David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

By nightfall Powerscourt was ready. He had managed to tear his sheets into strips that could be used if necessary to tie the warder up. He had placed his bed underneath the window. He had very few advantages in this business. Darkness might be one of them. He waited on the far side of the door. Over the next forty minutes he prayed that the warder would continue the pattern set by all of them on their rounds, morning or evening. Find the key. You could hear the clinking on the other side of the wall. Put it in the keyhole. Turn it in the lock. Open the door. Turn back to your trolley. Pick up the medicine. Come into the room. Powerscourt would be waiting.

He felt nervous, as he used to feel nervous before a battle. In this encounter he had only one chance. There would only be five or ten seconds where he had to get it right. If he failed, he dreaded to think what might happen to him. Maybe they would transfer him to some other ghastly hospital and Lady Lucy would not know he had gone.

He heard the keys jangling now. Not his door, but the one next door. There was a brief conversation while the man took his medicine. Then the key went back in the door. Powerscourt’s turn now. Open the door and look inside. Powerscourt saw that his guess had been right. The warder took a couple of steps into the room and stood still, staring into the gloom. The door, kicked by Powerscourt using both feet with all his force from a sitting position on the ground, caught him full in the face. The warder began to fall backwards into the corridor. In a second Powerscourt was on him, pulling him back into the cell, slamming the man’s head into the wall until he passed out and slumped to the floor. Powerscourt checked he was still alive – death and the guillotine had little appeal – and closed the door. He taped up the warder’s mouth so any calls for assistance would not be heard. He pulled off the jacket and the belt with the keys. Getting the trousers off the warder was incredibly difficult for a man on his own. Powerscourt remembered some funeral attendant telling him once how difficult it was to undress the dead. At last he had the trousers to go with the jacket. The warder began making faint groaning noises as if he might be about to wake up. Powerscourt used up his last two sections of sheet and tied up his wrists and his ankles. He put on his new clothes and inspected the keys. Then he stepped into the corridor and locked what had been his door. ‘You’ll find the bucket in the corner,’ he whispered to the trussed warder before he left. He had decided against liberating any of his fellow inmates. They might start singing on their way to the front door or wander off on their own. Indiscipline, he thought, might be rife in the ranks of the alienes . He pushed the trolley down the corridor until he came to the stairs. Each floor, he saw, had a trolley of its own, waiting for the staff to place their trays. He wondered how many patients would miss their evening dose. Then he remembered that there was, according to the warder, a fifteen-minute gap at his cell between the medicine and the evening meal. He had less than ten minutes to get out.

He made his way down the stairs carefully, listening intently for any movement from somebody in authority. Occasional groans drifted out into the corridor from distressed inmates, more aliene than their fellows. He was on the first-floor landing now, a small window with bars on at the end facing the outside world. Down the last flight of stairs, tiptoe to the front door, inspect the keys. He had one key with the legend Front Door on its tag. There were three locks in the door. He unlocked the central lock which he hoped might be the main one. The door did not open. Growing slightly frantic he tried his key in the other locks in the hope that one key might be able to open all three. It couldn’t. Powerscourt tried pushing the door but it did not move an inch. The bolts at the top and bottom were still undone. Somebody must come along later to draw them. Would the somebody have the keys as well?

He heard voices now. One of them was shouting. ‘Jean, Jean, where the devil are you? The supper’s ready to go round. Come along, for God’s sake.’

Powerscourt didn’t think Jean was going to wake up very soon. He wondered if they would realize what had happened to their fellow warder, that they would have to open the doors of every single cell until they found him. It seemed possible to Powerscourt that they would assume Jean had gone home early, or had been taken ill and gone to lie down somewhere. Maybe they wouldn’t realize he was locked in one of the cells, unable to speak, and in that case they wouldn’t come looking for him. A prisoner escaping was just impossible. It had never happened before.

The events of the next ten minutes confirmed to Powerscourt that they had no idea that one of their charges was at large. They shouted messages for Jean, some of them rather rude, and they returned to their own quarters. Powerscourt crept into the room where the doctor had talked to him, close to the front door. Even in here the windows were barred. He padded round the room, removing a doctor’s white coat from a hook on the door and some bandages from a drawer in the desk. To the side of the window was an enormous closet, large enough to hold a man. There was a bathroom to the side and from a little window in there Powerscourt had a view of the path leading up to the main gate. His plan now depended on somebody coming up to the front door and being able to open it. He put on his doctor’s coat and felt safer inside it. He put a couple of large pens in the top pocket. He put a stethoscope round his neck just in case. Everything in here depends on the colour of your clothes, he said to himself. Dress or be dressed in pale green and they’ll pour medicine down your throat two or three times a day. Pale blue and you’re a warder with vast powers over the patients. But a white coat? You’re virtually God.

He checked the time on the clock on the wall. The bastards had taken his watch and he didn’t think now was an ideal time to ask for it back. It had probably been sold already somewhere in the back streets of Beaune. Eight minutes to eight. He thought any more staff clocking on would come on the hour or the half-hour. Maybe a few minutes earlier to be on the safe side. Peering out of the bathroom window, Powerscourt saw that nothing moved for now. There was nobody in sight. He wondered if he should explore other parts of the hospital in search of windows with no bars or doors with no keys. He decided against because he might open a door on to a room full of warders and be sent straight back to the cells with extra dosage for having knocked out Jean. He checked that he could breathe if he was concealed inside the cupboard for a while.

Eight fifteen came. Eight thirty. Powerscourt was back on duty at the bathroom window, rubbing at the glass from time to time. He wondered about Lady Lucy and hoped she was bearing up. He hoped she had remembered to send a message to William Burke. If anybody could organize reinforcements it was Burke. Powerscourt thought his brother-in-law would have made a most efficient adjutant in the Army. He wondered about the theory that had brought them to France. It didn’t seem that important now, he told himself, until he remembered the forthcoming trial of Cosmo Colville on a capital charge.

At twenty to nine he heard footsteps. But they were on the inside, the footsteps, not outside, and there were voices too. Two people were heading for the front door. Powerscourt had a split second to make his decision. He waited until he saw the door opening. He patted the stethoscope round his neck and fastened his coat buttons all the way to the top and strode out into the corridor.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, ‘time to go home at last, I see. Even we doctors must rest.’ He was halfway out the door now, one of the men busy with keys in the locks.