David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Lady Lucy’s breakfast consisted of warm croissants and jam and delicious hot chocolate. Her husband’s consisted of a hard roll and a glass of cold water. Powerscourt managed not to swallow the medicine again, but he knew he would not be able to keep this up for very long. The morning warder was different from the one he had talked to the evening before. He too was old, leading Powerscourt to speculate that they might be able to pay the elder ones less than the younger men. But sooner or later a more watchful warder would keep looking at him to make sure he had swallowed his dose or ask him to open his mouth. He would have to escape today or it might be too late. Evening would be better than daytime. It was dark between five and six in Burgundy in November. The last round of medicine came at about half past five. Powerscourt settled down to wait. He lay on his bed and tried to remember as much as he could about the journey to his cell the day before, about the locks on the front door. If he had known then what he knew now he would have taken a much greater interest in his surroundings. He wondered if they were given any exercise in this French prison. He saw in his mind’s eye one of those enclosed courtyards so dear to the hearts of English prison architects where the inmates trudged round and round under the watchful eyes of the guards in a ghastly arabesque, not allowed to speak to each other, unable to see anything of the real world except the stone blocks of their prison house and the little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky. Lunch time came and a further round of medicine, once more deposited in the bucket when the guard had left.

Powerscourt was now thinking about a weapon. He had his fists, of course, and they might well suffice to incapacitate the warder. He tried swinging the bed without the mattress but it was cumbersome and slow. He lay down once more and thought about his problem. His first plan had involved taking the warder’s uniform as a disguise on his way out of the hospital but he wasn’t sure one man without a weapon could force another to remove the outer layer of his clothes. The keys? Were they heavy enough to threaten a man’s face? Would they be credible? How about the belt? He wondered what they would do to him if he beat up a warder and didn’t manage to escape. He didn’t like to think about that. Shortly after lunch he lay down on his bed once more and made plans for his future.

Lady Lucy certainly had a more varied morning than her husband. A cable from William Burke arrived shortly after breakfast, informing her that Johnny Fitzgerald and Charles Augustus Pugh had been informed of her husband’s disappearance. Johnny Fitzgerald, he reported, had set off immediately for Beaune and hoped to be there late the following day. Burke had taken it upon himself to telephone Lord Rosebery, a close friend of the Powerscourt family and a former Prime Minister. Rosebery had hurried round to his old stomping ground, the Foreign Office. Shortly before eleven o’clock a telephone call from the British Embassy in Paris informed Lady Lucy that a Second Secretary was setting off for Beaune within the hour. Half an hour after that a handsome young French police inspector arrived and took from Lady Lucy all the details she could remember about her husband’s last hours in Beaune. He would begin his inquiries, he told her, with the Hospices de Beaune. A cousin of his was a sister in the hospital and should be able to help. Lady Lucy marvelled at all this movement and activity marshalled on her behalf. She suspected that Francis would manage his escape all on his own.

The light was beginning to fade and Powerscourt began to laugh. A visitor from the external world might have deduced that this one was indeed mad, pacing the floor of his twelve foot by eight cell, peering occasionally out of the window. And laughing. Perhaps he needed some medicine. In fact Powerscourt had just realized something about the keys on the warder’s ring. There had just been time that morning for Powerscourt to see a row of medicine phials on the trolley he brought with him. That surely meant that the warder had the keys to all the doors that held the patients on this floor due to take their daily dose. That also meant that once Powerscourt had the keys he could open all the other doors. He could let the patients out and lead a great escape, a mass break-out from the Maison d’Alienes. It would be tremendous. Then he wondered how wise it would be to release a band of lunatics into the French countryside. Maybe some of them were capable of violence or worse. Then he told himself that the rapists and the vicious criminals would be held in a prison rather than locked up in the Maison de Fous. And if the patients he might liberate were really mentally ill, wandering in their wits, paranoid, not sure who they were, would it be fair to those patients to return them to the hostile world that had caused them to break down in the first place? Would he have a better chance of success on his own or with a platoon of the insane for company?

The Second Secretary from the British Embassy in Paris arrived at Lady Lucy’s hotel in time for tea. He was a most fashionable young man, discreetly fashionable, Lady Lucy thought, surveying the expensive shirt and the slim gold cuff links and the highly polished shoes. She wondered if he did the polishing himself. Perhaps there was a sort of shoe-shine wallah inside the Embassy retained to ensure that the British diplomatic corps had the brightest footwear in Paris. He took a small cup of lemon tea with Lady Lucy, Piers Montagu, before departing for the Town Hall and the Mayor. He firmly believed, he told Lady Lucy, that the Mayor held the key to all French towns and cities. He was a strategic point, said Piers, in the manner of the Chateau of Hougoumont at the Battle of Waterloo. Hold the Chateau, or the Mayor, and success was assured.

The young Inspector learnt little from the sister at the Hotel Dieu. Nobody had seen any of the people involved in the chase the previous day before. They were all strangers. They could not be citizens of Beaune, surely, or we would have seen them about the town. You would not forget the man with no teeth for instance or the round man who was his companion. During the afternoon the policeman rang round some places in Beaune where the stranger might have been seen, the hotels, the restaurants, such chambres d’hote as were on the telephone. There were no reports of an English milord anywhere. He rang the Maison d’Alienes only because it was on the approved list of places to call in the hunt for missing persons. The administrative office told him that there had only been one new admission in the previous twenty-four hours, a Burgundy peasant called Albert Bouchet.

Emily Colville had turned into a different person. Or rather, Emily thought she had turned into a different person, a better person. It had all started with a present, a present from Montague, brought home from town one cold evening some weeks before. It was unusual for Montague to give presents, and even more unusual for him to give a present of this sort. It was oblong, and quite heavy, and seemed to Emily as her fingers crossed over the slight gaps in the surface to be in three different parts.

‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’ Montague asked with a smile.

‘Of course,’ she replied, and worked her way to three volumes of a book called Middlemarch written by somebody called George Eliot. It was the first time she had ever seen her husband with a book.

‘Have you read this?’ she asked her husband.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Montague, ‘my great aunt Philippa thought you might like it.’

‘Great Aunt Philippa, I see,’ said Emily. She had only met this great aunt once, an old lady more interested in the arts than in the world of commerce. This Philippa thought that life with Montague might be a little dull for a quick intelligent girl like Emily. George Eliot might fill the gap for a while. But George Eliot had done more than fill the gap. George Eliot made a convert. The new Emily longed to be good. She held imaginary conversations with Dorothea Brooke. The prize of goodness was always in her sights. And when she had finished Middlemarch , she told herself, she would be twice as good after reading The Mill on the Floss , twice as good again after Felix Holt, The Radical . A great parade of virtue stretched out before her now.