David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Ten minutes after the Powerscourts’ departure a note was dropped through the door. It came from Charles Augustus Pugh. ‘“Time, like an ever rolling stream,”’ it began, ‘“bears all its sons away.” Or, in this instance, it has borne away the trial due before Cosmo’s. The case has fallen apart. Cosmo’s appearance in court is scheduled for next Thursday, six days from now. God help us all.’

Powerscourt had never known a Channel crossing like it. The captain, it transpired later, had serious reservations about setting forth but had been overruled by the managers of the shipping line. Now the boat, apparently so large and so solid on the quayside at Dover, had turned into a matchstick box, rising and falling in the great swells of the angry sea, its metal shrieking and battered in the fury of the waves. The passengers were confined to the great cabin where they clung on to the seats that were fixed to the floor or held on to the railings by the bar. Anybody on deck would have been swept away to certain death in the swirling embrace of the angry waters. Up on his bridge the captain peered ahead, seeking any respite in the storm. There were several small children on board and they huddled sadly into their mothers’ coats, their faces drawn and pale, asking from time to time when it was going to end or were they all going to die and go to heaven.

Lady Lucy had never been seasick on board ship until today. A nauseous mixture of sea water and vomit swirled round the little table where she and her Francis tried to make a shelter from the tempest. She remembered suddenly that Powerscourt’s first wife Caroline and their little son Thomas had been drowned in a terrible storm in the Irish Sea years before. She hoped Francis wasn’t going to meet his first wife again after another maritime disaster. Perhaps, she thought, they have a special section in heaven for people drowned at sea. At least she presumed her husband would be going to heaven. Looking at him now, she saw that his eyes were closed and his lips moving. She wondered if he was praying or reciting some of his favourite poetry. Tennyson’s Ulysses, she remembered, had a pretty rough time on the seas of Greece, taking ten years after the Trojan Wars to reach the craggy island of Ithaca that he called home.

It took over three hours to cross the first ten miles of the English Channel. There was nobody on board now who had not been sick. Many were throwing up for the fifth or sixth time and had little left in their stomachs. The captain sent word that he thought the last stages of the journey might be easier than the first. There was a sort of embryonic hospital in the corner of the great cabin now, populated by people who had broken an arm or a leg sliding across the floor, unable to stop before they crashed into some immovable object.

Just when you could dimly see the French coast, a thin pencil line of land that wasn’t moving or sliding or falling over, it began to rain. It rained, as Lady Lucy said afterwards, as if it were the last downfall ever on earth, as if all the rivers and all the oceans of the world had to give up their water for it to be hurled down on to the English Channel. It lashed down in torrents so dense you could only see a couple of yards in front of your face. Any other shipping close by would have been a grave hazard. Powerscourt looked at his watch from time to time, realizing that all their train connections had, quite literally, been blown apart. He might not have been aware of the latest Pugh deadline, now in Markham Square, but he was sure the start of the trial could not be very far away. And here he was, miles away from London on a mission that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have described as a wild goose chase.

Nearly eight hours after they set out from Dover their ship docked at Calais. The passengers, some still shaking from their ordeal, others wrapped round husbands or wives, small children held very tight in their parents’ arms, descended the gang plank gingerly and wobbled about helplessly on the unmoving dry land. The captain was waiting to greet them at the bottom, rather like a vicar come to shake hands with his congregation after service on Sunday. He proffered his apologies, assuring everybody that he would never have set forth if he had known the conditions were going to be so harsh. The passengers thanked him for bringing them safely from England to France. Powerscourt found a train bound for Paris that was leaving in twenty minutes. The man in the ticket office said they would have to wait until the next day, a Sunday, to reach Beaune.

Tristram Bennett was back in the tiny cottage behind Brympton Hall. He was lying in bed, completely naked except for an enormous cigar. Emily was lying beside him, her hands folded behind her head, eyes closed, a dreamy look on her face, her shock of red hair bright against the pillows. Tristram had been thinking seriously about his own position in Colvilles and the dues he was owed by society in general. He had been hurt by various episodes in his youth when he felt people, particularly schoolmasters, had not paid him the respect due to a man of his abilities. There had been that refusal to take his going into the Church seriously. On another occasion they had laughed when his mother suggested putting him in for the Diplomatic Service. Only a month ago he had heard of a contemporary of his at school who had just been made a director of a leading bank in the City of London. And here he was, languishing away as junior manager for Colvilles in East Anglia, a post that had provided insufficient scope for his genius.

Emily was not quite asleep. She was dreaming of a great ball where she had gone with Tristram. Now he had left her to play cards and she was besieged by a host of beautiful young men, asking her to dance. The champagne was flowing freely. Through the great windows you could see the garden glowing in the lights strung between the trees and the young couples strolling arm in arm along the paths. This was where she belonged, Emily thought, as she was led away to the dance floor by a young hussar with a slight scar on his cheek that made him seem even more romantic.

‘I tell you what I’m going to do,’ said Tristram, taking a long pull at his cigar. ‘The firm is now as full of holes as one of those Swiss cheeses. Randolph gone, the fool Cosmo locked up and not speaking for something he didn’t do, the old boy Nathaniel out of his depth and past it. Don’t you agree, Emily? You’ve watched what’s been going on.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Emily although it was hard to tell whether she was speaking to an imaginary lover in her reverie or the real one on her right-hand side.

‘They’ve never given me a chance,’ Tristram went on. ‘Just because I was unlucky enough to back a few wrong horses and put my money on the losing cards once or twice doesn’t mean I haven’t got a financial brain. Oh no. It just needs a chance. And I won’t get a chance to do that mouldering up here with the donkey rides on the beach and the boats messing about on those ridiculous Broads.

‘I’m going to sell my shares, all of them, and set myself up as an independent investor with the proceeds. How about that, Emily?’

Emily was still dancing with the hussar with the scar. ‘That sounds very nice, Tristram,’ she said.

Now it was Tristram’s turn to dream, staring out of the little window at the upper branches of the trees waving in the wind. He saw himself at a large desk in a large office in the City, signing cheques and bankers’ drafts, looking for new investment opportunities. His firm would expand, possibly, into casinos and luxury hotels and horse racing. Surely, he thought, you couldn’t lose if you owned the bookies or the roulette wheel. ‘Yes, Mr Bennett,’ ‘What good taste you have, Mr Bennett,’ ‘Thank you, Mr Bennett.’ He was completely incapable of seeing himself as others saw him. He had, after all, been the only boy in his school who had been totally on the side of Malvolio through all his troubles at the court of Olivia in Shakespeare’s Illyria. They were both sick with self-love, the lovers, dreaming their way to running Colvilles or enjoying the most perfect romance.