lavatory paper in her house. Instead her cloakrooms were liberally provided with the published works of Protestant divines. He heard about Newman’s unhappy attempt
to start a Catholic university in Dublin.

‘In some ways, of course, the strange thing about Newman,’ Philips said after seventy-five minutes with scarcely a pause, ‘was not that some people followed him, but that so
few did so. The Cardinal at the time believed that Newman would lead a positive stampede of some of the best and brightest of the youth of England into the fold. But it never happened.’

And then, miraculously, Christopher Philips paused. He looked up at his clock.

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, forgive me. I have talked for far too long already. You want to know about the last twenty-five years, I believe.’

Powerscourt nodded. He wondered how long the man’s lectures went on for. Did he start at ten in the morning and finish about half-past three? Was there anybody left in the hall by the
end?

‘The conversions are almost all one way, from Canterbury to Rome, as it were. They are isolated cases. They are steady but not very numerous. There are, of course, a variety of reasons for
departure. You could put doubt at the top of the list, I suppose, doubt about the impact of modern science, doubts about miracles, doubts about belonging to a Church that is controlled by man in
the form of the government of the day in the House of Commons rather than by a hierarchy of faith that has been in place for nearly two millennia. If you worked in the countryside you might wonder
if you were in the wrong place. If you worked in the cities you might despair of ever achieving anything in the midst of such terrible social problems of dreadful housing that saps the body and the
lack of work that saps the soul. Roman Catholicism offers faith to the doubtful. It offers certainty to the sceptics. It offers order to the confused. It offers hierarchy to the rootless. It offers
historical tradition to those searching for authority. Once you can make the leap of faith to cross the drawbridge into it, as it were, your intellectual problems are resolved.’

‘Have you heard, Mr Philips, of an organization called Civitas Dei?’ Powerscourt fired his arrow into the dark.

Christopher Philips looked at him with great interest. ‘I have, Lord Powerscourt. I have to say I am surprised to hear that you know about it. It is very secretive.’

‘What sort of organization is it?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘And why is it so secret?’

‘I don’t know very much about it, I’m afraid. It’s believed to be related to the Jesuits in some way. The headquarters are in Rome. Its aims are to advance the coming of
God’s kingdom, as the title would suggest. I believe it is secretive because they wish to use every means possible to obtain their objectives.’

‘When you say every means possible, are you implying that they might be prepared to use illegal means?’ asked Powerscourt, thinking suddenly of bodies roasted on a spit or cut into
pieces and distributed about the countryside.

‘I don’t think they would do anything outside the law,’ said Philips. ‘I’m afraid that’s the sum total of my knowledge.’

As Powerscourt began to say his thank yous and goodbyes Christopher Philips held him back. ‘Just a moment, Lord Powerscourt, I think this might interest you.’

He reached into his desk and pulled out a fading place card from a dinner at High Table. ‘This is the menu and seating plan for the dinner the Master and Fellows gave for John Henry Newman
when they invited him back to Oxford in the late 1870s, over thirty years after he left. They say he derived more pleasure from his return to Oxford than he did when the Pope made him a Cardinal.
Everyone who attended signed it on the back.’

He handed it over to Powerscourt as if it were a holy relic or the bread at the Communion service. Powerscourt glanced down the menu, thinking that Johnny Fitzgerald would certainly have
approved of the wines. Then he turned pale. For in one place at the top table, three places away from the Master’s left, was a Moreton. G.B. Moreton. Powerscourt remembered the Dean telling
him about the two different Moretons who had been involved in the succession to the Bishopric of Compton. He checked the signatures on the back. There it was. Gervase Bentley Moreton. Then he had
another shock. For seated at the bottom end of the table was one A.C. Talbot. Powerscourt checked the signature again. He knew it well. Like Moreton’s he had seen it before. His head was
spinning. Gervase Bentley Moreton was the Bishop, and Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot was the Dean of Compton Cathedral.

God in heaven, Powerscourt said to himself. Whose God? Whose heaven? Anglican or Roman Catholic? Not one but two of them. Not just the Dean but the Bishop as well. They must
have been Anglican back then or else how could they have reached their present lofty positions in Compton Minster? But suppose they had been planning to convert to Rome even then, or maybe shortly
afterwards, seduced perhaps by the beauty of Newman’s prose and the luminous certainties of his faith. In that case they had been sleepers, moles burrowing deep into the Anglican hierarchy,
for over twenty years. Hold on a minute, he said to himself, still staring as if hypnotized at the seating plan. It could all be a coincidence, an accident. The Dean and the Bishop could have been
Anglicans all along. Maybe they still were. Then he remembered the Archdeacon and his furtive trips to Melbury Clinton on Thursdays. Perhaps there was not one but three of them. But what was the
point? Why should they dissemble for so long about their true allegiance? Was there an end point, a time when the pretence could stop? An extravagant, an impossible thought shot through his mind.
He put it to one side.

The bells of Oxford were ringing outside, Balliol following Trinity, Wadham following Hertford, the torch passed on down to New College and Queen’s and Magdalen with
its deer park by the river. Powerscourt suddenly realized that he had been staring at the menu and the signatures for a couple of minutes at least. He returned it with a smile to Christopher
Philips.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘my mind was far away.’

‘You looked, Lord Powerscourt,’ Philips replied, ‘as if you were wrestling with some mighty problem. They say, you know, that Newman stayed in college for three or four days.
Apparently he grew very friendly with some of the people he met at the dinner.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt. ‘I don’t suppose we know which people, do we?’

‘One of them was certainly the man Moreton,’ said Christopher Philips, totally unaware that he was setting off another depth charge in Powerscourt’s brain. ‘They say they
had a lot in common with their interests in early biblical scholarship.’

‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sure they must have had a lot to talk about.’

The rehearsal for Handel’s
Messiah
was at its end. Vaughan Wyndham, the Compton choirmaster, and his choir were folding up their scores, the musicians returning
their instruments into their cases. It was going well, the choirmaster thought. In a few days’ time when they had finally mastered the more difficult sections of ‘Unto us a Child is
Born’, he could have a full run-through of the entire oratorio.