Death of a Chancellor (38 page)

‘William,’ she said softly, ‘Philip, I’m here.’

There was no answer. She moved forward, away from the door and tried again.

‘William, Philip, I’m here.’

Then two things happened virtually simultaneously. The light went out. There was a loud bang as the door slammed shut.

It was only a matter of moments before the minster was closed up for the night. And Lady Lucy Powerscourt was locked in the crypt in total impenetrable darkness.

Powerscourt gave details of his investigation into the mysterious death of Prince Eddy, eldest son of the then Prince of Wales, some nine years before. He referred to his role
in the defeat of a plot to bring the City of London to its knees at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. He mentioned his work in South Africa, undertaken at the request of
the Prime Minister himself. Then he started a new paragraph about the three deaths in Compton. He left nothing out. He referred to the celebrations at Easter for the one thousandth anniversary of
the cathedral as a place of Christian worship. He felt his letter was going well now. He could see his way to the end. Somewhere outside he heard Johnny Fitzgerald enthusing about the birds to Anne
Herbert who had brought her children over for the afternoon.

Lady Lucy cursed herself for her folly. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have ignored every word Francis had said to her? The crypt was very low, Norman
vaulting rising from great pillars in the floor. Lady Lucy felt her way very gently round her prison, realizing that a tall man would be continuously banging his head on the stonework. The walls
were clammy to the touch. She remembered that the workmen in here had found the ancient volume supposed to have been written by a pre-Reformation monk and currently appearing in weekly instalments
in the
Grafton Mercury.
Faint scurrying noises could be heard in distant corners of the underground chamber, which might have been mice. Or rats. There was a mouldy smell, as if things left
down here centuries before were still rotting slowly inside the walls.

Then she remembered Francis’s fears that the murderer might strike again. Lady Lucy was not particularly frightened of the dark. She remembered games of hide and seek in gloomy Scottish
castles as a child where she had been able to conceal herself in places virtually bereft of daylight. But then there had usually been a gleam from under a door, a distant shaft of light up some
corridor lined with long-dead warriors in their rusty armour. Down here there was nothing. If she held her hand in front of her face she could see nothing at all. She wondered about the man roasted
on the spit. She shuddered violently as she thought of the man hung drawn and quartered, his parts distributed around the county. She thought of Francis’s vigil alone in the cathedral for
hours until she found him. Huddled against a pillar, tears beginning to form in her eyes, terror in her heart, Lady Lucy Powerscourt began saying her prayers.

‘Our father which art in heaven,’ she began, her voice sounding strange in the deserted crypt, ‘hallowed be thy name . . .’

It was nearly half-past seven when Powerscourt finished his letter. He read it through three times. Then he decided to leave it until the morning before he posted it and the
two other versions he would send to the Archbishop and the Lord Lieutenant. He had decided to omit the Bishop of Exeter. Maybe he could improve it in the morning. As he set off through the drawing
room to join Johnny and the children, he saw Lucy’s letter on the table. He read it once and called for the butler in his loudest voice.

‘McKenna! McKenna!’

The butler came running into the room. He had never heard Powerscourt shout before.

‘Do you know why Lady Powerscourt went into Compton this afternoon?’ said Powerscourt, staring hard at Andrew McKenna.

‘All I know is that there was a letter, my lord. It came about half-past four, I think.’

‘Did you see who brought it?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘No, my lord. Nobody saw the bearer. It was addressed to Lady Powerscourt at Fairfield Park. The handwriting might have been a child’s.’

Or somebody pretending to be a child, Powerscourt thought bitterly.

‘And did she go out straight away?’

‘Yes, my lord. She rode off into Compton at about a quarter to five.’

‘Right, McKenna,’ said Powerscourt, ‘can you ask the coachman to take Mrs Herbert and the two children back to the Cathedral Close. And ask him to wait outside her
house.’ He strode out into the garden. Johnny and Anne Herbert were looking sadly at the remains of a small bird that seemed to have fallen victim to one of the Fairfield cats. Johnny was
proposing burial underneath the trees, the children nodding slowly in agreement. None of them had been to a funeral before.

‘Mrs Herbert,’ even now Powerscourt remembered his manners, ‘the coachman will take you and the boys back into town as soon as you are ready. Johnny, we must go now. I think
Lucy may be in danger.’

‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee oh Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.’ The closing prayer of Evensong, which
Lady Lucy had heard so often less than a hundred yards from her dungeon, gave her some comfort. Fragments of prayers and bits of collects jumbled themselves up in her mind. She had prayed for the
means of grace and the hope of glory She had prayed for the hope of grace and the means of glory She didn’t think God would mind if the message was confused. This after all was one of his own
on temporary sojourn in the valley of the shadow of death. Then she heard a noise. Only when she heard it did she realize that up till now, fifteen to twenty minutes after her incarceration, she
thought, she had heard absolutely nothing. No human voice, no passing carriages, no songbird gracing the walls of the minster with its music, not even the trebles of the choirboys could be heard
down here. The walls must have been ten feet thick, built to last at the end of the eleventh century, rendering the crypt the perfect place for the contemplation of one’s soul in peace. Or
the contemplation of your own death in peace, Lady Lucy said to herself, huddling ever closer to one of the central pillars. The noise was growing louder, a hissing noise, a gurgling noise, a noise
that grew in volume as time went by. Lady Lucy was virtually certain what it was. Then she felt it running over her shoes. Water was flooding into the Compton crypt, not in a deluge, but in a
steady flow that must surely fill the entire chamber if it continued. Lady Lucy began looking for the steps. Over there was higher ground. Twice she fell over and her dress and her blouse were
soaked. What a frightful sight I’m going to be if anybody ever manages to find me, or if the monster decides to turn off the water, she said to herself. She thought of Thomas and Olivia
grieving for a drowned mother. She wondered how Francis would cope on his own. Perhaps he would marry again. He didn’t seem to have very much luck with his wives staying alive, she reflected
bitterly. Two drowned, one in the Irish Sea, one in the crypt of Compton.

At last she found the steps and sat halfway up to wait for the flood that would engulf her to rise slowly up the Norman pillars. Sometimes she thought it was subsiding, draining away perhaps
through some porous section of the walls. Then it rose again, slowly, steadily, stealthily, almost like some wild animal stalking its prey in a jungle and waiting to pounce. Lady Lucy found herself
thinking of her grandfather in Scotland who had dreamed of her marrying the Viceroy of India. He had taught her to shoot in case she needed to defend herself against hostile natives or marauding
wild animals. Bullets would not help me now, she said to herself. I must remain calm, she told herself. If I panic or turn hysterical I shall die even sooner. She tried to imagine what Francis
would say. She thought she knew exactly what his message to her would be. Hold on Lucy, I’m coming.

Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald were riding into Compton faster than they had ever galloped across the South African veldt the year before. Johnny had a dark bag on his back,
filled with strange implements that would open doors and windows designed to keep intruders out. The sun was setting over to their right, the glorious greens of an English spring turning back to
the anonymous grey of twilight. Once or twice Johnny glanced wistfully at some bird of prey hovering above the fields. Powerscourt was calculating how long it would take them to reach Compton. And
how long the murderer had already had to kill his Lucy.

Lady Lucy had counted fifteen steps from the bottom of the crypt to the great door that had banged shut on her some time before. She was sitting on step number eight, peering
at the tide of water that swirled about her feet. Not that she could see the water, but she heard its presence everywhere, rippling round the pillars, slurping along the walls at the back. She had
drawn her feet up to the step beneath. As the water rose she was going to retreat higher until she ended up crouching on the top step with her back to the door. She had moved on from the prayers
and the collects to St Patrick’s Breastplate. One of her grandmothers used to recite it to her as a lullaby at bedtime. The words had never left her.

Christ was not beneath her. The water was. It had risen again during her prayer. Lady Lucy retreated to step number nine. She found herself wondering why the murderer was so sensitive about the
choir. Her mind went back to the conversation with the choirmaster when he had threatened to expel her for taking too much interest in the boys. They have a lot of new music to learn for the
commemoration service, he had said, as well as the
Messiah.
What sort of new music? Catholic music? Music that would never gain countenance in an Anglican cathedral, perhaps? And the
choirboys might have told her? Surely that was the answer. She would have to tell Francis when she saw him. Maybe the choirmaster was the murderer. Then Lady Lucy’s courage broke down and the
tears rolled down her face to add a touch of salt to the malevolent flood beneath her. She might never see Francis again. He would never know how much she loved him, how she had loved him ever
since that meeting in the National Gallery nine years before when she had talked with such passion about Turner’s
Fighting Téméraire.
The thought that Francis would never
know how much she felt for him reduced Lady Lucy to bouts of uncontrollable weeping. The waters advanced again. Lady Lucy retreated. She was on step number ten now. Only five to go.

Powerscourt reined in his horse on the edge of the Cathedral Close. He felt very cold in spite of the vigour of his ride.

‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘do you think you could pick up the cathedral keys from the Deanery over there? I’m going round to the choirboys’ house. I’ll see you at
the west door in a few minutes.’

The choir were still practising as Powerscourt raced round to the Georgian house that was their home. He heard the singing from twenty yards away, the choirmaster not happy with his charges,
making them sing the same phrase over and over again. Powerscourt thought there was something unusual about this music, something not right, but he had no time to wait and listen further. He pulled
vigorously on the bell. You would think the bell in this sort of house would be melodious, he said to himself as he waited for an answer, a Mozart or a Haydn among door bells. But this one was
harsh and grating, a dissonant note with the heavenly voices on the upper floor.

An enormous man in his late thirties with a large black beard opened the door.

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘My wife has gone missing. She is a member of the choir for the
Messiah.
I wonder if you’ve seen her at all
earlier this evening?’

‘We all know Lady Powerscourt,’ said the man ominously, ‘and I can promise you we haven’t seen her at all this evening. Goodnight to you, sir.’

And with that the man closed the door very sharply in Powerscourt’s face. There was some strange accent there in the man’s speech, Powerscourt thought, but he hadn’t time to
wonder what it was. He led his horse back to the front of the cathedral. It was twenty-five past eight.

Lady Lucy was on step number twelve now. She had cried all she could. Now she felt very cold. The water was beginning to creep up around her ankles. Ever since she was a child
Lady Lucy had believed in heaven. Now she felt she might see it rather sooner than she expected. She had given up all hope of rescue, all hope that the remorseless flood might stop rising. She
wondered if they had cleaning and drying facilities for new arrivals up above. God’s laundry, she said to herself, presided over by a couple of wrinkled female saints, dispensing good cheer
and heavenly soapsuds in equal measure. She wondered suddenly if there were big queues at busy periods, remembering the long delays that sometimes occurred at her local laundry on the corner of
Sloane Square. She would just have to wait and see.

She began rehearsing some of her sins for the questions higher up. She hoped she would get preferential treatment for being so wet. Most of the new arrivals must come in perfectly dry after all.
She should have been kinder to her mother. Lady Lucy suspected the authorities must have heard that one before. Sometimes she had been too strict with the children. Another familiar refrain. The
waters were rising again. Lady Lucy, on her very own ghastly stairway to heaven, climbed back another step. Number thirteen. Unlucky thirteen.

Johnny Fitzgerald was carrying an enormous bunch of keys. ‘The Dean’s man wasn’t about,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I had to interrupt the Dean in the
middle of a meeting for him to fetch me the keys. He looked pretty cross.’ Johnny began inspecting the bunch for the key of the west door, Powerscourt trying not to become impatient beside
him.